Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Besides milking cows there are a few other optional things you can sign up for here and one is to work for 3-4 hours on a Saturday morning at Probys Kitchen in Cork.

This isn’t a random thing; the head chef there, Pat, was a teacher at the cookery school for many years—and he started work at a previous incarnation of Probys when the head chef there was the current head chef at Ballymaloe House, Dervilla.

Anyway, after dropping a fellow student off at Ballymaloe House to help with a doughnut pop-up that’s running this weekend, I head off to Cork. I don’t find the car park I was looking for, but do find a space right opposite Probys. I attract the attention of Mike at the counter who is a bit surprised to see me, but is very welcoming and points me in the right direction for the car park.

When I get back (and after changing into my chef’s gear), he puts me to work making smashed avocado. Once I’ve scooped the flesh out of 3 boxes worth I’m shown where the lemons are, handed fennel seeds, black & aleppo peppers, salt, a spice grinder and told to get on with it. Oh, I was also shown where to find the gloves: the avocado were smashed by hand! And it was the smashing where I fell down; me seasoning was judged find but the avocados needed to be less lumpy.

That done, I prepared six punnets of strawberries, mashed them up a little and added elderflower cordial. Not quite enough for Pat’s taste but otherwise OK to serve as a topping for French toast.

Next was preparation of rose petal harissa, mostly a weighing exercise, but I also had a whole load of garlic cloves to chop. Then another weighing exercise (preparation of the various ingredients for an orange cake) and, finally, deboning some 20 chicken legs. I was a bit surprised to find that by then my time was up.

All in all, it was an interesting experience. I’ve described what I did, but I could also see the organisation of the kitchen and the work and had interesting discussions with Pat about Ballymaloe, precision in cooking, the realities of running a restaurant in Cork, … No pictures, of course, but here’s one of the lunch they provided afterwards.

Back to the cottage to start my washing and thence to Midleton for a haircut and shopping. Tesco don’t sell anchovies, it seems, but I do pick up some Barry’s Tea, which seems to be the local brand, as I’m running out of my Twining’s supply. And I didn’t need to bring so much; I should have realised that finding loose leaf tea in Ireland would be easy!

I also didn’t need to buy a lot from Midleton; beef and oyster pie was one of the dishes cooked this week and there were some oysters left on Friday evening. I was given first refusal and didn’t need to be asked twice!