Recipes - June

Every calendar month for the next twelve months we will publish a historical recipe that fits the season. We'll publish the original as well as the appetising reimagined version our creative chefs. This recipe was reimagined by our food industry partner @NiallSabongi and his Masterchef Muireann Mc Colgan. Niall’s skills and long-standing experience as a creative chef and visionary put him in a perfect position to create innovative and appetising dishes from historical recipes and forgotten cuisines.

Twelve recipes will be the flagship of the Food Smart Dublin project and will be published as a booklet at the end of the project. This booklet will include narratives of the organism's ecology and its importance to Irish people through time as well as its economic value, health benefits to us and where it can be found.

We identified sustainable seafood dishes for you that are easy enough to cook and can be locally sourced in order to be repeated at home with ordinary kitchen tools and basic cooking skills.

We created a google map of fishmongers and seafood shops in and around Dublin where you can get your seafood for your recipe. This list is by no means exhaustive and if you can't find your local or favourite seafood shop here or you're a fishmonger who would like to be added, please get in touch and we will update our map.
Enjoy your seafood experience!

JUNE recipe: Pan roasted megrim sole with lemon butter!

This recipe is described in "Mary Cannon's Commonplace Book - an Irish kitchen in the 1700s" as recipe no. "8 To Fry ffishe". Mary Cannon lived in Dun Laoghaire and collected 120 recipes between 1700 and 1707. In the olden days, a Commonplace Book was used as a scrapbook for sayings, letters, prayers, measuremetns and also recipes. Marjorie Quarton who is a descendant from Mary Cannon edited and published these recipes in 2010 in a beautiful book with Lilliput Press.
The recipe was reimagined and adjusted to the modern taste by Muireann Mc Colgan and Niall Sabongi using the flatfish megrim sole. The recipe tastes great with any other flatfish as an alternative choice such as lemon sole, Dover (black) sole or even plaice. We chose megrim sole as it is the most affordable and sustainable option.

Pan Roasted Megrim Sole with Lemon Butter

prep: 15mins; cook: 10mins; difficulty level: easy

Ingredients

• 1 megrim sole, gutted, head and fins removed
• 50 g flour for dusting
• 20 g butter
• juice of 1 lemon
• 2 tablespoons of chopped fresh parsley

Method

• Heat a large frying pan
• Dry your fish with a tea towel or kitchen paper
• Dust the fish in flour and shake off the excess
• Add some of the butter to the pan
• When butter is foaming, season the fish with some salt and begin to fry
• When fish is golden, about 3 minutes, flip and cook on the other side
• In a separate pan, heat the butter and lemon juice until thick and emulsified
• Finish with the chopped fresh Parsley

To Serve

• Place the fish on a serving dish and top with the lemon butter. Enjoy!

We continuously carry out archival work to identify historical, local seafood recipes of the Dublin coast communities. We do this by searching through the archive of the National Library of Ireland on Kildare street in Dublin, and by visiting the National Folklore Collections at University College Dublin (UCD). To optimise our outcome we listen to sound archives from the Urban Folklore Project carried out by UCD in 1979-1980 and keep our ears and eyes open for any seafood recipes that may have been commonly used in Dublin up to the 1950s. If you have a seafood recipe from your Nana or parents or greatgreat grandparents, please get in touch with us. We would love to hear from you!

At the end of our project, we will publish these recipes in the form of a Food Smart Dublin booklet including the stories surrounding each seafood, the nutritional values as well as the organism's natural habitat and lifecycle.