The Celtic Tiger years saw food turn from fuel into art. Before the boom people were judged by how much mash they served to visitors. Afterwards they were judged by the coffee they served and their views on olives.

And then the money ran out. So now we have to figure out a whole new set of rules around our food habits to avoid looking like a plonker. Here’s what you need to watch out for.

The Dinner Party

Your dinner party has never mattered more. Before it was something you’d squeeze in between your five holidays. Now it might be the only day out people can afford for a month. They’re depending on you. You need to get it right.

Fifteen years ago the standard Irish dinner party involved somebody who returned from Thailand with a wok and made a stir-fry that tasted of nothing but tomato puree. It had to be eaten in a hurry before it set. Luckily this coincided with the arrival of Romanian red wine for 4 punts so we could hardly feel our tongues when the polyfilla was served.

Then Jamie Oliver happened and everybody learned the same new dish; sea bass stuffed with herbs. It became impossible to avoid on the dinner party circuit. There are two problems with this. One is that it can taste like eating a hedge. The other is most Irish people don’t like fish.

When you ask why, they’ll reply because of its fishy taste. You can’t argue with that. You’re better off with chicken. It tastes of nothing and you can always pass some breast off as tofu if somebody declares themselves a veggie.

Obviously somebody will ask you where you got the chicken. This is a trap. Don’t say “Tesco, €2.50”. Giving somebody cheap chicken these days is the kind of insult that would lead to a blood feud in Albania. Here people will talk about you behind your back, which is worse.

To avoid this, take a bite and say “you can really taste the difference with an organic free-range chicken, can’t you” Nobody has ever disagreed with this statement, even though it is complete horse shit. Then as your guests discuss a documentary on Channel 4 about the high instance of chronic depression among factory chickens you think to yourself “taste the difference my arse. I got the bird in Tesco. €2.50.”

You have to be careful with steak these days. You don’t want to rub people’s faces in it with a hunk of prime fillet for everybody at the table. They’ll wonder where you got the money.

The trick is to buy fillet and tell everybody it’s a cheaper cut. Nobody gets embarrassed by the show of wealth and they’ll think you’re Rachel Allen for making round steak taste so good. Nice one.

Avoid boozing during the preparations. One of the main reasons Irish people warmed to Celtic Tiger dinner parties was the guilt-free excuse to open a bottle of wine at six o’clock. There you were, stuffing rosemary in to the sea bass, singing along to your favourite CD, feeling like the king of the world crossed with Keith Floyd.

Next thing you know the bottle is empty. There’s a group of hungry friends in your living room trying to pretend they don’t mind you forgot to turn on the oven. There’s a Chinese man at the door with four plastics bags of take away and a bill for 140 euro. You don’t remember anything after that.

That was fine in the good times, when the cost of five ruined fish and a Chinese for everybody was the kind of money you’d lose out of your wallet on a night out. Open a bottle of Chablis at six these days and it will end in embarrassment.

Your guests will insist on paying for their own Chinese. At least one couple will say they’ve no cash and the rest will say sure pay later and they’ll say you don’t understand, we have no cash at all and she’ll turn to him and say you just had to be the big property developer like your brother and then every one will blame you for being a pisshead and the evening will be ruined.

Food Nostalgia

There’s a certain type of person – usually on mood enhancers – who thinks it’s cool to serve food from your childhood. So you arrive at their house for a starter of alphabetti spaghetti with a twist, followed by something clever with fish fingers. There’s Angel Delight for dessert. Everybody gets a Wagon Wheel on the way home.

Don’t do that. Your guests didn’t organise a baby sitter and get all dressed up so that you could treat them like kids. This is an adult night out, maybe their only one all month. Stop acting the clown.

Splitting the Bill.

The new thing in a restaurant these days is when the bill arrives at a group table and someone says “Actually, Martin and I didn’t have the soup.” This is from a person who resented splitting the bill during the boom times but had to go along with it. Now she’s hiding behind the recession. Don’t be that person. You’ll only save a few euros and poor Martin will be mortified.

What’s your favourite Supermarket?

