Sean Nolan’s parents started smoking fish for themselves in retirement, and soon the Union Hall institution was born
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.
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 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. The mackerel and herring for kippers are fished off Donegal. The salmon is farmed from Scotland and Norway.
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.
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