Read: The Examiner | Cork’s wild salmon warrior Sally Ferns Barnes looks to the future
First published in the Irish Examiner on 1 March 2024.
“I only wo
rk with wild fish.” In one simple statement, Sally Ferns Barnes of Woodcock Smokery in West Cork sums up her raison d’etre: hers is the last smokehouse in Ireland that deals exclusively with our diminishing stock of wild fish. One of Ireland’s most iconic artisan food producers, Barnes has been much celebrated. She was the first Irish producer to win the Supreme Champion award at the Great Taste Awards in 2006, received a Euro-Toques Craft Award in 2018 for her work in protecting culinary skills and craft and, in 2022, was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Food Writers’ Guild.
Born and brought up in Scotland and Sussex, she moved to West Cork in 1975, becoming a fisherwoman and rearing two daughters while her former husband, a commercial fisherman, worked at sea. Starting off by smoking fish in a tea chest in the early 80s – one way of preserving unexpected gluts – Barnes taught herself the techniques of the trade through trial, error and lots of experimentation. Since those early days, those learnings have been appreciated by the customers who get to taste her superb smoked salmon, as well as other wild fish like haddock and tuna. She also shares her knowledge with the people who have travelled to The Keep, the on-site workshop where she teaches the traditional skills of filleting, salt-curing, hot and cold smoking that she has acquired over the last 45 years.
For Barnes, who is a warm and welcoming presence, coming to West Cork felt like coming home. “I just melted into the background and I loved it. It reminded me of what Scotland was like when I was a child,” she remembers. “I didn’t like living in England at all, it was very cliquish. It took three months before anyone spoke to me!” After a childhood that involved lots of moving, she was also determined to put down roots. ”I’ve been a stranger in communities most of my life and I swore I’d keep children in this place. No chopping and changing.” It wasn’t easy: “Being a fisherman’s wife is not much fun. I was on my own with all the responsibilities for the children and the homework and the dogs but we were working in the local community and becoming part of it. We were all in the same situation, trading for fresh fish for turnips and potatoes.”
Barnes has always had to adapt to survive. “Working with wild food is incredibly difficult,” she says. “You can’t project sales figures, or even know if there will be fish this year. Unfortunately, fishing seasons are set by humans, not when the fish is ready.”
Along with the vagaries of nature, Barnes has also had to deal with the Irish government’s ban on drift-net fishing for salmon which decimated the inshore fishing industry and, with it, her main source of wild fish. “It was a dagger in the back when the drift-netting at sea was banned, just after we’d been awarded the Supreme Champion Award at the Great Taste Awards in London in 2006. I was so proud to bring the trophies back to Ireland and thought that the future looked great for the business with that publicity. It was not to be.”
Another issue for Woodcock Smokery, as with many other small producers, is the burden of dealing with prohibitive regulations. Barnes was involved in the artisan food group set up by Myrtle Allen in 2001 in response to fears about EU regulations that were being introduced and has always been vocal about the importance of small producers to a local economy. “People pay diddly squat for food,” she says, “they don’t want to pay a reasonable price for the work that goes in.”
This sense of fairness has seen her involved in Slow Food – and its piscine offshoot Slow Fish – for many years. “It has been my saviour. I belong and am not so weird! There are lots of people like me trying to be cognizant of the fact that things are limited.” Championing the ethos of food that is good, clean, and fair, Slow Food – which is based in Italy – is also responsible for founding the now twenty-year-old University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG). Barnes, who has a passion for education and teaching – “I did train for primary-school teaching before I arrived here, so I am going full circle” – has taken in many UNISG students as temporary interns, “teaching them about fishy life…and introducing them to Irish culture, which they love.”
On a more short-term basis, Barnes’ deep knowledge of fish and the sea is something that she shares with visitors and students who come to The Keep, for a tasting evening, to do a smoking workshop, or to learn about edibles in the world around them. “We’ve always foraged, gathering carrageen moss for coughs, harvested mushrooms in the fields and woods, preserved rowan berries and blackberries. It was part of life and then it became infra dig. Now we educate people on how we used to do things and how we ate before the supermarkets.”
Despite her rural coastal West Cork setting, Barnes’ profile stretches far outside the island of Ireland. Slow Food has named her as one of their Queens of the Sea. She works with American eco-travel company Bog & Thunder and, with them, recently completed a New York residency where she participated in an international panel discussion featuring “wild salmon warriors from Alaska to Ireland”. Renowned food journalist and BBC broadcaster Dan Saladino featured her work in his 2001 award-winning book Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods & Why We Need to Save Them. Profiling at-risk food and food culture around the world, Saladino makes the point that wild Atlantic salmon are “a natural barometer of the state of the Earth,” something that Barnes is acutely aware of. “Last year we smoked around 170 fish…, which was grim. The previous year, also grim, there were 248 fish bought. [That’s a big drop] from the times in the 1980s/1990s, when we’d buy around 650 fish each season.”
“We don’t know what’s around the corner. Ours is a very disturbed planet and there’s no food security any more,” points out Barnes, but her work with educating young people gives her hope for the future. “We need to pass our skills on to another generation who are interested in looking outside and engaging with the planet. Education can bring us back to where we live and an appreciation of what the planet gives to us. Don’t take it for granted,” she says. “Nature can work if we can butt out and take our greed out of the equation. Just give Mother Nature a chance, and let her sort it.”
