Breaking Eggs: Chef Cliodhna Prendergast’s Idea of Enlightening Her Kids About Kitchen Shenanigans

Breaking Eggs, a video series, is the brainchild of an Irish mother who grew up catching, shooting and hunting for wild food. She shares her delight in finding ingredients at source and teaches her children to cook through a new series of online videos.

Who is Cliodhna Prendergast?

Cliodhna Prendergast is a 39-year-old chef who has worked in top kitchens – from Jacob’s Ladder, where she trained, to Ballymaloe, Newport Lodge and for many years, the exquisite Delphi Lodge where Prince Charles once holidayed. 

“After college, I wanted to open a cafe, so my mother insisted that I learn to cook and I went to work in Jacob’s Ladder in Dublin, with Adrian Roche, who once worked in the family hotel and now happens to be my brother, Gavin Prendergast’s partner in his business, Urban Picnic.”

What is Breaking Eggs?

The video series feature Prendergast’s children Jake (9), Iseult (6) and Milo (4).

“You’ll see us sourcing the food on the farm, going fishing, foraging, meeting cheese producers or going to the market and connecting the food to simple family meals,” says Prendergast.

How did Breaking Eggs come into the act?

After her three children came along, she wanted to find a new career path that kept her in the kitchen, also got her out of the house, and involved her own children. Enter Breaking Eggs, the 24-part video series.

“Breaking Eggs is about getting children tactile with food; trying to foster an instinctive natural awareness of food. It’s not going to make every child eat every vegetable,” says the creator of this series, which is for parents and children to use together.

Why such an intimate liaison with homegrown foods?

“There is something about spending time on common ground with children – they feel it’s a shared experience as much as you do,” says Prendergast, who grew up in a family-run hotel in Connemara where a succession of “girl chefs” took her under their wings. At the age of 11, she was making the hotel’s ice cream and while studying psychology and sociology, she worked in a cafe and made their tarts for “going-out money”.

 When it came to her cooking style, Prendergast was swayed by her own childhood where local ingredients were brought to the table. Her childhood was spent picking wild mushrooms and nettles for the hotel chefs, helping with the kitchen garden and the sea trout fishery, going to Gowla River to fish for sea trout, harvesting scallops from the sea, catching mackerel and learning to prepare the family’s own Connemara lamb.

“In the winter, we used to have shooting groups to rough-shoot woodcock and snipe, and then the game would come in – venison as well, all indigenous. They might go out with dogs and come back with none or five – it was not a bloodfest, but we would have to pluck them and prepare them.”

This relationship with food is one that the millennial generation has little idea of, she reflects. But aren’t kids a bit sensitive towards farm animals (courtesy Old McDonald)? So how do the children handle the reality that animals are killed to feed them?

“I really feel that if you tell them from the beginning, they don’t seem to have a problem at all with it. We have pigs, hens – we will name the mummy pig but not the piglets because the children know they will be eating them at some point. Those animals wouldn’t be here if we weren’t eating them, and that’s what they are raised for.”

“The kids got such a kick out of those producer parts of the program – visiting Uncle Matt’s Farm in Oughterard, run by Catriona and Padraig Walshe, and baking beetroot brownies, and making the best ever tomato sauce. It was heartening to hear my son Jake say how much he enjoyed meeting the lovely people and to see their passion for what they do – their devotion to the ground that they grow on is amazing.”

Take a look at this one about Mushroom Hunting: