A woman of some importance - Irish master playwright Teresa Deevy’s life and creative legacy reclaimed

Teresa Deevy

When old, repressive systems like the former USSR collapse, among all the broken bottles and barbed wire you can often find whole libraries full of censored books. That image came to mind to me this week watching two accomplished works by Irish playwright Teresa Deevy.

You probably haven’t heard of her. There’s a good reason for that.

In the first half of the 1930s she was becoming the nation’s most accomplished dramatist. In fact, she was becoming one of the most frequently performed women playwrights in the world.

Her most famous 1936 drama, Katie Roche (which is now playing through March 26 at the Mint Theatre on 43rd Street as part of a revival of her works) paints a completely absorbing portrait of a spirited young Irish servant girl with a head full of daydreams of romance and glamour.

Because we now know what most often happened to spirited young girls with a head full of daydreams in the increasingly theocratic nation Ireland was becoming at the time, it’s hard to watch Deevy’s plays without fearing for her heroine’s future.

In the nation Deevy depicts, just one wrong step, one wrong word, can see a trap door open that you’ll fall through, perhaps never to be seen again. Your life, your future can change in an instant, before you notice what’s happened, and long before you get to have a say about it.

What’s heartrending to watch is how Katie’s desire to do something “grand” with her life instantly comes into conflict with the options Irish life is actually presenting her.

The choice for the women of her era, the playwright calmly reminds us, is marriage or the convent. Step outside of those narrow confines and you’ll discover quickly what happens to spirited girls and their daydreams.

On Saturday the Mint Theatre presented two readings of Deevy’s one-act plays, Within a Marble City and Eyes and No Eyes. The works confirm her status as a first rate playwright, and they also confirm why she is unknown to most of us.

In Within a Marble City Deevy introduces us to a recognizably insular Irish community called Inishfree where a young woman, romantically taken with a handsome and ambitious young blow-in, takes a terrible risk and exposes herself to potential scandal to do what any young man can do without thinking -- make a romantic overture to the person she has become infatuated with.

Luckily for the young woman the plot works out. But getting what you think you want can be the worst of all snares, she discovers.

Deevy gently reveals the young man’s arrogance and pomposity, his certainty that he’s carrying all the cards and that he’s been dealt a good hand.

What’s even more alarming is to watch the way fathers and sons decide the fate of their wives and daughters without their input. Marriages are arranged, dowries are debated and futures and sealed without a word of protest. It’s the language of the cattle fair, and Deevy quietly outlines its individual consequences.

In Eyes and No Eyes, the more accomplished offering of the evening, Deevy reminds us that the traps that most often open for women can sometimes open for men too. Especially if they are of an artistic bent, or given to philosophy, or to saying things that startle others.

In Ireland, her play suggests, it would be better to have no eyes at all than to really see what’s going on all around you.

As you can imagine this kind of observation made her a target for the increasingly powerful Irish censors. Post-independent Ireland made gender politics the ground zero of its fight to maintain control over identity and consolidate its power.

Deevy still fascinates because she shines headlamps into the cozy shadows of Irish nationalism and challenges Irish authority at its source -- in the boardrooms, the bar rooms and the bedrooms. Not everyone wanted to be a comely maiden with her mind set on marriage, she reminds us.

For her trouble, for the trouble she was beginning to cause the establishment, Deevy had her later works rejected by Ernest Blythe at the Abbey Theatre. Her offending play Wife to James Whelan confronted the gulf between the earning power of men and women in the new Republic.

So they did to her what they did to thousands of others. They banished her to a silent world from which it was presumed she would never reemerge. It has taken almost 80 years, but she’s back.

For tickets to Katie Roche, call 866-811-4111.

Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor - “Tempered with Reality: Economic Theory and the Real World”

Irish economist A.P. O’Malley has studied the global economy for a quarter of a century, and being Irish he also found himself compelled by it to make a life here in the U.S. 

There’s nothing quite like economic displacement to open your eyes to the fact that everything is connected, since the hard lessons of immigration have a good deal to teach us about profit and loss, after all.

Unlike many other free market analysts O’Malley -- who earned a business degree at University College, Dublin and an MA at Baruch College in New York where he now teaches in the Marketing and International Business Department -- isn’t afraid of wading into controversy.

