More often than I care to be, I am asked by a) people who are thinking of going to Ireland and b) people who have never been to Ireland and c) people who worry about what to expect from the food, the teeth-grinding question, “Is there really anything to eat in Ireland besides fish and chips and corned beef and cabbage?”
    Such ignorance persists among those same people who think all Indian food is a form of curry, all Thai food is searingly hot and all German food is heavy. (Actually, that last one is pretty close to the truth.) The fact that corned beef and cabbage is far better known and popular as an Irish-American dish, just as shrimp scampi is an Italian-American dish, shows just how myopic the question is.       
 And, even if one were to factor in a well deserved reputation for rather bland cooking even twenty years ago in Ireland, the answer to the question is that Irish food can be among the best in Europe simply because of the exceptional quality of its ingredients—including seafood ranging from wonderful crabs and lobsters to sea fish, trout and salmon; superb lamb and chicken with real flavor; and dairy products unmatched by any but the French. And the fact that Ireland has enjoyed an entire generation of young chefs who have trained in much heralded kitchens on the Continent and adapted their techniques to Irish provender has resulted in a widespread, imaginative cuisine all its own, from Dublin to Belfast.  Let’s call it the Gaelic Gastro Revolution.
    By far the most comprehensive assessment of Irish food culture is the book The Country Cooking of Ireland (2009) by Colman Andrews, who writes, “There is a sense in which all Irish cooking—at least the good stuff, the real thing—is country cooking. It is almost inevitably straightforward, homey fare, based on first-rate raw material whose identity shines through. Even in sophisticated urban restaurants, it tends to have an underlying earthiness and solidity that suggest honesty and respect for rural traditions.”
    That was written a dozen years ago and it’s truer than ever, particularly of Irish cheeses, which are artisanal homestead creations with no registered or traditional names behind them, like Camembert, Gorgonzola or Stilton. Only a handful of names have become well known, like Gubeen and Castel Blue. These small producers are making cheeses according to their own learning curve, using the local milk and winging it with little to draw on from the past. Thus, rare is the Irish cheese available outside of Ireland itself, though a good store like Dublin-based Sheridan’s, with branches in Galway, Meath, Cork, Limerick, Kerry, Kildare and Waterford, proudly stocks many small farms’ cheeses. For that reason a particular cheese will be available only until its current production runs out. In the years to come this may change, owing to the enormous success of the Irish brand Kerrygold, which is now, after Land O’ Lakes, the best-selling branded butter in the U.S. (Kerrygold also now sells cheddar-style cheese.) Ten years ago you would be hard put to find a restaurant in Ireland with an interesting cheese plate; now, many proudly serve an array.
     When it comes to vegetables, it’s no surprise that the Irish have mastered a tuber that originally came from South America and whose first plantings in Ireland were by Sir Walter Raleigh. The white potato grew prolifically in the colder climates of Europe, ideal for Germans, Poles and Irish, both as fodder and people food. Though highly nutritious, the potato needs to be consumed in large quantities to get its vitamins and minerals, which was not a problem for the Irish poor until the Potato Famine of 1845 led to what was called the Great Hunger, when millions of Irish starved to death—the population decreased as much as 25% — while others escaped to America and Australia. With the eventual recovery, farmers diversified their crops but returned to the humble spud for sustenance and, given potatoes’ appearance at just about every lunch and dinner table, it is as requisite as bread and butter.
     Irish breads, by the way, while nothing like French or Italian loaves, are delicious and have marvelous textures from rye, barley and oats, not least in Irish soda bread.
    When it comes to meats and poultry, Irish quality easily ranks with the best in Britain, France and Italy. The lamb, pork and chicken all have exceptional flavor, absorbed from the local terroir, and I’ve never purchased any eggs in the United States, not even at a farm stand, to match the richness and color of Irish eggs. With a side of streaky bacon and toast, breakfast is a feast.
     When it comes to beef, however, as in all of Europe, the cattle are fed exclusively on grass and never acquire the sweet fat marble-ization that corn-fed American beef has at its best. Irish beef is juicy, tender and lovely to look at, but it pales in flavor in comparison with USDA Prime.
     When it comes to great seafood Ireland is blessed not only by a ragged coastline—3,500 miles of it—ideal for crustaceans and mollusks but it also has the North Atlantic, the Irish Sea and the North Sea to supply a wide range of fish. Wild Irish salmon is certainly as good as Scottish, and the crabs and lobsters taken offshore are superb.
    Oddly enough, the Irish did not take full advantage of their own piscine bounty until recently, relying more on cured, smoked and canned seafood from other counties. Now, however, one of the signal improvements in Gaelic Gastronomy is in the gathering and utilization of its seafood, especially by well-trained chefs who know just how fine their hake, haddock, skate, eel, Arctic char, cod, oysters, prawns, salmon and mussels truly are.
     I have written often about the distinctive qualities of Irish whiskey, which has become a major force in the spirits market, going from only four distilleries twenty years ago to more than 40 today. A good pub or restaurant will carry a dozen or more, which makes an evening’s crawl an education.
     And then there is that unique contribution to worldly pleasures called Guinness Stout, which originated in the Dublin brewery of Arthur Guinness in 1759. Made from malted barley and roasted unmalted barley, its thick, creamy head—achieved by a careful draft pull—is immediately identifiable, and its richness and bitterness are as far from ale as heavy cream is from milk. The conventional wisdom has long been that, despite Guinness now being brewed in 50 countries and the refinement of the product into a can, only in Ireland does it have the quintessential flavor every Irishman and woman swears by.
      I can certainly swear to that (just as I can that the Nutella made in Italy is superior to that made in other countries under license), even factoring in the atmosphere of a good pub. Perfecting the pour is key to Guinness on tap in Ireland, and if the bartender is a pretty Irish redhead who calls you “darlin’” and draws the elixir into a perfectly sized  Guinness glass, so much the better.
     If the title of this article refers to a Silver rather than a Golden Age in Irish food and drink, it’s because my faith in the future of Gaelic Gastronomy makes me certain that it’s only going to get finer still in the next decade.

         Katie’s surprise at the news made her smile.
         “So, it looks like the Chinese connection is not so farfetched after all?” she purred.
         “I guess not,” said Coleman. “At least we know the painting is in China and that it’s not an individual who’s selling it, which of course makes it all the more interesting.”
         “And maybe tracing it back to the Shui family holdings, prior to their leaving the mainland, makes sense.”
         “Could be.  Are you and David intending to follow that lead?”
         “Absolutely,” said Katie. “For one thing it would make Mr. Shui a prime bidder for a painting his family once owned.”
         “Understood. I’ll make some inquiries from my end and you from yours.  Meanwhile, with the challenge thrown down to investigate the painting’s authenticity, I think I’ll start doing profiles of the probable bidders on this, besides our Mr. Shui.”
         “I’ve done a little digging on some of them,” said Katie, “but I didn’t get too deep.”
         “Most of them are a bunch of crooks,” said Coleman, “in one way or another.  You know the old saying, ‘Behind every great fortune there is a great crime?’ Well, in the art world you’ve got to start with a great fortune before you even think of buying your way in.  Back in the Renaissance you merely had to be a ruthless family like the Borgias to hire top artists to fill your palaces. Then you had all the Gilded Age robber barons like Jay Gould (right), Carnegie, Henry Frick, every one of them got notoriously rich before buying status for themselves in the art and museum world. Or, if you’re a Nazi like Herman Goering (below), you just outright steal it from people and museums in countries you conquer.   Not nice people.”
         “And you think that’s true of a lot of collectors today?” asked Katie.
         “Oh, my God, yes! No one on that list I gave you got rich by running a five-and-dime company. Lauden did inherit his money, though. As for the rest, I wouldn’t want to cross any of them, especially Stepanossky. He came out of the KBG when the Soviet Union fell apart, and he became a billionaire almost overnight. You don’t get that rich without cracking a lot of eggs and breaking a lot of heads. Word was he had Boris Yeltsin in his pocket when the old drunk was president.”
         “So you’re going to run profiles of all these guys before the auction?” asked Katie.
         “Sure, it’s sexy stuff.  You wouldn’t read it in Art News, and certainly not in Art + Auction, which have to kowtow to those same people.  That’s what distinguishes Art Today from the rest—and the reason I don’t get paid what their editors are making.  Best I can hope for is a glass of cheap Champagne and bad canapés at gallery exhibition openings.  Art Today is the runt of the litter with a chance to have the biggest bark on this story.”
         Indeed, all the actual news coverage about the Vermeer in the art media was gleaned from what Art Today was breaking, with plenty of quotes from Coleman and his writers. The media were left interviewing academics and gallery owners for fresh copy. While Art Today was getting its news directly from a credible source, the rest of the media were printing hearsay and opinion.
         Meanwhile, David had picked up where Katie had left off with her research on those same billionaires, trying to find anything in their backgrounds that Gerald Kiley might not have let on about. David was convinced that Kiley had played everything thus far very close to his vest, giving out only as much as he wanted an ex-cop like David to know. While there was as yet no evidence of a crime being committed, David’s instincts told him that an art world dominated so completely by very rich men whose pasts were at best shadowy, and at worst criminal, would ignore such associations as long as the money drove the market. The gallery owners’ and the museums’ own devious histories, he had learned, involved outright stealing of national treasures, forging of documents, and alliances with former Nazis, dictators, traitors, and con men. 
         As Katie had remarked, David knew cops everywhere, and some of them had pieces of the puzzle, even if David did not know what the puzzle actually represented. She said it’s like working on a Jackson Pollock drip painting jigsaw puzzle.
         There was always the possibility of forgery, or of the Vermeer being a copy, or by a member of his studio. There also was the question, partially answered by the Fordham professors, of how such a painting could travel from the Netherlands to China in the 17th century. Or where exactly had the painting been all those centuries?  Had it been shifted from country to country, collector to collector? Why would the People’s Republic hold on to it for so long—at least since taking power in 1949—then suddenly decide to auction it off? 
         David also began to think that the crazy Japanese billionaire Saito’s dying so suddenly, and so soon after the announcement of the Vermeer sale, was too coincidental. Even if he was reportedly broke when arrested, Saito had been forced to sell the van Gogh and Renoir he’d bought at such exorbitant prices, so he was certainly rich again to the tune of more $160 million, and he probably had squirreled away his money out of reach of the authorities.  He would have had the resources to bid on the Vermeer.
          David kept Katie up to date with whatever he found out and was coming around to feel the whole story was getting darker and darker.  And, while David was trying to put two and two together on his end, Katie had been inquiring of her gallery sources how often, or how rare, it was that the Chinese sold off art from their collections.
         “Never,” Kevin O’Keeffe of the Mannion Gallery told her. “To my knowledge none of the treasures in the Beijing National Museum (above) ever leaves the museum, and I assume they have a lot of fourth-rate stuff they could easily unload.  They also have a lot of first-rate stuff any museum or collector would sell their own mothers to bid on.”
         “So why would China sell the  most expensive painting ever put up for auction  now?”  

      “Well, there is that. It will bring a fortune, and China just got Hong Kong back from the British this year, so there must be a lot of turmoil.  Maybe even some feelers from some British collector or art scholar who might have gotten wind that the Chinese had a Vermeer they didn’t know the value of.”