We’re all familiar with the bargain bore by now. That’s the previously rounded individual who has become obsessed with special offers. You realise this when they start using words like bogof (buy one, get one free) in their every day conversation. They’ll also start over over-using the words unbeatable, unmissable and amazing.

Their life involves a lot of driving. Tesco have a bogof on their favourite orange juice. Next it’s across town to SuperValu who have twenty cans of Carlsberg at an unmissable price. After that it’s a quick stop at Lidl to pick up some vegetables which are just as good as anywhere else then into Dunnes for their  25% extra streak deal, Aldi have gone nuts with smoked salmon and look, Mark’s have meringues at 1990 prices.

Total saving? Who knows. Supermarkets fling their prices around these days to create three-card trick confusion. They hope you’ll be too busy chasing a bargain to stop and wonder what kind of profits they made off you during the boom. In the time you’ve been reading this the location of the cheapest carrot in Ireland has changed four times.

Don’t be the bargain bore. It’s more about being a know-all than saving money. So relax. Find a place you can live with nearby with and do your shopping there. Yes, it might mean two euros on your weekly shop, but that’s nothing like the hundreds of thousands you owe to the bank.

Healthy Eating

You’ll have heard the recent radio ads for littlesteps.eu. You know, the one where an actress with a fake Dublin accent tells her friend (who also sounds like she might break into ‘Take me up to Monto’ at any minute) that she has stopped giving pizza and crisps to her kids.  The ad – presumably subtitled “I can’t believe working class people are allowed to have children” – is so last year.

The recession means The Food Nazi has had his day. You no longer have to listen to their lectures. Just say “youse haven’t a clue what it’s like to rear two chisellers on my income, ya nosey bollix”. Then pile Jack and Sorcha into your Range Rover and drive off giving the finger. Nobody said you had to be poor. Just act poor and get those Nazis off your back.

Vegetables

Once upon a time there were five types of vegetables in Ireland (excluding the potato, which has its own category.)

Cabbage, carrots, turnips, frozen peas and mushy peas. Nobody knew better than your mother how to boil these five bad boys within an inch of their lives. Next came coleslaw, a kind of super-vegetable.

In their own quiet way (and nothing is quieter than a vegetable) they become a badge of sophistication in Celtic Tiger Ireland. It was hard to keep up with the latest variety you had to eat to show sophistication. No sooner had you mastered pak choi and fennel when you said somebody said “I just can’t believe you’ve never eaten kale.”

Kale was the warning light, a sign we’d gone too far. Why? Because kale is cabbage. Now, your veggie snob will try and convince you that kale is much nicer than cabbage. They’re wrong. A sausage is much nicer than cabbage. So are choc mallows. Kale, on the other hand, is very like cabbage.  Just more expensive.

Veg obsession is on the way out. The next time somebody approaches you with news of the next big thing in Veg World, just ask this simple question. Is it nicer than a Flake? No? Thought not.

Best Before Date

Older generations of Irish people scoffed at the notion of a best before date. We can all remember a defiant parent or grandparent digging into a piece of putrid cheese. Even later, as they started to vomit out their ears, they’d cheerfully announce that what doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger.

This was famine talk, from a bygone era. Once we got wealthy, anything in the fridge for more than three days was thrown out to make room for the organic carrot cake we couldn’t resist at the Farmer’s Market. Most of this cake was thrown out three days later to make room for the beautiful fresh salmon you couldn’t resist, which was thrown out two days later because Irish people don’t like fish.

Throwing away food became the new thing, our equivalent of lighting cigarettes with a hundred dollar bills. Now that the famine almost back the new, new thing is using up everything in the fridge. We’re a nation of milk sniffers.

The key here is to stock up on sweet chilli sauce.  It’s our new gravy, ideal for covering up. Bit of a hum off your five day old chicken breasts? Not any more there isn’t. Trying to find a use for that yellowing broccoli and bag of floppy carrots? You’re just two shakes of a bottle away from vegetarian stir fry.