In fact, much of his sometimes pugilistic new book Tempered With Reality: Economic Theory and the Real World seems to invite it, exploring as it does how deliberately arcane derivatives have swarmed the balance sheets of banks, and how governments throughout the world have guaranteed them private profits but have socialized their losses to the taxpayer, putting the global economy at increased risk.

If that doesn’t set off alarm bells then you weren’t paying attention during the collapse of the Irish economy and the near collapse of the American one. So O’Malley’s timely book could serve as a primer to bring you up to speed concerning where we are and how we live now.

In particular, O’Malley examines how tried and tested economic theories that achieve what he calls perfect equilibrium in the classroom may no longer apply to the increasingly complex global business and economic environment.

O’Malley writes lucidly about how most of the world’s free market economies are now saturated in debt, both government and private. In fact, he writes, most financial institutions are now leveraged more than they have ever been in the past.

Sovereign debt was low risk in the past, but now countries like Ireland and Greece have become risky investments, he writes. Deleveraging, or the gradual repayment of the nation’s giant debts, can only occur through economic growth, but the biting austerity programs that lower government spending and budget deficits (hello Ireland and Greece) actually threaten all growth. You can’t get there from here, it seems. 

So what’s a tiny nation like Ireland to do when confronted by mountainous debt and ever shrinking coffers? The answer, at least initially, has been to introduce stealth taxes, which over 800,000 already strapped Irish taxpayers simply refused to pay.

The challenge for Ireland now is the challenge for the free market economy more broadly. How can its economy create jobs, wealth and social stability when the economies are strangled by debt, both private and public?

The first thing to do might be to learn from the excesses of their recent past. O’Malley wisely reminds us that the so-called Celtic Tiger economy was injected by what he calls “financial steroids in the form of massive debt, causing a debt bubble and housing bubble, and since construction was the backbone of the economic miracle, housing became the driver of prosperity.”

The banks made out like bandits, he writes, while ordinary homeowners ended up locked into mortgages they could not sustain.

Recall too that Irish wages never rose alongside property prices, and the lag between earnings and the collapse in housing left tens of thousands caught in equity traps that would ultimately force them to emigrate.

Most of them went quietly too, because they always seem to. For centuries emigration has acted like a pressure valve that prevents revolutionary sentiment from taking hold in Ireland. People simply vote with their feet, leaving the system that failed them largely intact decade after decade.

O’Malley pulls no punches about the nation they have left behind. The Irish economy is being reduced to an International Monetary Fund controlled colony he writes, where foreign multi-nationals own key national assets due to scandalous government mismanagement of the Irish economy and banking mistakes so monstrous that were then granted guaranteed bailouts.

O’Malley also focuses at length on the American economy and the national debt, but in particular his subject is the way in which the middle classes across the nation and across the world are being diminished, financially in terms of employment, and more importantly under political leadership.

Taxpayers, he writes, will continue to be held hostage for the mistakes made by reckless banks in the U.S. and in Europe especially.

O’Malley’s challenge is that once you understand how the global economy works now, will you be content to sit by and watch the future fall into the hands of those who understand the nature of resources, and control them for the benefit of the few or the many?

Tempered With Reality: Economic Theory and the Real World is published by Cognella Academic Publishing. The book is available at www.amazon.com and other book outlets.

Review by Cahir O'Doherty

Top Irish chef Rachel Allen’s new book shows that easy-to-follow recipes can bring the taste of Ireland to your table

The Queen of the Kitchen, Rachel Allen

Your Irish mother was right.  There are two things you need to turn a house into a home -- love and decent cooking. Get those two things right and you’re well on your way to enduring happiness.

But you don’t just become a good cook, do you?  If it was easy we’d all be Julia Child, I suppose.  The truth is it takes practice and a little persistence, and where you turn for help when you are starting out will make all the difference.

Some cookbooks just want to turn you into an unspeakable show off, plying your friends and family with ridiculously overwrought recipes that seem calculated to impress rather than satisfy. The experience can be so off-putting that you’ll decide on the spot you were wasting your time as you crack open another frozen meal from Stouffer’s.

But this doesn’t have to happen to you. There are options. In fact the first real skill you’ll pick up as a budding cook is to find out exactly where to turn to for help.

So let’s hear a word of thanks for Rachel Allen, 40, already one of the world’s most successful cookbook writers, with over a million books sold. Her beautifully illustrated new book, Rachel’s Irish Family Food (Harper Collins, $29.99) is like a manifesto of the best of Irish cooking.

