Skehan in Muckross and Kylemore

In Donal Skehan's 'Kitchen Hero: Rediscovering the Irish Kitchen' next Tuesday, 15th July at 8.30pm on RTÉ One, he experiences Benedictine hospitality.

There has been a Benedictine Abbey at Kylemore since 1919, and one of the Benedictine traditions is extending hospitality to anyone who visits.  Donal Skehan visits the Abbey and meets Sister Karol, one of the last teachers from the girls’ boarding school which the nuns ran at the Abbey.  She cooks Donal a lemon sponge cake.

On Muckross Traditional Farms Donal learns about keeping pigs and how to make black pudding. And back in studio Donal prepares Stuffed Pork Chops and delicious Blackberry Amber.

Loosely based on the recipes of Irish food writer Theodora Fitzgibbon, this series sees food writer Skehan looking back over the last 50 years, drawing culinary inspiration from a generation that cooked much more than his own young generation, yet had access to far fewer ingredients.

For Donal's generation, used to Thai green curry on virtually every menu in Ireland, a wild blackberry seems more exotic than lemongrass, and a tin of coconut milk is more commonly purchased than a carton of buttermilk. While it's wonderful to have greater choices, Donal argues that it would be a shame for foreign recipes and ingredients to usurp indigenous ones, and recreates some of Theodora’s delicious recipes.

In this new Kitchen Hero series, sponsored by SPAR, Donal also rediscovers old techniques that were commonplace on farms just 40 years ago - making butter, milking cows by hand, digging lazy beds, and cooking over an open fire. For this part of the programme he visits Muckross Traditional Farms, a charming and thoughtful recreation of rural living from the 1930s to the 1970s. Donal then cooks a dish using ingredients that he has made, such as  buttermilk (a by-product of making butter) or black pudding, from the blood of a pig that most Irish farms kept. He stresses that he's not recreating dishes as an historical exercise, but because they are still great dishes to enjoy today.