When you are choosing potatoes for a recipe, remember that waxy potatoes and baby new potatoes are excellent for salads; large Kerr's Pinks or Golden Wonders are good for baking and Maris Pipers are the potato of choice by chefs for the best mashed potatoes.
American food writer Margaret M. Johnson has chronicled the food and pubs of Ireland – it's a wonderful celebration of a piece of Irish heritage that we need to value more.
There's a version of Ireland that we all recognise whether we're Irish or not: the white-washed thatched cottage with the spinning wheel outside and inside a burning hearth of red-hot turf, a rough pine table, a dog sitting on the flagstone floor and somewhere a bit of tweed and a dresser full of delph. Always in that picture is an auld one – a grey-haired woman of indeterminate age who embodies the culture: the famine, a tale of loss and the subsequent keening at the funeral, 'the dry black bread and the sugarless tea' of Paddy Kavanagh's poems, our heritage, our innate Irishness.
Is that what we are? Maybe once, but no more. The Ireland of today is a far more progressive animal, and in terms of food, we need to reflect the truth so that when people visit, they still feel and can taste our Irishness, but in a thoroughly modern way.
Food writer Margaret M. Johnson has achieved a remarkable thing: she has managed to capture the Irish pub and represent it back to us as something worth protecting. In her book The Irish Pub Cookbook she recreates a world that spans every corner of Ireland: every shebeen, tourist pub, every local and the food that they serve. Each pub is lovingly documented from its history to its food. Thanks to her meticulous research, they will remain alive and well in our memory for a long time to come.
The Irish Pub Cookbook is above all a celebration of the fabulous food you find in Irish pubs. She has gathered the secrets of every well-known pub in the country, many of whom may not outlive the book. 'A rural Irish pub might be an extension of the village shop, or it might serve as the local post office or, in the case of a pub in Wexford, an extension of a funeral parlor; many traditional ones still feature intimate, partitioned booths or cubicles called 'snugs', and others have boldly painted or black and white beamed exteriors with thatched roofs'.
This is above all a cookbook. Her recipes include Chicken and Ham Pie from The Old Stand, home of barristers and rugby fans in Dublin; Baked Limerick Ham from O'Neills Pub in Suffolk House, also in Dublin which has been licensed for over 300 years; Spinach Salad with Pears and Bellingham Blue Cheese Dressing using local Louth cheese, and Stuffed Salmon en Croûte from the chef at The Meetings pub-restaurant in the Vale of Avoca. The photographs by Margaret and Leigh Beisch are evocative and show both the establishments and the food off at their best. When you think of bacon and cabbage, you may remember the slush you were served as a child: when you see the photograph in The Irish Pub Cookbook, you see immediately that it ranks up there with the Alsation Choucroute Garnie as a national dish of substance. Desserts feature too: Irish Cream Cheescake, Murphy's and Baileys Cheesecake, Bread and Butter Pudding with Hot Whiskey Sauce, Guinness Black and White Chocolate Mousse and the heavenly Banoffe Pie.
Like most important things in life, it is the writers, the artists and the poets who remind us what we need to preserve. They are often the sensitive souls who tell us, in many ways, what we need to keep sacred and what needs to survive despite the obvious attractions of progress. Margaret M. Johnson has achieved the impossible: in this book she reminds us that the traditional pub is something that we need to preserve as part of our heritage. And the food is bloody good too!
Author note Margaret M. Johnson is a noted cookbook author and journalist. She has written for the Los Angeles Times, and is the author of Irish Puddings, Tarts, Crumbles and Fools; The New Irish Table and the Irish Heritage Cookbooks all published by Chronicle Books. Photograph: Copyright Leigh Beisch.
This is above all a cookbook. Her recipes include Chicken and Ham Pie from The Old Stand, home of barristers and rugby fans in Dublin; Baked Limerick Ham from O'Neills Pub in Suffolk House, also in Dublin which has been licensed for over 300 years; Spinach Salad with Pears and Bellingham Blue Cheese Dressing using local Louth cheese, and Stuffed Salmon en Croûte from the chef at The Meetings pub-restaurant in the Vale of Avoca. The photographs by Margaret and Leigh Beisch are evocative and show both the establishments and the food off at their best. When you think of bacon and cabbage, you may remember the slush you were served as a child: when you see the photograph in 