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She’s too modest to say it herself, but this book represents over 20 years of tried and tested Irish recipes that will expand your own repertoire and turn you into an authentically Irish cook, regardless of your experience to date or where you live.

It’s the cookbook Allen has always wanted to write, being an inspired list of some of the most nourishing and seriously comforting Irish dishes, all featuring the incredible produce to be found on Irish farms.

“How I started the book was to ask myself, what food do I love to eat at home?” Allen tells the Irish Voice. “I asked myself what celebrates the best of great Irish produce that isn’t just traditional? In other words ,what are we eating now?”

A lot of Irish cooking is sophisticated in its simplicity, Allen realized, so she stresses that every element in a recipe has got to be good quality.

“I want it to be the kind of cookbook that people can pick up and say, ‘Oh great, I can make this dish tonight and this dish tomorrow.’ From breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert to the more expansive dinner party fare. I wanted to cover all of it.”

As an 18-year-old teenager from Dublin, Allen attended the world famous Ballymaloe Cookery School in Co. Cork run by Darina Allen.  But it was more than just another course of study because she found her true calling there she says, going on to marry Allen’s son and raise her own family as she continues teach an incredibly popular course on baking at Ballymaloe.

The best bit of advice she ever got from Darina Allen was given when she first arrived at Ballymaloe as a student, she confesses.  Start with the best possible ingredients and that way you’ll end up with something great, Allen told her.

“It’s also the most important thing we can do for ourselves, to feed ourselves and others well. I love a treat as much as anyone, but I do believe that food should be nourishing as well. I think if you have the right ingredients then you will stay healthy too,” she said.

Rachel’s Irish Family Food is a timely comeback to your snooty non-Irish pals who associate Irish cooking with the over-boiled, under seasoned offerings of our near neighbors in Britain. We know we don’t do that, and finally here’s the proof.

Read more: Climate change creates cabbage shortage for St. Patrick’s Day

The new book takes stock of the range and sophistication of Irish cooking. Our baked goods are simply world class, Allen argues, as is our range of dairy products and homegrown crops. If the best food comes from the best ingredients then it’s no wonder this book will fly off the shelves.

Almost everyone loves food, after all. It can be a powerfully emotional experience too.

What Irish person abroad hasn’t been utterly delighted to see some really well made soda bread or a full Irish breakfast laid out on the table in far flung destinations like Sydney or Singapore? It’s a deep connection to our culture and a history, and it’s thrilling.

“Irish food is very produce led,” says Allen. “We don’t have a cuisine as such so our cooking is really about the great ingredients.

“The upside to all the rain that we have in our climate (which we have been having all day today!) is our fertile soil. We have fabulous dairy and wonderful meats, and being such a small island we have wonderful shellfish and seafood too. So the new book is about celebrating all of that.”

As the most successful cookbook author in Ireland, Allen uses her Irish heritage to provide recipes for every occasion and for every taste. It’s the kind of food that the Irish eat every day.

Rachel’s Irish Family Food does include traditional dishes like the Dublin coddle and Irish stew, alongside many potato dishes, but it’s the kind of wholesome food that has evolved in the way we tend to eat as families.

“We don’t rely heavily on spices or a huge amount of herbs, so the ingredients have to speak for themselves and they have to be good quality,” says Allen.

“I’m a mum and I’m quite busy, so recipes have to be practical as well. I want to be able to look around my kitchen and say, ‘I’ve already got most of those ingredients, great!’ I want the book to be easy and accessible. It’s the kind of Irish food that I cook for myself.”

A good Irish cook will say to him or herself, that piece of cheese I have is really great, what can I do with it? That’s how we learn to make a feast out of ingredients we have to hand, Allen says.

“Some people misinterpret Irish food. Maybe they think it’s very stodgy or flavorless. I don’t believe it is,” Allen says.

“We are like the Asians; we love our broths as well. So many of the dishes in the book have been selected from watching people I know cook. What they cook and how they cook it is where the magic happens.”
One of her favorite recipes in the new book is Chicken Open Pot Roast, she confesses.

“It’s French in influence because its got Dijon mustard and lemon in it, but it’s also hearty and Irish without being heavy or stodgy. The best of both worlds!”

