JUDY KRAVIS

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Tuesday 29 August 2017

The Domestic Godless

Reading a live manuscript is so much more flexible, open to the four winds, than reading a publication, hardback, with author photo. Live, you are let in by unusual permission, and can disport yourself among these not-yet-pages from The Domestic Godless: Brandes, O'Shea and Murphy with an entourage of the admired, the tolerated, the invented and the cheerfully despised.

Culinary dada meets local assurance and universal defiance. They may be godless but they're not turfless; they roam around their terroir, polluted, no bother, helping out the farmers, processing invaders, taking the tests and undermining them at the same time, converting their spoils into barely imaginable feasts.

This is way beyond cooking, or deep inside it. Mockery and jaggery hold hands. There's plenty of science, and latin, a séance in a hurricane, a burning caravan, some non-Irish yearning and nostalgia, a jag or two of revulsion, some dispiriting memories.

At the outer edge of your food awareness, the inner edge of your fears, your credulity, Domestic Godless lead you further into the kitchen than you've been in a while. Welcome, I say.

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