Tom Durcan’s Spiced Beef

Tom Durcan’s Spiced Beef

FOOD AWARD

BY AOIFE CARRIGY

It’s quite a thing to be recognised as one of the finest purveyors of one of your county’s most beloved foods and to have successfully introduced it to new customers all around the world. ‘It used to be eaten at Christmas as a real treat for locals here in Cork,’ craft butcher Tom Durcan explains of the traditional spiced beef that he is famed for, ‘but now people love it year round and the country over.’ The Farmgate Café in the English Market uses it daily in sandwiches, reubens and cold plates and the Real Olive Company uses ‘mountains of it’ at their popular market stall. Indeed, you’ll now find Durcan’s Spiced Beef nationwide, from Centra and SuperValu, where it’s sold cooked and sliced, to Dublin’s Chapter One restaurant, where chef-proprietor and fellow Cork man Ross Lewis is an enthusiastic champion of the tender, sweet-savoury delicacy. Tom Durcan has been selling his traditional spiced beef at his butcher’s stall – one of 10 in the 140-year-old covered English Market, if you include three who specialise in poultry – since he set up the stall in 1985, but the recipe he uses dates back to his teenage apprenticeship in Jim Kidney’s butcher shop in Carrigaline. Tom’s adapted recipe involves a slow cure for at least a month in a salt brine with brown sugar and saltpetre and a secret spice mix that includes pimento, cloves and cracked black pepper. It’s a lengthy and labour-intensive process requiring regular stirring of the cure to ensure absorption of all the flavours. Traditionally the joint would have been cured for up to three months, extending the cold-room shelf life of the Irish beef provided as vittles for merchant ships coming and going from Cork’s busy ports. As food writer Elizabeth David tells us, spiced beef was also a traditional feature of English and Welsh cookery for several centuries. However, its popularity has endured in Ireland, having peaked in Cork in the 1920s and 1930s.

IT’S QUITE A THING TO BE RECOGNISED AS ONE OF THE FINEST PURVEYORS OF ONE OF YOUR COUNTY’S MOST BELOVED FOODS AND TO HAVE SUCCESSFULLY INTRODUCED IT TO NEW CUSTOMERS ALL AROUND THE WORLD.

While silverside, topside, rump and brisket would also have been traditionally used, Tom chooses to spice the eye of the round, as it is a prime and tender cut that is ‘good enough for a roast but not so thick that it won’t absorb all the spices’. He uses local Irish Hereford heifer beef that has been finished on maize for three months to produce a particularly tender meat with good layers of fat. During a typical Christmas in Cork, some six tonnes of Durcan’s spiced beef passes across Tom’s counter. Unsurprisingly, 2020 was a big year for online sales of their spiced beef gift box, as this special taste of home was sent as a festive gift to Irish expats around the world. This signature speciality has also built up a loyal fanbase in Italy and France and attracts regular customers as far-flung as Donegal to Hong Kong. Durcan’s spiced beef can be ordered and delivered ready-to-cook or ready-cooked, whole or sliced, and ready to pop onto crusty buttered white bread topped with caramelised Spanish onions, as Tom loves it, or into a fresh Waterford blaa with Coolea cheese, as in the recipe below from Hatch & Sons in Dublin. tomdurcanmeats.ie  

Spiced beef blaa

Recipe by Domini Kemp

This recipe comes from Guild member Domini Kemp’s café Hatch & Sons in Dublin, where it’s long been a favourite on their menu, but it’s also an excellent way to use up leftovers at Christmastime.

Waterford blaa / Rapeseed mayonnaise / Tom Durcan’s spiced beef, thinly sliced / Coolea cheese, thinly sliced / Onion relish

This isn’t a recipe per se, just assembly! Spread a warm blaa with rapeseed mayo, then pile on some thinly sliced spiced beef and Coolea cheese and top with a spoonful of onion relish. Sandwich together and tuck in.