When one of Allen’s American friends looked at her sideways and asked, “What on earth is Dublin coddle?” she had the answer right away.

“I told her, ‘You know what, you have to try it!’ If you’re feeling under the weather or hung over it’s the most restorative and nourishing food you can eat I think. That the magic of Irish cooking.”

"Rachel's Irish Family Food: 120 classic recipes from my home to yours" is available on Amazon.

A wild time in Inishfree - 'Donnybrook' at the Irish Repertory Theatre

Jenny Powers and James Barbour in a scene from Donnybrook!

For a decade now the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York has made the wise decision to include at least one musical in its seasons. Usually this means spirited revivals of golden age classics, but this year they've gone for a bit of a surprise.

Donnybrook!, the rarely performed 1961 chestnut by Johnny Burke and Robert E. McEnroe, is a diverting romp based on the beloved John Ford film The Quiet Man.

Set in the 1950s, at the top of the play we are warned (by a cassock wearing parish priest, naturally) that what follows could easily have taken place 1,000 years earlier, because this is land that time forgot.

That's your clue to throw away your vexing memories of the Celtic Tiger, or Bishop Eamon Casey or the life and career of Mary Robinson. They'll be no good to you here at all, at all.

Donnybrook, it turns out, is closer to Homer than James Joyce.  Set in the town of Inishfree (courtesy of an outstanding, highly malleable set design by James Noone) the boozy, brawling locals break into boisterous performances of “The Wild Colonial Boy” given just a sniff of whiskey. It's that kind of town.

The lasses are comely and the lads are bantams on the prowl. Stereotypes are its lifeblood.

What the Rep's production has going for it is its sleight of hand.  Director Charlotte Moore keeps the cast on their toes and the action moving forward at a lively canter.

She is aided in her efforts by the good humored, firing on all cylinders female lead Jenny Powers, who is what they used to call a knockout. From her first appearance, which instantly anchors the proceedings, Powers becomes one of the two pillars of this always entertaining production.

The other pillar, if I can call her that, is Kathy Fitzgerald, who turns in one of the most astute comic performances I have ever seen on the Rep stage.

Fitzgerald plays the widow Kathy Kerry, a woman who realizes now that her husband has passed that she has some basic appetites that have gone unattended for entirely too long.

Fitzgerald is simply sensational in the role of this big chested bombshell looking for a new man to make her own. When she sings of her late husband in “Sad Was the Day” you can already see that she's over it. Now she's in pursuit of a little affection, and Fitzgerald makes comedy gold of her character’s predicaments.

If you accept (and in this show you really don't have a choice) that the best kind of rural entertainment is a good old fashioned, knock-down fight, then you'll be helplessly beguiled by this very silly show.  But if you enjoy clever lyrics and memorable songs you'll be out of luck.

The truth is Donnybrook's best efforts fade even as they're sung, and you'll be hard pressed to remember one line of it.

As Sean Enright, the returned Yank who yearns for a little peace and quiet, and maybe a local lass to woo, James Barbour gives a barnstormer performance. The problem is that emotional nuance (and to be honest, his character) can get lost amid all that blaring baritone.

For that reason the romance that blossoms between Powers and Barbour seems heavily tilted in one direction. It's also the reason why his 11 o'clock number, “The Loveable Irish,” flies past without a hint of its original irony or humor.

A strong word in favor of the costume design is almost always a dangerous sign, but go ahead and award the Lucille Lortel award to Linda Fisher and Leon Dobkowski. Their designs are so masterfully created that the actors who fill them have no choice but to become their characters. The design of this show is one of the best I've seen off Broadway in years.

Wisely, Donnybrook! makes no pretense at being anything other than light hearted entertainment, and in this it succeeds to broadly uneven effect.

The performance of Samuel Cohen as the doubtful matchmaker is worth the ticket price alone. Paired up with Fitzgerald, the two make real magic and lift this often earthbound production to the heights it deserves to attain.

Donnybrook! is now playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 West 22nd Street. For tickets call 212-255-0270 or visit www.irishrep.org.

Review by Cahir O'Doherty

An abundance of Irish luck - review of “The Luck of the Irish” at Lincoln Center

Dashiell Eaves and Amanda Quaid as Joe and Patty Ann Donovan and Eisa Davis
and Victor Williams as Lucy and Rex Taylor in Luck of the Irish.

