By the time James and I arrived in Cork in late September, he had been sick for nine days with the cold that took hold on our first night in Northern Ireland. As he drove from town to town, we stopped regularly at Tesco’s grocery stores for cold medicine, cough drops and boxes of tissue. James is generally very neat and fastidious with keeping our cars clean, but the back seat of our rental car had become a wasteland of used Kleenex, discarded cough drop wrappers and empty water bottles. When we arrived in Cork – coming close to end of our tour of island – cleaned up all the junk.
The cold had so far eluded me and I was taken with some wishful thinking that perhaps I had already been exposed to this particular Irish bug when I was a student more than a decade ago and now I was immune.After all, I had gone more than a week in close quarters with my husband without any sign of illness. But that first night in Cork, I woke in the middle of the night with a horrible sore throat. I tried to rally much as James had in the early days of our trip so we could enjoy the last few days of our trip.
Despite the lingering cold for James and the onset of one for me, James and I found the food in Cork to be some of the best we had on our trip. That might partly be due to using Yelp to find restaurants with good reviews and partly due to Cork’s reputation as the Culinary Capital of Ireland. Many restaurants advertised locally sourced produce, meat and seafood. On our second day in Cork we made time to visit the English Market, but realized we could not take full advantage of it as many of the items were perishable. We still enjoyed lunch at one of the restaurants and an ice cream cone before we headed off to visit the Cork Butter Museum.
I had joked about visiting the Cork Butter Museum for most of our time planning the trip. The museum is tiny, but tells an interesting part of Irish history that I had not known about before. At one point in history, Ireland had been the premier supplier of butter to the world and Cork was home to the Irish Butter Exchange. I found it especially interesting that many of the roads James and I had driven on our way from Killarney to Cork had actually originated as dirt paths for farmers to bring their butter to the port city. Ireland’s dominance of the world butter exchange ended when France began exporting butter with a lower salt content, and eventually created a way to make butter by machine.
The museum admission includes a demonstration of how butter is made by hand, with a sample shared with guests on a piece of brown bread; an exhibit of historical butter-making equipment; and an exhibit about the Cork Butter Exchange.
Our other excursion in Cork included a visit to the Cobh Heritage Center a short drive from Cork. Cobh is one of the main ports were Irish emigrants headed west toward America. James and I both have ancestors who immigrated to America from Ireland so we visited the exhibit wondering if our family might have been there. The exhibit there includes information about the history of emigration from Ireland to other cities and folks can also make an appointment to meet with a genealogy export. James and I visited the exhibit, but did not delve into any family history.
While in Cork, we ate at our hotel at the Weir Rooms on evening on the terrace overlooking the river. We were lucky that the warm, dry weather had followed us for much of our trip so our evening dinner time was warm enough to have outside. I loved that the outdoor terrace had blankets and pillows that made it extra cozy. James and I shared an appetizer of mozzarella burrata with roasted tomatoes and crostini, then a I had a turkey club while James had a hot roast beef sandwich. The food was tasty and the atmosphere was lovely.
On our other night in Cork, James said he was craving some “American” food, specifcally barbecue. We used yelp to check out some restaurant options within walking distance of our hotel. We decided to check out Elbow Lane, a barbecue and brewery place, that noted having limited seating. We headed over about 5:30 p.m. and we were lucky to get a seat opposite the bar. The restaurants name, Elbow Lane, is apt as there is barely room to walk through the restaurant with out knocking someone with your elbows. There were tables at the back of the restaurant for about 10-12 people, then bar or counter seating for about 10 people. The restaurant was so small that one of the workers couriered entrees from another kitchen space across the street. The food was excellent and some of the best we had on the trip. More on our overall culinary experience in a future post…
Andersons+Ireland 