MARIE-CLAIRE DIGBYtalks about food matters
Talking about cook books
The Cookbook Club is a new venture created by Elaine Walsh, a writer and editor who has worked on RTÉ’s Fair City. Walsh is on a career break and, as well as writing a cookbook, she has organised a monthly supper club at the Town Bar and Grill on Dublin’s Kildare Street, at which cookery books will be discussed. On the first Monday of each month, a chef will talk about a book they’ve written, while participants get to ask questions and give feedback. The €30 ticket includes a three-course dinner, designed around recipes from the book, and a glass of wine.
Paul Flynn, author of The Tannery: An Irish Adventure with Food, is the club’s first guest next Monday night at 7pm. Tickets from thecookbookclub.ie.
Further dates – with Catherine Fulvio and Clodagh McKenna, for example – are available from Elaine Walsh, tel: 087-7990452.
Royal treatment
Waterford Castle Hotel will host a soiree next Friday night designed around the menus and entertaining style of the last member of the Fitzgerald family to live in the castle. Princess d’Ardia Caracciola (née Mary Purcell-Fitzgerald) was a renowned hostess and head chef Michael Quinn has designed the seven-course menu inspired by a newspaper report of a dinner she hosted in the castle in 1964. Her daughter, Maria Levinge, studied her mother’s cookery books to research menu suggestions and passed on her reminiscences of her childhood there to Quinn. Dinner with wine will cost €80 and bookings can be made on 051-878203. The event is part of Waterford’s Harvest Food Festival; waterfordharvestfestival.ie. mcdigby@irishtimes.com
Flour power
Catherine Fulvio is back on TV with Catherine’s Roman Holiday (RTÉ1, Fridays, 8.30pm). She also has a new book out, Catherine’s Italian Kitchen (Gill and Macmillan, €19.99) and she’s the face of Roma’s new Tipo “00” pizza and pasta flour. Milled in Italy, it comes in 1kg bags (€1.89) and is on sale in Dunnes and Superquinn branches. There’s a recipe sheet available where it’s sold, with a great recipe for tomato ravioli with ragu filling and homemade herb oil (left).
Seamus and Kevin Sheridan, the noted cheesemongers, are staging a 50-Mile Harvest Festival tomorrow, from 11am-6pm, celebrating the abundance of good food grown or produced within a 50-mile radius of their headquarters in Carnaross, Co Meath. Sheridans Cheesemongers can be found on Virginia Road Station, Carnaross, Co Meath. For a map, see sheridanscheesemongers.com.
