Smoked fish might not be exotic in Ireland, but what’s not rare is still wonderful

It’s all well and good to be a genius creative cook, delivering inspired dishes for dinner every night of the week. Or at least it must be, I imagine. Despite 40 years of cooking, I can only dream of that.
Truth be told, if you’re an everyday cook like I am, you probably have a short repertoire of recipes you fall back on for all of those days when inspiration is lacking. We all have our staple ingredients we keep in the refrigerator or pantry for those nights. One of my favourites is Union Hall’s smoked mackerel.
It’s a funny thing about being a blow-in – a food that most of you might take for granted is exotic to me. I don’t remember seeing smoked mackerel in the US outside of a few gourmet shops. The fact that this wonderful product is available at my neighbourhood Tesco and SuperValu seems like something of a miracle to me.
Union Hall’s smoked mackerel is dense and meaty with only a hint of smoke and just the right amount of saltiness. I use it all the time for impromptu dinner salads.
One of my favourites combines smoked mackerel, Little Gem lettuces and grapefruit sections — the acidity from the grapefruit is the perfect foil for the oily fish.
It could hardly be easier to make. Peel the skin from the mackerel (this is one of my dog Izzy’s favourite treats) and tear the fish into large flakes. Make a good mustardy vinaigrette. Peel the grapefruit and section the flesh (call them supremes, if you’re feeling fancy). Add any juice from the grapefruit to the vinaigrette and dress the lettuce lightly (don’t drench it). Arrange the mackerel over top and then the grapefruit sections.
Done and dusted in 15 minutes.
This smoked mackerel is also really good in a salad with new potatoes. Steam the potatoes until they’re tender and, while they’re still hot, dress them with salt and a bit of vinegar (this way the seasonings penetrate the potato before the flesh cools and becomes waxy). Again toss with the mustardy vinaigrette and flaked mackerel, but finish with chopped chives or green onions. When I have horseradish in the house, a bit of that is delicious, too.
Union Hall is a family business run out of the town by the same name in west Cork. What started as basically a backyard experiment has grown into national distribution. Union Hall now supplies roughly 50-60 tonnes of smoked mackerel every year (it comes both plain and peppered).
It also produces a similar amount of smoked salmon. Most of it is cold-smoked but it also makes a bit of very good “barbecued”, which is salmon that is first cold-smoked, then briefly hot-smoked, changing the texture from silky to firm and flaky.
Union Hall does whipped pâtés from both salmon and mackerel, mixed just with mayonnaise, lemon juice and black pepper.
And it has a line of kippers, which seem to be making something of a comeback. The company does about 20 tonnes of kippers every year.
The mackerel and herring for kippers are fished off Donegal. The salmon is farmed from Scotland and Norway.
When the salmon fillets arrive they are brined, then arranged on large racks and wheeled into the smoking chamber, which is like a room-sized oven where they are smoked over oak chips at 21-23 degrees for 12-14 hours. The barbecued, which accounts for only about 10 per cent of the salmon total, is then finished at 75 degrees for another 2½-3 hours. The mackerel is handled similarly, but in a smaller chamber that allows the smoke to circulate more quickly.
All this is a far cry from the way the business began. It was started by Sean’s father, John Nolan. He was a fisherman from nearby Baltimore who married Elmar O’Driscoll from a farming family at Union Hall. The business is still on the old family farm.
“My parents started smoking some fish for their own use,” says Sean. “Then they started supplying some local businesses. The two of them were messing around a bit when they were retired. They didn’t look for it to grow, it just happened. It just grew itself.”
The big push came when they got a contract with John Field of Field’s SuperValu in Skibbereen. That was when Sean joined the company while in his 30s, having started work fishing off trawlers.
“It’s not the easiest life,” he says. “Every day is different. When we started, we did mostly herring. Then kippers went away, but now the taste for them is improving and they’re coming back again.
“Mackerel is the big thing for us now and it’s getting bigger. We’re not doing too bad.”