Jp McMahon has a PhD in theater and drama from the University of Galway. He runs three restaurants in the city — Aniar, which has held a Michelin star every year since 2013, Cava Bodega, and Tartare Café — and he founded Food on the Edge, the international chef symposium that each autumn draws cooks from thirty countries to the west of Ireland to argue about what food means. He writes a weekly column for the Irish Times. He has written plays. He is, by any reasonable measure, an intellectual.
But the book he made is not an intellectual’s book. It is a cook’s book.
The Irish Cookbook (Phaidon, 2020) contains 480 recipes. It spans ten thousand years — from Neolithic hazelnuts and foraged seaweed to the farmhouse cheese revival that two women on opposite sides of Cork powered with determination and a network of bus drivers. McMahon’s headnotes cite ninth-century story cycles and sixteenth-century histories alongside the living memory of his neighbors. The recipes themselves are home-scale: onion soup with hard cider and cheddar, lamb shin with blackened leeks, brown soda bread with stout and treacle. This is not chef food dressed down for civilians. It is the food Ireland has been cooking, in one form or another, since people first figured out what the land and the sea would give them.
What McMahon understands — what makes this book more than a compendium — is that Irish food has been undermined not by any lack of quality but by a history of colonialism, famine, and what he calls self-doubt. The book is a corrective. It does the patient, necessary work of naming what was always there: the wild garlic, the nettles, the oysters pulled from Galway Bay, the butter, the bread, the broth. Published during the darkest months of the pandemic, it didn’t get the attention it deserved. It deserves it now.
JR Ryall first visited Ballymaloe House in County Cork at the age of four, dragged along by an aunt. Darina Allen handed him a copy of her book Simply Delicious and wrote inside it: “For John Robert, who will be a great chef one day.” He was fifteen when he started working in the kitchen. Twenty-one when Myrtle Allen — Mrs. Allen, as everyone called her, including family — sat him down one autumn afternoon and offered him the pastry. He had a degree in natural science from Trinity College Dublin. He took the job.
Ballymaloe Desserts: Iconic Recipes and Stories from Ireland (Phaidon, 2022) is the book he waited his whole life to write. It is organized the way Mrs. Allen organized the famous dessert trolley — fruit, meringues, mousses and jellies, frozen desserts, and a pastry or cake — because Allen understood that if guests wanted a taste of everything, the pieces had better eat well together. That structural logic, quiet and hospitable, runs through every page. The 140 recipes carry Myrtle Allen’s originals alongside Ryall’s own: compote of apple with wild blackberry and sweet geranium, pistachio meringue roulade, an Irish coffee meringue gâteau, a foolproof Christmas pudding.
What matters here is the continuity. Ryall was the last chef trained by Mrs. Allen, who died in 2018 at ninety-four. The book is a commemoration of her legacy — of the woman who opened her country house doors in 1964 and insisted on cooking with what grew around her at a time when every serious restaurant in Ireland was pretending to be French. Ballymaloe was never trendy, Ryall says. It just kept doing the right thing until the world caught up. The dessert trolley won a gong at the World Restaurant Awards in Paris in 2019. Mrs. Allen would have been unsurprised.
Max Rocha’s first career was in music management. It did not go well. Depression arrived. He compared himself to his family — his father, John Rocha, the fashion designer; his sister Simone, who built a global label — and came up short. At twenty-four, with memories of making soda bread and scones in his mother Odette’s kitchen and his grandmother Margaret’s, he walked away from music and into the only thing that had ever made him feel calm.
He staged at St. John Bread and Wine under Farokh Talati. He cooked at the River Café. He trained at Ballymaloe Cookery School. Then came lockdown, supper clubs, takeaway picnics, and eventually a small dining room facing a waterway in Hackney, East London. Café Cecilia Cookbook (Phaidon, 2024) is the record of that restaurant, named for his grandmother Cecelia, and it is one of the best London cookbooks of the year — not because the food is complicated but because it isn’t.
