I don’t venture much on to Twitter any more. Or X. I know we’re supposed to call it X. I’ll always remember it in its Twitter heyday though, so I’ll continue to refer to it thus in my heart. I had good reason to miss it recently. Working on a writing project, I had reason to Google “When did rocket come to Ireland”. I meant the salad leaf, not the spacecraft, but of course Google returned the more obvious results: Ireland’s first space rocket (launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida in 2003), and the history of diner chain Eddie Rockets. Nothing about the precise moment the peppery sprig entered the national food chain.
Irish Twitter would have been all over this. Within minutes of asking the question I would have had a response from the niece of someone whose uncle started growing rocket in the wake of Ireland’s legendary Italia 90 appearance (in my memory, that’s when spaghetti Bolognese entered our weekly dinner rotation, although a leaf of rocket wouldn’t cross my tongue for decades to come). Someone else would say their family had been growing rocket for personal consumption since the 1950s. A retired chef would remember the very first panini to be topped with the stuff circa 1998. We would have gotten two days out of #rocket.
The change in Twitter’s (yes, okay, I will put X here in brackets, Elon) ownership and demographic means that this type of community crowdsourcing doesn’t really happen any more. Instead, I turned to Instagram and posted a Story asking for first memories of consuming rocket in Ireland. My research needed a time frame for when Irish people became generally aware of the leaf, in urban settings at least. I was expecting anecdotal evidence to confirm my suspicions of a Y2K rocket awakening.
The earliest memory came from Mary, who first tasted it in 1999. Crucially though, Mary had left Dublin and moved to Leeds, whose buzzing metropolis introduced not only rocket but goat’s cheese to her palate.
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Another responder, Kate, remembered a chicken, rocket, sun-dried tomato and pesto panini from Al Boschetto in Ballsbridge circa 2000. She felt “like I was literally on another planet”. In fact, many mentioned that the panini and the rocket leaf went hand in hand. The much-missed Dublin restaurant Café Bar Deli from Dublin’s George’s Street was responsible for several rocket realisations. It opened in 2001, and chefs used to pile it atop pizzas and fold it into unctuous salads. As a rube, Café Bar Deli certainly opened my eyes to many exotic delights.
It is safe to say then that rocket, quite fittingly, came to Ireland along with the euro. Finally, our palates were as refined as our continental cousins. As Lorraine rightly noted in response to my Instagram query, rocket had become the “default leaf” when she entered “the world of salad” in 2010.
My leafy research brought up some unexpectedly traumatic memories. In the early 2000s I had a weekend job working at a busy and well-stocked greengrocers in Naas. My salad leaf knowledge until that point was mostly limited to butterhead and iceberg. In Swans on the Green though, they had lollo rosso, radicchio and endive. The learning curve was steep, and barcode scanning wasn’t on the table. By the time I was manning the tills I should have known the different lettuce types and should have been inputting their correct prices.
Deeply committed to not getting into trouble and afraid that asking questions would expose me as a fraud, I hid the fact that I couldn’t tell my oak leaf from my frisée and chanced my arm at putting them all through as butterhead, thus devaluing. It wasn’t long until my scheme was uncovered. Nothing catastrophic happened and my boss kindly revised the greens with me. It was an early lesson in realising that it’s okay to make mistakes. Continuing them knowingly is what will get you into bother.
Among the other important learnings from my time as a greengrocer was the idea of a lucky Lotto machine. We had a power cut one early Saturday evening and were unable to process entries. Locals who were superstitious about where they played their Lotto were not happy. At least they were likely getting their lollo rosso for the price of a butterhead.
I have no doubt Irish people were eating rocket before the year 2000, but for the purposes of my research I’m going to use the turn of the century as the jumping off point for its entry into our collective consciousness. I still buy a bag regularly now. Obviously, I leave at least half of it to turn to sludge in the bottom of the fridge. It’s the done thing.