ByFarida Zeynalova
Published June 20, 2023
• 5 min read
This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
My father once wrote a poem about my mother’s cooking. One of the lines was ‘we caught a wild hare, and you cooked it with your skilful but tender hands’. He didn’t catch a wild hare at all, he was just making it up! But the most memorable meals were always when he’d find something. He’d meet a poacher in a pub and come home with some salmon from the River Slaney, which was very rare — it was always ritualistic and a big deal when we sat down to eat it. He’d often meet fellas in the pub and come back with things like pheasants, venison etc and my mother would cook it — she was very good.
The best thing about Spanish cuisine is the meat. They really know what they’re doing with it here [in Ibiza, where Róisín lives]. I love restaurants that grill meat over a fire, and I especially like secreto Iberico, which is the cut just underneath the shoulder of the pig. Also, I recently went to an amazing sushi place in town, but it doesn’t have a name and you can only get in if somebody gives you the number. It only has nine seats and the chef tells you everything about each dish — all the fish has a story, a pedigree of where it’s from. It’s really special and not so expensive, but I can’t tell you where it is or give you the number, sorry.
My Italian partner makes a lot of the classics. Things like cotoletta alla Milanese [veal Milanese], everyone loves that. Yesterday, he made fried bread from scratch with stracchino, which is a really runny, white cheese — oh, it’s delicious. He also makes arrosto di maiale al latte — roasted, rolled-up pork with this curdled, sort of milky gravy, which sounds awful, but is absolutely delicious.
I love slow-cooked corned beef — but it’s not what you think it is. It’s a big piece of meat that’s boiled for hours, then you put cabbage on top, so the flavour of the meat goes into it. Ideally you have it with British Queen potatoes — they’re very floury and sort of explode when you boil them. You have it with mustard and it’s perfect. My auntie Linda is the best at anything like that, all the slow-cooked, old-school Irish food. She also makes the best Christmas pudding. I used to hate it as a child but the last few Christmases I’ve had it, ooh!
In Tbilisi, Georgia, they’re not happy unless you can’t see the table for the food. We did a gig there and ended up hanging out with the president for a few days. They took us to this typical restaurant outside town, up a hill. It was real old mammies bringing out the food, and they kept piling plates on top of plates. It was all really fresh — lots of cream cheese, vegetables, flatbread, meats, a lot of kebab-like stuff. Everywhere we went, whether we were with the president or not, people wanted to see a smile on our faces and make sure we were well fed and had drinks.
My greatest memory of food is a potato picked out of the ground. It was at a fella’s house in Wiltshire — his family had a farm. They baked it in the Aga and served it with homemade chilli and it made me cry.
When I go back to Ireland, the first thing I buy from the garage is a snowball. It’s absolutely disgusting but I go back into heavenly flights of childish fantasy when I eat it. It’s like the stuff inside a teacake — Tunnock’s Teacakes, I love them, too! If I get a packet of those, you have to take them off me after two, because I’ll eat all six of them. It’s that spongy, white, disgusting, melted marshmallow that just does it for me.
Róisín’s new album, Hit Parade, is out 8 September 2023. Singles CooCool and Fader are available to stream now.
Published in Issue 20 (summer 2023) of Food by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
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