Chicken liver pâté
Thierry Peurois, Le Paysan, Co Wicklow
My parents were charcutiers in Brittany, so one could say that I have been making pâtés for a long time. I first set up Le Paysan as a delicatessen and restaurant in Greystones, Co Wicklow, in 1996. I was selling chicken liver pâtés and terrines. I moved to a new premises in Wicklow town in 2019 and started focusing on the production of pâté.
Christmas has always been busy. With the retailers I supply, we do in December what we will do in five months otherwise. I am also busy with hamper companies, online sales and markets. I will be at the Christmas on the Plaza in Greystones at the weekends leading up to Christmas.
My Christmas prep starts very early in the year. By March or April, I’ve already made plans with the hamper companies. From early September onwards, we ramp up production according to our sales forecast; we usually do more than 1,000 pâtés per week from then on. One of our issues is packaging, as the pallets of glass jars have to come on time, and have to be paid upfront, and as a small artisan producer, we have limited space to store them. We are fairly busy until Christmas week with production and the market, and keeping the supermarket shelves full.
For many people, chicken liver pâté is an essential part of the traditional menu at the festive table. Our free-range chicken liver pâté is our best seller and makes up about 80 per cent of our sales. Our wholesale customers include retailers such as SuperValu, independent retailers such as Nolan’s of Clontarf, Ardkeen Quality Stores in Waterford and Morton’s of Ranelagh. Overall my business is thriving because of repeat purchases all year long. At Christmas even more so. In Ireland the classic way is to eat chicken liver pâté with Melba toast with a side of relish.
RM Block
I’ve grown to like the traditional Irish Christmas dinner; there’s nothing like turkey and ham when it is well made. This year, though, I probably will go for a beef Wellington for a change. I will enjoy the rest, too, maybe a few walks in the Wicklow Mountains if the weather is good. I take a nice break for New Year’s and visit my mother in Brittany. We’ll have a few glasses of wine, some good terrine, foie gras and a nice roasted capon. lepaysan.ie
Christmas pudding
Charlotte Leonard-Kane, Scéal Bakery, Co Wicklow
“Scéal is deeply connected to Christmas. The very first market we did was the Dublin Christmas Flea in 2016. We made our puddings in a makeshift kitchen at home. We sold them, jars of mincemeat, brandy butter and the very first version of the Scéal mince pie. The funds we raised that weekend went towards setting up our first kitchen at Elmhurst Cottage Farm.
Our Christmas pudding recipe is one that I hold very dear to my heart. It has been passed down through the generations since 1906. We make our own marmalade instead of mixed peel and simply substitute house-made sourdough breadcrumbs in place of classic white breadcrumbs. The recipe was given to me by Mimi, a mother, sister, best friend, and aunt figure in my life. Mimi died suddenly in 2020. I miss her terribly. What brings me great comfort is that her memory and cooking legacy live on in our Christmas pudding, and she is celebrated among hundreds of families each year.
Many customers will serve our pudding as one of their centrepiece desserts on their festive table. It’s a real celebration with a jar of our vanilla sea salt brandy butter on the side. I adore a slice of warm Christmas pudding with cold, cold pouring cream. It’s the contrast of hot and cold that is really nostalgic for me.
We had our first Christmas meeting in June. There’s a lot of planning, particularly this year, as we grow our list of stockists for our Christmas puddings. Our cafe’s general manager, Clíona, has refined the packaging this year, a project that started back in July. All while running the bakery seven days a week. The lead-up to the festival season can be gruelling, but I still love Christmas, always have. I’d happily have the Christmas playlists on in the bakery from early November, but Shane [Palmer, her husband and business partner] has to rein me in.
Christmas has taken on a whole new meaning now that we have a young family. Seeing the season through a child’s eyes makes even the smallest moments feel special again. I’ve been daydreaming about having a creamy Baileys over ice this Christmas with a classic movie on. And I’m particularly excited for a celebratory Christmas Eve pint of Guinness in our local pub.” scealbakery.com
Blue cheese
Mike Thompson, Young Buck & Mike’s Fancy Cheese, Belfast
I got into cheese accidentally, working in a deli in Belfast. Most of the cheese we sold at the time was from west Cork. I loved learning about Veronica Steele and the Fergusons at Gubbeen. I realised cheese was made by people, not large factories. Then I went to England for a cheese-making course and worked on different farms and for small producers for about three years, but I always wanted to come back to Belfast to try starting something. We made our first batch of Young Buck in October 2013 and sold it on 1st April, 2014. It was terrifying.
Young Buck is the first raw milk blue cheese made in the North. It’s made in the style of Stilton, a cheese traditionally linked with Christmas because it has aged for about three months. The cheese made during summer, when cows graze on grass, was traditionally eaten at Christmas time.
Historically, Stilton was aged much longer, sometimes up to a year. It became drier and was even called the English Parmesan. The ageing process allowed the blue veins to develop naturally through drying, cracking rinds, and time. Since it was an old, long-aged cheese, it was quite expensive, and at Christmas, people wanted the priciest cheese rather than just the best-tasting. But our customers are buying for taste, and Young Buck is very decadent, so people love it at Christmas.