One hundred recipes. Guinness bread, which gets its own chapter because bread saved his life — his words, and he means them. Sage and anchovy fritti. Odette’s cold roast ham. Onglet with peppercorn sauce. Deep-fried bread-and-butter pudding. The cooking draws from Ireland, from the River Café, from St. John’s nose-to-tail ethos, but the center of gravity is his mother’s kitchen. Diana Henry, who wrote the foreword, called the food honest — not following trends, not showing off, coming from the core of the cook. She’s right. This is Irish food in exile, carried to London and cooked with an emigrant’s particular tenderness for what was left behind.
Cathal Armstrong grew up in Dublin in the kind of household that, even by Irish standards, took eating seriously. While other families scarfed fish fingers in front of the telly, the Armstrongs sat through three- and four-course dinners. His father kept a sixty-variety vegetable garden in suburban Dublin — unusual for the city then. At seven, Cathal began annual summer exchanges in France. By the time he landed in Washington, D.C., the two traditions had fused: Irish ingredients, French technique, and a deep, instinctive understanding that knowing where your food comes from is not a lifestyle choice but a baseline.
My Irish Table: Recipes from the Homeland and Restaurant Eve (Ten Speed Press, 2014) is the diaspora book on this list. Armstrong opened Restaurant Eve in Alexandria, Virginia, in 2004 with his wife Meshelle. Food & Wine named him one of the ten best new chefs in America in 2006. The White House honored him as a Champion of Change for his work on childhood obesity and school lunch reform. Alice Waters endorsed the cookbook. Darina Allen wrote that his passion began in his Da’s vegetable garden and was fostered at his mother’s table. The book moves from Irish breakfast — homemade black pudding, marmalade — through his mother’s potato pancakes and shepherd’s pie to the restaurant’s more polished work: foie gras with black pudding and pears, butter-poached lobster with parsnips, an Irish Caesar salad with brown breadcrumbs and Cashel blue.
It is the story of a man who carried Irish food across the Atlantic and found that it held up — that the techniques his mother taught him translated, that Irish dairy and Irish bread and Irish stew could anchor a four-star menu in Northern Virginia without apology. The book makes a quiet, unyielding case that Irish food belongs wherever Irish people go.
And then there is the castle. Lismore Castle: Food and Flowers from a Historic Irish Garden (Rizzoli, 2025) is a different kind of Irish cookbook, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Lismore sits above the Blackwater River in County Waterford. It was built in 1185. Its gardens are the oldest formally cultivated in Ireland. It belongs to the Cavendish family — the Dukes of Devonshire — and the book is written by Laura and William Burlington, who have taken over from William’s parents.
The politics of an Anglo-Irish estate publishing a cookbook of Irish recipes need not be belabored, but they should not be ignored either. What redeems the book — what lifts it past the coffee table — is that the person actually doing the cooking is named. Teena Mahon is the castle’s resident cook, and the forty-odd recipes are hers: soda bread, beetroot gravadlax from salmon fished out of the Blackwater, chutneys and jams that follow the seasons. The kitchen works hand-in-hand with Lismore’s gardeners, farmers, and riverkeepers. The ingredients travel almost no distance at all.
It is a beautiful object. Anna Batchelor’s photographs are atmospheric and generous. The history of the castle — bishops and kings, eight centuries of cultivation — is told with genuine affection. But the book earns its place on this list for one reason: it documents a working kitchen inside a functioning estate, and it credits the cook by name. In a country where the labor of feeding the big house was performed for centuries by people whose names went unrecorded, that matters more than the Burlingtons may realize.
Five books. A Galway chef reclaiming ten thousand years of food history. A Cork pastry chef carrying forward the legacy of the woman who started modern Irish cuisine. An Irishman in Hackney cooking his mother’s recipes as an act of survival. A Dubliner in Virginia proving that Irish food travels. And an estate in Waterford where the cook’s name finally makes the page.
What connects them is not geography or genre. It is the insistence that Irish food is not a punchline, not a potato, not a nostalgia play. It is a living tradition shaped by the people who grow it, catch it, cook it, and carry it with them when they go. The best Irish cookbooks know this. They name their people.
Buy the ones that do.