The best thing about sweet chilli sauce is that even though everybody knows it gives you the runs, people can’t resist the taste. Which makes it perfect on those aged pork chops at the back of the fridge. Your guests will shovel it down and gladly spend the next two days on the toilet saying “I’m telling ye lads – it’s well worth it.”

The Take Away

Celebrity chefs don’t make us want to cook. They make us want to eat. There and then.  That’s why they’re on at 8pm, just after our dinner has worn off.  Jamie or Rachel’s delicious but complicated looking homemade pizza makes us think “Let’s face it; I’m never going to cook that. But I know a man who will.”  You have Tonytoni’s on speed-dial. The 12” Mamma Mia! with extra pepperoni and no onions, two portions of garlic bread and a coke arrives in time for the 9 o’clock news.

That’s 30 euro a night pizza habit. You watch two celebrity chefs a week. That’s three grand a year plus diabetes and a giant belly. It can be easily avoided. Keep the phone out of arm’s reach. In the time you spend trying to get off the couch, you’ll have turned over to Eastenders and the moment will have passed.

Funeral Food

For years, funeral food was all about the two most terrifying words in Irish cuisine: ‘Light Refreshments.’ That’s one egg sandwich and a cup of tea in your hand. The high point was some free booze if you could get at the whiskey before the priest arrived.

However a boom-time burial wasn’t complete until a relative grabbed the microphone at the cemetery and announced a sit down meal at a nearby hotel, all welcome.

The result? A new band of professional mourners who laughed every time they heard the phrase ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch.’ These were retired people with time on their hands, experts at reading between the lines of a death notice. If the address of the deceased included ‘and Marbella’, it was on with the sombre faces and off out to the car. You’re looking at chicken or salmon, pavlova and some cracking wine.

A four-line rhyming ditty about the deceased meant only one thing; they’re a bit common. That’s cocktail sausages and a platter of sandwiches at best. Hardly worth the petrol money.

Do you really want to be paying for these free-loaders? Times are tough. Whoever grabs the microphone for the ‘all welcome’ announcement should mention there will also be a table quiz, with questions about the life of the deceased. Add that there will be a special prize for whichever tables comes last. That will do the trick.

The Kitchen

You might want to take your kitchen off The Tour.

The Tour was when you called over to your friend’s new house for the first time and heard the dreaded words ‘C’mon, I’ll give you the tour.’ It was less fun than the Stations of the Cross. But there was no escape from a ten minute walk around the house repeating “I love what you’ve done” while thinking “Jesus, what’s with all the cushions?”

The kitchen was the high point of The Tour. While the rest of the house was about taste, this room spoke about wealth. Smeg, Miele, Aga were all good. Any sign of Tricity Bendix or Indesit and your guests were liable to ask if you were all right for cash.

It’s different now. You can’t afford to seem flashy. If you have a Rolls Royce kitchen these day, just tell your guests that you actually bought all the gear as a long term investment because class is permanent. If you can’t stomach lying, take your kitchen off the tour.

Knives

As we ran out of things to buy during the boom years, many of us started to splash out on knives. It wasn’t unusual to be told as The Tour reached the kitchen that the set of knives next to the cooker were the kind used by Tokyo’s finest sushi chefs.

“What the Jesus do you need them for?” was the obvious question we never asked.

Never be rude to somebody with a set of sharp knives. But it was odd that we changed our tune.

You see, past generations of Irish families made do with what was known as ‘the good knife.’ This was the only implement in the cutlery drawer sharper than a crayon. It would be used to cut everything; meat, vegetables, bread and maybe hair. Every other knife was for spreading butter.

Just as we couldn’t put down Rusty, the 22 year old dog, people became sentimental about the good knife. It would be kept in service for years past its sell by date. Then, one day, when the good knife brushed your thumb by accident without even drawing blood, you’d say to yourself “this is ridiculous, I need a new knife”. Which is a funny way of going about things but there you are.

Problem now is we’re packing heat. Japanese sushi heat. The good knife doesn’t slide off the thumb any more – it keeps going all the way through to your expensive granite topped counter.  So be careful. We’re still not great with knives.