Frank Hederman
Frank Hederman is a fish smoker. He lives in Belvelly Smoke House, Cobh. He is married to the food writer Caroline Workman and he has four children
Baby Beatrice and I wake up at 7am. She calls from her cot, which is at the end of the room. She just turned one and she's a bundle of energy. When she smiles, it's a delight. Then she is awake, between us in the bed. Every morning, I wake my wife, Caroline, and take her up tea. Then we have a very calm start. There's no structure to the day. Every day is different. I may have to go away early to collect the organic salmon, which we get down from Donegal, and that fish will be brought back to the smoke house. I'd have breakfast before I start. I have porridge and toast and a boiled egg and coffee.
We live in a place called Belvelly, which is approximately on the north shore of Great Island, Cobh. We are about a kilometre from the entrance of the Fota Wildlife Park, which people would know. The smoke house is the oldest traditional smoke house in Ireland; it's the only one of its kind. We've been smoking fish here for 25 years. We smoke wild salmon, if it's available, mackerel, haddock and porridge. We smoke the porridge and that's made into oatcakes.
I got tired of living beside the smoke house and I left here for a while, but then I came back. Now I love it because you just walk up the yard to it and it's no hassle at all. Then you just get on with it.
The smoke house is like a large sauna. You open the door in the middle of it and it's completely black, like a black hole with a lamp inside. It's so old that it's like a Stradivarius; you just play it and no one should interfere with it. It turns out beautiful fish all the time. Because it's traditional, it's now a protected structure and no one can ever touch it.
Our system of smoking is the simplest in the world. The fish comes in in the morning. It is salted, then the salt is washed off and, at the end of the day, it's put into a smoker and it smokes during the night. The length of time it takes depends on the time of year and the ambient temperature. It can take anywhere up to 20 hours.
How do I know it's done? Well, this is what I do: I feel the fish through my fingers -- imagine the inside of a salmon, the upper front. I put my thumb on the orange bit at the front and feel it at the back, at the skinniest part. I move my finger and go, 'Yes' or 'No.' It's an instinct thing. There's no law to these things. So when the fish is ready, the fish is ready, and when it's not ready, it ain't. You leave it until it is ready.
One journalist very kindly said that saying Frank Hederman smokes fish is a bit like saying Mr Steinway makes pianos.
We use beechwood chips, which we have specifically made for us in the UK. The size of the chip dictates the temperature at which it burns, which then, in turn, gives you the smoke that you desire. I suppose you could say that it's bespoke timber. The curing process is the salting. We're not Indians in pioneering America and we're not trying to feed families for the winter. We add flavour, like Lea & Perrins or Colman's do. When I was starting out, one very clever man told me: "Do not, under any circumstances, smoke volumes of anything. Smoke high value, low volume." So we did that and it makes a lot of sense.
From the very beginning, we've been a low-volume producer, but a very high-quality one, and we have stuck to that rigidly. The Irish market is actually a very small part of what we do. The bulk of it goes to London. We supply all of Selfridges, we do the food halls, the Wonder Bar, the Oyster Bar and all the big restaurants, such as Richard Corrigan's. We did the Queen's birthday two years ago.
All day, I'm constantly going from the house to the smoke house. I don't stay in the office too long. I check the emails and see what has come in and see what has to be sent back out -- our orders. If they want stuff in London, we will ship it out to them in the afternoon and it's at their place by 9.30am the next morning.
We like doing business with people we like doing business with. We're not in the business of getting grief. If people are messy or truculent or very slow paying, we prefer not to do business with them. We don't need the business that badly and that's not being arrogant, just being honest about it. I'm back doing what I wanted to do at the very beginning when I smoked fish, but, in the meantime, you had to do everything else. For many years in Ireland, we didn't have a food culture for top quality. It all started with Myrtle Allen. She was the inspiration. All the artisan cheese-makers started in the late Seventies and Eighties. Now it's wonderfully trendy and there's a lot of ballsology about it. Quite simply, everyone started making cheese because they had families to feed. I had a young family and I had to make a living.
A lot of people come and go in this game, but you've got to know the business and you've got to have the right attitude and be absolutely relentless. You have to have energy. I still get a great kick out of it. At the moment, I'm making marmalade for the house and I'm trying to work out how to smoke oranges.
The balance is an important aspect of the whole thing -- the balance in your life and the balance in your head. There are all those phases of life where you're so busy running around that you don't actually know what you're at. But you don't know this at the time, you have to learn it.
Sometimes, at night, I go out to water the garden and I look across the yard. I just see the smoke. I don't smell it any more . . . I smell it if there is something wrong with it -- if it is too high -- but that doesn't happen very often. I love the sound of it and I love to see the little waft of smoke out of the top of the chimney. There are crows here now that sit on the chimney. With their beaks in the air, you'd swear to God they are having a smoke.
Frank Hederman, Belvelly Smoke House, Cobh, Cork, tel: (021) 481-1089, see www.frankhederman.com
- In conversation with Ciara Dwyer