When Rex and Lucy Taylor, a prosperous African American family, want to buy a desirable house in early 1950s Boston, they have to employ the help of Mr. and Mrs. Donovan, a down on their luck Irish American couple, to purchase the property on their behalf in a process that was referred to as “ghost buying.”

It’s an appropriate term because the consequences come to haunt all the principal characters in Kirsten Greenridge’s utterly absorbing new play, Luck of the Irish, that addresses themes – money, inheritance, and the terrifying generational squabbles that can erupt over them -- that often echo the works of Irish master playwrights like Tom Murphy and Brian Friel.

Racial prejudice means that the Taylors have no chance of buying the desired property themselves. So instead they have to hire their Irish proxies, which results in predictably differing degrees of social success in the all-white neighborhood.

It’s a delicate deception this, one fraught with peril. First to spot the potentially underhand windfall that this transaction could result in is Patty Ann Donovan (Amanda Quaid).

Patty Ann is secretly affronted that she has less money and options than the well to do black couple that is simply paying her for her local clout. Her scalding resentment motivates every action that follows.

Since the Donovans sign the legal papers, and present the purchasing check, they hold the legal title to this leafy property overlooking the harbor. That means to Patty Ann that whatever they have been paid to do the heavy lifting simply wasn’t enough.

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She wants more cash. And since she’s holding the trump cards, she aims to get it.

Patty Ann’s detached and long-suffering husband Joe (Dashiell Eaves) doesn’t share his wife’s icy contempt or her sense of economic injustice (Patty makes it clear she believes that there’s an order to American life that should see her and her husband looking down on the Taylors, not the other way around).

It’s appalling to witness, all of these savage machinations assembling on the neatly tailored lawn of this contested house, and the playwright pulls no punches setting them up.

Joe tells Patty Ann he’s kept the title to the house and so she is content to wait years, decades in fact, to extract the property when the opportunity finally presents itself.

Fifty years later, now old Mrs. Donovan shows up to threaten Hannah (Marsha Stephanie Blake), the Taylor’s granddaughter, with eviction and disinheritance.

To make her point old Mrs. Donovan triumphantly holds up the title to “her” house and insists she will take it back. She justifies this blatant attempt at theft by saying that the Taylors stole her family’s luck, because their presence and their good fortune represented a break in the established social order, an order than should have seen her and her husband on top all these years.

But Greenridge never once loses sight of what animates her characters underneath it all -- cash. Who has it, who doesn’t, who prospers and who falls are all recorded by the playwright with a clear eyed dispassion that marks her out as one of the most interesting writers to have emerged this decade.

Read more: Irish Arts Center to honor cultural leaders at annual ‘Show Your Love’ NYC event

As old Mr. Donovan, actor Robert Hogan is a shuffling mass of conflicting impulses looking around for the last exit to human decency.  Jenny O’Hara plays old Mrs. Donovan with a bone deep conviction that is rattling to witness.

As the younger Mr. Donovan, Dashiell Eaves is an all too transparent mass of tensions and seductions that look like they will never be resolved (and aren’t, in fact).

Frank Harts plays Rich Davis, the only character in this play who can spot a way out of the imprisoning claims of the past with a delicacy and passion that add another layer of complexity to this remarkable work.
But the evening belongs to Eisa Davis, the actress who plays brittle 1950s housewife Lucy Taylor. Davis knows that an abyss has opened on her manicured lawn and each day she peers into it, and each day she prevents herself and her family from falling in. The effort is so heroic that this subtle and cerebral play still manages to hit you like a blow to the chest.

Luck of the Irish runs until March 10. Visit www.lct.org for tickets and showtimes.

Valentine's Day means Francois Payard - French pastry chef became a world class chocolatier

Looking for an extra special Valentine's Day gift this year? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world of chocolatier Francois Payard.

The Nice born French pastry chef became a world class chocolatier right here in New York City after challenging himself to create an exciting new dessert repertoire.

In 2009, Payard opened the François Chocolate Bar, and since then the former James Beard Foundation pastry chef of the year has been delighting new Yorkers with his chocolate and seasonal fruit menus.

You can go the traditional route this year and select a Valentine's Day box of chocolates ($28 for 12, $55 for 30) that include temping high-end flavors like mint chocolate, mango passion fruit and citrus zest, lemon thyme, and caramel coriander - and all of this presented in an tasteful box. Or you can peruse a host of other options, including macarons, cakes and even spicy truffles.

