For the love of food…
For amiable Derry-born chef, author and educator, Emmett McCourt, food – and the story it has to tell – has been a constant journey of love and passion for more than two decades.
Emmett McCourt’s culinary career began more than two-and-a-half decades ago at the former NI Hotel and Catering College in Portrush and since then, he has travelled the world and gained experience in some of its finest restaurants. He’s worked on luxury cruise liners and grand hotels alongside some of the industry’s most respected chefs, including the legendary Georges Paineau and Yves Thuries.
For the last 15 years, he has been a lecturer and trainer at the North-West Regional College in Derry, working hands-on with successions of up-and-coming young chefs in the institution’s own restaurants – The Flying Clipper and The Erin Room.
He also operates a successful cookery school, which he relaunched last year in the County Londonderry village of Greysteel.
But where Emmett has really excelled is in his determination to tell the fascinating story that lies behind Irish food and drink. Through the award-winning Irish Food Heritage Project, which he launched in 2011, Emmett has striven to capture and preserve the food history of the north-west of the island.
In 2013, after many years of painstaking research, he produced Feast or Famine, A Cultural Food Journey of the North West of Ireland. The book – named the Best Culinary Travel Book in the World last year at Gourmand World Cookbook Awards – tells the incredible story of Irish food and celebrates and promotes the region’s unique culinary appeal.
“I’ve always felt that the north-west was under-rated in terms of its food and its food heritage, yet we have so much history here,” Emmett told LCN this month. “It was really the great people of the north-west that inspired me in my work on Feast or Famine and what I learned from that process is that food is something that really brings us together as a people. It highlights our shared history and our amazing links with other peoples all around the world.”
These days, Emmett is a regular fixture on television and radio where he presents his meticulous interpretations of traditional Irish cuisine. He also travels widely, visiting schools, festivals and open-air events to give demonstrations on a fully-equipped kitchen trailer and a unique mobile hearth crane crook.
He’s relishing the opportunities that he feels the current Year of Food and Drink will bring, particularly March, which has been designated ‘heritage month’:
“In 2016, Irish food is really coming of age,” added Emmett. “We’re growing in confidence, it’s just amazing that it took us so long to realise what we had here. This is something that gives us a real competitive age over other countries in terms of our tourism potential.”
In Derry, Emmett has just staged a very successful event, ‘Food and Folk Song’ in the Culturlann centre, during which he told the stories of individual emigrants through the presentation of a series of canapes, combined with live Irish folk music and a narrative presented by Emmett himself. He think it’s a concept that will travel easily and he hopes to take the show to Belfast audiences in the near future.
He’s also working on a follow-up to Feast or Famine. This new book, which should be ready in 2017, will tell the story of the Irish emigrants once they had arrived in America, how they integrated with the culture they found there and how the food they brought with them evolved.
Also in 2016, Emmett will continue to develop the Irish Food Heritage Projects links in the United States. He has been invited to attend a number of festivals there throughout this year, during which he will be introducing visitors to some of the traditional Irish food that the emigrants had brought with them and talking about the historical and social impact those dishes had on the history of America.
