Sally Ferns Barnes LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD BY KATE RYAN
how I started to teach myself about smoking,” Sally recalls. By a convoluted turn of events, Sally acquired a kiln and taught herself how to use it. The ambition was to master cold smoked salmon to raise extra income at Christmas when fishing was lean. In the 40 years since she began smoking wild fish, Sally has acquired great knowledge on everything that links the ocean and its bounty, smoke curing and working with nature and natural processes. In her hands each regal fish is an individual. Sally reads their lithe and muscular bodies to reveal their story: where they came from, journeys undertaken, enduring cycles of smoltification from freshwater fish to saltwater
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ally Ferns Barnes is one of the original pioneer women of West Cork food, settling in that rugged land in the 1970s and going on to create delicious things of true artisanship that shine brightly in the firmament of Ireland’s most iconic foods. Since 1979 Sally has been perfecting the art of smoking wild Irish fish from her modest smokery perched atop a windy hill near Castletownshend in West Cork. It began with mackerel, a fish that was cheap and abundant. “I had a tea chest with a hole in the bottom where I put a little metal pan filled with wood shavings, lit the shavings, and hung the mackerel across the top of the tea chest with a wet sack over it. That’s
FORTY YEARS OF HARD WORK - AND I’M NOT DONE YET!
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