As a small producer, it’s difficult to scale for Christmas. Usually we make cheese three times a week, but from July to the third week in September, we make it five times a week to get ready for Christmas. So when we start selling our Christmas cheese in December, it’s up to nearly five months old, and then after the new year will be back to three months. With cheesemaking, it’s not just the making side of things; we also have to mature and pierce the cheese, too. I’m very fortunate to have such tolerable cheesemakers.
We have a shop in Belfast, Mike’s Fancy Cheese, which is where we sell most of our Young Buck, and it goes in all our hampers too. We also supply to Sheridan’s and cheese shops around Ireland. We’re big believers in a smaller number of cheeses on your Christmas cheese board with bigger pieces of cheese. Or even just one simple wedge. Our pals Maegden, another cheesemonger, make a massive batch of pickled pears, which we have to ration out to two per customer. People got mad for them; they are perfect with Young Buck, and you can also make a great dirty martini with the pickled pear juice. We also get a load of apple jelly logs, our local version of quince jelly, made for us by chef Karen Bell.
By Christmas Day I’ve usually worked about 14 12-hour shifts, so I take the opportunity to do very little. I get a dozen oysters, a Broughgammon goat gammon, a pitcher of Bloody Mary and usually one cheese from the shop. I’ll take the dog for a walk and sit in silence watching NBA basketball with the fire lit. mfcheese.com
Christmas condiments
Kathleen Flavin, head chef at Foxford Cafe, Co Mayo
I’ve been working at Foxford Cafe for 15 years. Christmas has always been busy. The first year I would have started with Christmas cakes and a couple of jams, and it has grown from there. We’ve more than 30 products at the moment. Chutneys are our bestsellers at Christmas. People like to get them for cheese boards. Then there are also things like cranberry sauce and ham glaze, and mulled wine spice. Our cranberry sauce is used for all sorts. I’ve heard of it being used on top of a cheesecake.
Making the condiments and dressings for retail happened because I made a red onion marmalade that would have gone into our goat’s cheese tart, and people asked to buy that. The same thing happened with dressings. We started making them for retail. The beetroot and orange chutney I first made for sandwiches, and people started asking for that, so that ended up in a jar. The pickled pears would have been made for going on our fig and pear platter. I made them because the pear season was so short, so I started pickling them. I’ve developed a lot of the recipes over the years like that because I had a glut of things.
The mincemeat is all made by early September. We sell thousands of mince pies. They are baked fresh every day. The Christmas cake orders start coming in from early October. We’ve a huge amount of repeat customers. And people who come to Foxford for the day and do their Christmas shopping, we stock a lot of other items. Lots of local produce. People go around and make up their own hampers, and we’ll box them up for them.
I sit down in January and run through what we did at Christmas when it’s fresh in our minds. Last year whiskey marmalade and raspberry jam were the best sellers. We are making stuff all year. The production kitchen runs until about two weeks before Christmas, and then in the run-up to Christmas, I’d always spend a lot of time out on the floor. I meet the people who have been coming in all year, and I chat to people about cooking the turkey.
At home I cook for as many as 30 people. I’ve a huge family and my house is where everyone congregates. Traditional dinner with a turkey, four kinds of desserts and lots of mince pies. There are always people around, cups of tea being made and glasses of wine being had. Walks in the woods, loads of food. It’s hectic. I sometimes go back to work in the days between, and it can feel like a reprieve. But then, when I get home, there will be dinner waiting for me, and that’s nice. I love a good cheese board, because there’s no cooking. I love sitting down and relaxing with a nice glass of wine. I’m quite happy with that. foxford.com
Smoked salmon
Sally Barnes, Woodcock Smokery, Skibbereen, west Cork
I’ve been smoking fish here in west Cork for over 45 years. I started it for extra income when I was married to a commercial fisherman and as a way to preserve some of the fish we were catching. I only use wild fish, and for smoked salmon, I work exclusively with diminishing supplies of wild Atlantic Salmo salar, and we compensate the fishers properly for their efforts. Fishing was often an impossible source of income in the winter, so Christmas was such a joy in the early days, as I had forgotten how popular smoked salmon was at that time. Planning begins in early May, when the commercial fishery commences on the river. The time flies during the autumn, so we have to be ready and fully prepared; days become too short for forgetting things. Along with the wild salmon, we try to source alternative species to smoke around that time, but it’s not always successful. If we do source whitefish fillets or albacore tuna, we put those on the website along with salmon.
At Christmas people celebrate with precious foods, so for many, our smoked salmon is an annual purchase. I’ve had many of the same customers for decades. Most people that I know eat the salmon with brown bread, and plenty of butter slathered on it. I am strict about the use of lemon on our fish – absolutely none – but a drizzle of local honey is a wonderful addition or a scratch of fresh-ground black pepper.
I collapse in a heap on Christmas Eve, exhausted, so I am fit for very little for a couple of weeks afterwards. I have spent three days in PJs, eating simple sandwiches – salmon, obviously – and sipping prosecco. I will open a bottle of bubbly in the morning, slice myself some salmon, and find a good movie to relax with. All I really want is rest. And hope that everyone else who is consuming the fish is as happy as I am. I have an aged Christmas pudding, made by my friend Anthony O’Toole, from his Fat Tomato range, which I didn’t get around to using last year, so this year it will be even better, with brandy butter and cream. A good cheese board, mostly Irish cheeses, raw milk when possible, oatcakes and some home-made pickles. And a glass of golden rum to finish. That’s my idea of a blissful Christmas. woodcocksmokery.com
