Festive Flavors of Ireland invites readers—cooks and armchair travelers alike—on a holiday visit to one of Europe’s most beloved destinations. From decking the halls to gathering around the family table, you’ll find timeless classics and exciting new recipes in this full color collection of Irish Christmas dishes. With easy-to-follow recipes for tasty nibbles, warming soups, wonderful puddings, and dazzling desserts, Festive Flavors of Ireland will awaken your senses to the festive, delicious Christmas season that runs from Mairgead Mór (Big Fair Day) to Nollaig na mBan (Women’s Christmas). With more than seventy recipes and evocative photos, this colorful collection will become an essential addition to your holiday bookshelf and a gift that family and friends will treasure year after year. Nollaig shona duit . . . Happy Christmas to you!
My first thought after cracking into Margaret M. Johnson’s Festive Flavors of Ireland—Christmas can’t come soon enough! Johnson’s latest guide to Irish holiday cuisine, like its predecessor, beckons us to the art and artistry of making delicious meals, while serenading us with the whimsy of Irish culture as we go. Johnson’s forte remains crafting meals that anyone can make, but she is also a gifted writer. With seventy Irish holiday recipes on hand, illustrated with world-class photography, indexed and brought to life with her colorful anecdotes, Festive Flavors of Ireland offers a passport to Ireland itself.
—GERRY REGAN
Editorial Director, TheWildGeese.irish
It’s cliché, I know, but as a card-carrying Irish-American, I immediately jumped to the potato recipes in Festive Flavors or Ireland, and when the holidays roll around, Dauphinoise Potatoes will definitely occupy pride of place on my particular groaning board. But of course, there is so much more to Margaret Johnson’s newest cookbook, from tasty little palate teasers drawing on Ireland’s savory salmon to hearty, meaty mains and sweet, traditional holiday cakes and tarts. It’s a thoroughly appetizing and enchanting mélange of Ireland’s distinctive cuisine and often curious customs—if you’ve never heard of Women’s Christmas, Margaret is here to inform you! Lavishly illustrated, Festive Flavors of Ireland will make your mouth water and instill in you a very merry Christmas spirit.
—JEFF MEADE
Editor, irishphiladelphia.com
Open Festive Flavors of Ireland and come home to the deliciousness, charm, ancestral wisdom, lore, and feeling in your soul for the magic of the holidays. You’ll feel the way Robert Browning did when you delve into this fabulous and lovely cookbook: “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.” Margaret Johnson has created a palette of colorful and scintillating recipes for the palate of all, especially for the Hibernophile.
—CYNTHIA NEALE
Author, The Irish Dresser series and Pavlova in a Hat Box
Festive Flavors of Ireland is irresistible. Margaret Johnson, with her usual flair, finds a perfect balance between practicality and style, the great traditions and twenty-first century innovation. All of this is heightened by the sense of “great anticipation,” to use writer Alice Taylor’s term, that accompanies the Irish Christmas from December eighth through January sixth. That and other sprinkles of literary wisdom help set the culinary tone, such as from the poet Alexander Smith, whose line “Christmas is a time that holds all time together” just about sums it up.
—PETER McDERMOTT
Arts Editor, Irish Echo Newspaper
About
Margaret Johnson is author of twelve cookbooks—Teatime in Ireland; Favorite Flavors of Ireland; Christmas Flavors of Ireland; Flavors of Ireland; The Irish Pub Cookbook; Irish Puddings, Tarts, Crumbles, and Fools; The Irish Spirit; The New Irish Table; The Irish Heritage Cookbook; Tea & Crumpets; Cooking with Irish Spirits; and Ireland: Grand Places, Glorious Food. As a food and travel writer, she has contributed to magazines in both the U.S. and Ireland including Irish America, Intermezzo, SIP, For the Love of Drink, and Teatime; Irish Echo newspaper; and to online sites such as thewildgeese.irish and irishphiladelphia.com. She frequently appears at Irish food and cultural events, and when she’s not visiting her ancestral home in Ireland, she lives in Westhampton Beach, NY.