In our place we were acquainted with only six kinds of vegetables: onions, cabbages, turnips, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes and potatoes steamed in the baker.
(Maura Laverty, Kind Cooking (Tralee: Kerryman 1946)
Nowadays it seems every cookery writer has to have some kind of personality to pull the reader in – think of the three generations of Allens-by-marriage, Clodagh McKenna, Tamasin Day Lewis and her Mayo associations – but this practice was not invented by modern food writers. M.F.K.Fisher was one such writer from the mid-twentieth century, and our own Maura Laverty (1907-1966) was another. In the extract above, ‘our place’ was ‘Ballyderrig’, a fictionalized Rathangan, Co. Kildare, and the time Laverty was referring to was the early decades of the twentieth century. By the time Laverty wrote the cookery book for which she is best known, the blue-and-yellow-coloured Full & Plenty (Irish Flour Millers’ Association 1960), she had a high public profile as a playwright, journalist, children’s writer and broadcaster – her novels (which I will return to again on this site)were less well-known. Shortly after the publication of Full & Plenty she would originate RTE’s first soap opera, Tolka Row, based loosely on characters from her highly successful plays at the Gate Theatre during the 1950s. So while Full & Plenty is a very engaging book, each chapter of which is introduced by a short story, it is very much a brand statement. Laverty was far less well-known in 1946, when her second cookery book, Kind Cooking, from which the extract above is taken, was brought out by Kerryman. So she was really taking a chance with this novel approach to writing about cookery, and with the book’s unusual presentation. Each chapter is headed off with an illustration by Louis le Brocquy, and there are also black and white photographs. Best of all, there are stories and personal details, but they are twined through the narrative rather than heading off each chapter as they do in Full & Plenty.
The gentle, gambling father who dies at the beginning of Never No More (1942) Laverty’s first, autobiographical novel, is still alive and well in Kind Cooking; when the narrator mitches from school to pick mushrooms and he is sent (by her mother) to look for her:
I was glad to see him. No one was ever afraid of my father. ‘ “Is she mad at me?” I asked. “She’ll take your life.” he told me. (p.104).
The narrator’s sister Peg also features in both books. But there are entirely new characters, like the widowed, large-familied Dinny Foran of the bog, for whom a match was made with neighbour Miss Mary: when he visited her to seal the deal, she made the mistake of serving him high tea, rounded off with a trifle: he took a cup of tea, ate a slice of bread and broke off the match:
‘Three kinds of meat and six kinds of cake were bad enough,’ he said, ‘but a woman who would waste good cream on a pudden instead of turning it into butter would have a man in the workhouse inside a month.’ (p.58)
The book is proudly, self-consciously Irish; the four best Irish things are, she believes, W.B.Yeats, Barry Fitzgerald, potatoes steamed in their jackets, and soda-bread; ‘and the greatest of these is soda bread.’ (p.70) But there is no insularity. The young Maura Kelly spent four action-packed years in Spain where she picked up some tips about cooking rabbit, salt cod, chicken and various sauces. She even makes a plea for garlic. She described the kitchens of Spanish working-class women:
Everything scoured and scrubbed and shining, lace-edged linen runners along the shelf under the delph, floors as white as the tables…..In the city flats, their meat safes were arranged in the grandest way. You opened the door of what looked like a cupboard under the window, and there was the safe slung out over the cool patio. (p.4)
The book isn’t just anecdotal, it is also useful, and the vividness of its advice has always stayed with me – don’t ever boil anything with cheese in it, or it will get so tough and hard it will be fit only for a lead for the dog; add grated cheese to an already-made sauce instead. Pastry should be handled as little as possible. (She deplores those she calls the Unholy Rollers: ‘the rolling-pin is applied with the pressure and wildness of a steam-roller gone crazy.’ (p.46)) If kneading yeast bread, sing a song – in waltz-time, preferably – to get your rhythm going. (This really works). Baking yeast bread when there is a perfectly good bakery on the corner, is, she suggests ‘nothing short of sinful self-indulgence. But it is the nicest form of self-indulgence, bringing the keenest delight to all the senses.’ (p.75)
Money was short for many in the 1940s – quite often, Seamus Kelly tells us, for Laverty herself, and she acknowledges this when she admits that rabbit is often the backbone of her chicken casserole, that margarine takes the place of butter, and that condensed milk or ‘the top two inches off the bottle’ is substituted for cream. Such economies were also being recommended across the Irish Sea by the celebrated Marguerite Patten. The reference, above, to a bakery on a nearby corner is a reminder that Laverty was writing mainly for an urban audience. Her insistence on the aesthetic and emotional, as well as the nutritional significance of food, is a reminder that she is writing for a self-conscious one. And for all Laverty’s making-do, alittle verse about unexpected visitors needing to be fed suggests a social milieu where the classic tea and bread-and-butter and ham-and-tomato won’t do:
When friends come unexpected do I fuss and tear my hair
A though there’s only meat enough for two?
No: I walk into my pantry with a calm, unruffled air,
I fetch the tin of bully beef that’s waiting for me there,
I mix it with an onion and a fervent grateful prayer,
And for dinner we have savoury ragout. (p.110)
The word ‘ragout’ was not in the vocabulary of most Irish women of the house, urban or rural, in 1946; I can remember when we learned it at home, sometime in the 1970s when my mother was looking for a word to describe what she called the ‘mixem-gatherem’ (leftover turkey in cream sauce) of St Stephen’s Day, and my oldest sister,who was quite innovative, supplied it.
I received my copy of Kind Cooking as a present in Christmas 1991 from my sister who found it in a second-hand bookshop and didn’t (or so she insists) pay a lot of money for it. It is one of my most prized possessions: as a cookery book it is good, as a fund of stories and social history it is priceless.
*(Maura Laverty’s first cookery book was the government-commissioned Flour Economy, published in 1940.)
Seamus Kelly, The Maura Laverty Story: from Rathangan to Tolka Row (Kildare 2017).
Mairtin MacConIomaire & Dorothy Cashman (eds.) Irish Food History: a companion (Royal Irish Academy 2024), chapter by C.Clear, ‘Fact and Fiction in Maura Laverty’s Food Writing 1941-1960’
Clear Classic Books 
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