When Lilly Higgins writes about her blog readers, or her siblings, or her baby boys, her language drops into that delicious diminutive: ye.
“Ye are truly amazing and I love ye both”
“This all started with my blog and I hope ye continue with me on this culinary journey”
“Ye are all so good to listen to me chatting about recipes on Skype or at the kitchen table...’
You read this stuff, and your heart melts. You go “awhh...”, and you recognise that Irish food has fashioned a precious asset: the person who can perform without a jot of self-consciousness. The country girl without cynicism.
How did she get to be so lacking in the self-consciousness that defines the Facebook generation? We hazard the guess that the five other sisters in the Higgins family helped, and maybe the presence of the token boy. And, hey, sister Maeve is a comedienne, so the Higgins mavens are good at spotting the flotsam from the jetsam. Why say something straight when you can crack a joke?
She earned a degree in design at CIT, which accounts for her savvy photography, but then hewed sideways into food, taking the 12-week course in Ballymaloe in 2007, and teaching there afterwards. Then it all gets dreamlike: she starts to blog in 2010, and Gill & MacMillan ask her to make her debut cookery book. She operates the pop-up restaurant, “The Loaves and Fishes Supperclub” in a converted church in Dublin, helped out by her sisters, and runs it for a year. The Sunday Business Post knocks on her door, along with a bunch of magazines and RTE television. There is another excellent book “Lilly Higgins' Dream Deli.”
By the time it's 2014, there is a weekly cookery column in The Irish Times, with an accompanying video that reveals that she is a natural performer, precisely because she isn't at all self-conscious: here we are in my kitchen in Cobh and I want to make something lovely for ye... And lovely food is what she does: smart, tasty, unpretentious. You want to eat it, all of it.
We suspect Ms Higgins has actually only just started. And ye are all going to have to work hard to keep up with her.