We were wowed by the 16 piece Chocolate Collection ($36) that included individual pieces like the 70% Guanaja Dark Chocolate with Vanilla Bean, 66% Grand Cru Caraibe and Manjari with Raspberry puree and the Jivara Milk Chocolate with a Cold Brew Arabica Coffee Infusion.

What are you waiting for? It's the season of romance and real romance means chocolates.

Today, Tuesday 12, by 4PM is your last chance to order the best chocolates in New York.

Looks at Books - Joseph P Kennedy, Notre Dame and Irish recipes

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
By David Nasaw
 
You can’t understand the American 20th century without contemplating the Irish American family whose epic rise in many ways defined it. In David Nasaw’s magisterial study of Joe Kennedy, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, he explores the hardheaded pragmatism that was Kennedy’s central characteristic.
 
It can be difficult to remember from this standpoint in history that Joe Kennedy’s rise was a rags to riches story. But Kennedy himself never forgot.
Along the way to riches he encountered prejudice, discrimination and exclusion at every turn. These were the social and political barriers to an upstart Irish American that he overcame through smarts, entrepreneurship and self-belief.
 
Kennedy was a much more complex man than many historians have allowed to date, and in Nasaw’s book a complete portrait emerges of the man who went on to found the most powerful political dynasty of the 20th century.
 
Kennedy, Nasaw informs us, was never the bootlegger that some have suggested. What he was was a far seeing businessman who made millions from his own ingenuity.
 
Anticipating the Great Crash of 1929, for example, he liquidated his stocks and survived the Depression with his fortune intact. By the 1950s he was one of the richest meant in the world.
 
He was also, crucially, an attentive and loving father, and his passion for securing his families future in some ways shaped their political legacy too. Kennedy had raised his family to be comfortable in front of newsreels, and he coached his children (especially Jack) on how to speak on television.
 
Tragically he lived long enough to witness the assassinations of his two sons John Fitzgerald and Robert Kennedy, but he also understood that his family legacy had been secured, which was the principle that dove him throughout his life and career.
 
Nasaw presents a portrait of a devoted Irish father whose life’s work was to transform not only his family’s fortunes but also the world’s.

Penguin, $40

 

Notre Dame’s Happy Returns: Dublin, The Experience, The Game
By Brian O’Conchubhair and Susan Mullen Guibert

Thirty five thousand Irish Americans descended on Dublin for the Emerald Isle Classic football game between Notre Dame and Navy on September 1 of this year. But the relationship between Notre Dame and Ireland goes back much further.

In this handsomely produced book of photographs from the event, photographer Matt Cashore has selected nearly 200 of favorite images in large format pictures that capture the sights and sounds of that made the event so significant for both visitors and locals alike.
 
The book also underlines the university’s commitment to scholarship though the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, which seeks to strengthen its ties to Ireland.
 
This is a remarkably illustrated portrait of the ancestral homeland, but it’s a living link and one that celebrates the diaspora’s achievements and enduring ties.
 
In the excitement surrounding the big game the bonds between the old world and the new world are renewed and this portrait captures that important moment for all future generations.

Notre Dame Press, $38

Gimme the Recipe
By Sheila Kiely

The title of this brilliant new Irish cookbook acknowledges the way most of us actually cook now – impatiently, and with an eye on the clock. But these easy to assemble Irish dishes are surprisingly sophisticated under the hood.
 
The avalanche of new Irish cookbooks in recent years are startling international food writers with their breadth of reference and popularity, but perhaps more than that they are surprising because they actually even exist. Until fairy recently Irish cuisine was not something most international food writers had even heard of.
 
All of that is changing with a burgeoning Irish cooking scene that’s producing more and more bona fide stars. Kiely’s new cookbook is a winner because you’ll find yourself returning to it more frequently than the high-toned fare that captures the attention of reviewers, if not their hearts.
 
Kiely has written the book for ordinary people in a rush (sound familiar?) and she helpfully divides it into three sections, which are roughly What’s for Dinner Tonight, Baking Day and Party Day. 
Kiely knows how to produce an authentically delicious Irish spread, and after reading this book you’ll do likewise. It’s unpretentious, approachable and the results speak for themselves. Highly recommended.
 
Mercer Press, $29.95