The standard of food served in hotels and restaurants gets better and better but there is a downside too, since a creeping uniformity stalks the globe and indigenous foods are frequently lost in the rush to emulate foreign cuisines. Food may well be 'eclectic' and 'modern' but too frequently it is also from the '5 ingredients too many' school of cookery. Chefs all talk of 'freshly cooked' but a yard-long menu must raise suspicions and too often 'today's special' has been prepared in a kitchen in middle-Europe.
Throughout Europe some of the very best standards of food have always been found in private houses, and today this is still the case. Hidden Ireland's private country houses are consistently able to offer their guests a taste of the best and most authentic Irish country house food, which is becoming harder and harder to find today. Mediterranean, Oriental or Moroccan cuisines are wonderful in the right place, but this is not necessarily in the middle of Ireland, where visitors particularly want to experience the flavour of the country, and Hidden Ireland's houses provide exactly what they are looking for.
Many houses have farms and large gardens which provide the kitchens with fruits, vegetables and herbs, which all move seamlessly from earth to table in the twinkling of an eye. Some, such as Delphi, Mornington and Temple House are on rivers or beside lakes, which allows the fish virtually to swim into their kitchens. Others, such as Emlaghmore and Mount Vernon, are beside the sea and serve seafood and shellfish caught that very day.
Families who have lived in the same house for generations know where to find the fattest mussels, just-picked chanterelles, wild bilberries from the mountain or watercress from the stream - all the preserve of the private country house kitchen. These are houses where people keep their own hens and ducks, where they still make their own marmalades and jams, and their own chutneys and pickles. Their bread and biscuits are homemade, and the butter doesn't come portion controlled but in great generous slabs or pyramids of golden butterballs. And, if you want more, your hosts will be delighted to oblige.
It is this very lack of uniformity that draws people back to Hidden Ireland houses, for they are all so very different. At some, dinner is served around a big central table while, at others, separate tables prevail. What unites them, however, is a commitment to serving what is local, in season and fresh. As one owner says "We are strong on where we buy". When we buy meat this means from a local butcher with his own abattoir who will hang meat for a week longer than usual, just to ensure that it is perfectly tender and to allow its flavours to mature.
Some of our private country houses even have large organic kitchen gardens where a wide range of vegetables and fruit for the table is grown. Records are kept and only the best are grown another year. The desire to serve what is best might mean spinach two nights running, but it will always be cooked in different ways. The Percevals at Temple House in County Sligo were some of the earliest organic growers in Ireland, and today many of our houses use organic produce wherever possible. Catch a pike in Temple House Lake and it will be transformed into a mousse or poached with herbs. Tea there each afternoon is an institution, with wonderful homemade cakes and biscuits.
Treasured, top-secret recipes, handed down the generations surface in many Hidden Ireland houses. At Martinstown House on the Curragh, 'Mrs. Dalgety's Orange Cake' receives reverential treatment. The owner Meryl Long remembers the days when the family's old cook would watch the early television cooks and muttering disparagingly 'there's another good piece of meat ruined'. These links with the past are all part of the Hidden Ireland's charm.
Keen gardeners among the membership are able to offer produce to guests that is rarely seen elsewhere. At Hilton Park in County Monaghan the gardens produce tomatillos, cardoons, asparagus peas, pole beans, dozens of different kinds of pumpkins and squashes as well as the more familiar varieties of vegetables. Here too, the herb garden produces more than 30 different kinds of herbs. There is trout from one lake on the estate and pike from another.
At Mornington House in County Westmeath, guests will see their host Warwick O'Hara digging potatoes that will appear on plates at dinner, alongside their local beef or lamb, which is among the best available anywhere in Ireland.
Hidden Ireland is a wonderful base, too, from which to eat some of the freshest fish in the country.
Then there are the breakfasts. You might start with peaches poached in vanilla syrup or a fruit salad made with 15 different fruits; at Hilton Park garden rhubarb or gooseberries with sweet cicely, a dish of loganberries at Temple House, at Ballyvolane House a trout caught on the lake at dawn. Summer brings the soft fruits from the gardens onto to the table. There are dishes of black, red and white currants, mulberries, fat strawberries and raspberries and tayberries in abundance.
In Hidden Ireland houses, the salmon is usually wild, even today, and is sometimes smoked on the premises. You will meet herbs that are only grown in private gardens; chervil and angelica and lovage. The beef and lamb have often been fattened on adjoining pastures. In winter the wild game comes from the surrounding bogs and coverts, and the fish from local waters.
Nothing will give the traveller a better taste of true country house cooking than a visit to these lovely houses. Their owners are closely connected with the region and with the land; they have not lost touch with tradition and seasonality in the in the rush to be modern and fashionable. Staying at a Hidden Ireland house offers you a unique opportunity to sample some of the best traditional country house dining in Ireland.