When I moved to a small village in the Southwest of Ireland with my Liverpool-born Irish husband John, I longed for the luscious American-style chocolate sauces I'd grown up with in Boston. Leafing through my mother’s old sixties cookbook, I found the recipe - but it called for corn syrup, an ingredient that couldn’t be found at my local Supervalu. I made do without the syrup, but the sauce just wasn’t the same. Then I discovered golden syrup and experimented with that as a substitute - problem solved!

One August evening two years ago, John asked why I didn’t just buy the sauce - my answer was the beginning of East of Boston Foods: 'because you can’t buy it - anywhere'.

John thought we might have something here, and we began to think about how we might make a larger batch and market the sauce. I’d just read that a new farmers market had opened in Douglas so I stopped in to have a look and enquire about the possibility of getting a stand. A lady selling homemade cakes informed me that there was a waiting list of 17 people. ‘Who do I speak to?’ I persisted. Rose was in charge, and confirmed that their was indeed a waiting list. ‘What do you make?’ she enquired. ‘Dessert sauces - chocolate, toffee and raspberry‘. ‘Now that’s something different’, she replied, rather intrigued. That was my first clue that we might have stumbled upon a gap in the market. Rose and I exchanged phone numbers and I heard no more. Then on a Thursday evening in November, Rose rang to say that their was a stall available until May, as the berry-seller was off for the winter. ‘Can you come this Saturday?’. ‘Not this Saturday, but we’ll be delighted to start next Saturday.’ What Rose didn’t know was that I was buying time - I’d never made toffee or raspberry sauce before!

Out came the old sixties cookbook - the first recipe I tried was an utter disaster, but the second, once again substituting that lovely golden syrup along with fresh butter, brown sugar and an all-important pinch of salt, was the business. As for the raspberry sauce, well, why try to improve on nature? John worked away at sieving mounds of raspberries, we added a little sugar, and there it was, gorgeous.

John and I both came from the world of art and design, so we knew that packaging was all-important. But sourcing packaging on a small scale is next to impossible, as anyone starting up in the food business can tell you. Glass jars were out - the only company in Ireland that sells jars is in Dublin and they won’t deliver less than a pallet: 2000 jars. Plastic cartons weren’t much easier to source, as they seemed to only be sold in boxes of 1,500. I finally found plain white ‘cottage cheese’ type plastic cartons at the local cash & carry. John came up with a simple but snazzy logo for the labels, we printed them on the inkjet and applied them to the cartons.

Saturday 9AM came - we dragged along the garden table and umbrella, set up our display with two little (borrowed) fondue pots to warm the chocolate and toffee sauces - we were open for business. We stood in the cold for a good hour before anyone showed the least interest - they were all passing us by to head for the wild smoked salmon stand next to us or the Arbutus breads across the way. ‘Too early for sweets’, they’d say, wrinkling their noses. Then, as 11AM approached, they began to stop and look. And taste. And buy. And buy they did! Sometimes, when they couldn’t decide which sauce they like best, they’d buy two.

Our customers returned week after week. The Arbutus bread boy would stop by every morning to drizzle some chocolate or raspberry sauce on his crusty baguette for breakfast. Little children, just head-height to the fondue pots, would peer over longingly, and we’d give them a taste. Then they’d go and find their mothers and drag them over to buy. We were delighted that the mothers didn’t seem to need too much prodding and seemed as enticed as the kids!
We had a business.

And the growing business needed a name. Late one evening the phone rang. It was my mother. 'You're so far away', she said. John replied, '3000 miles east of Boston..'. He typed out the name, large size, and asked me to take a look. I loved it! East of Boston Foods was born.

Our next step was a visit to West Cork Leader in Clonakilty, the organisation behind the Fuchsia Brand initiative that represents many of West Cork’s best specialty food producers. We had in mind simply discussing getting into more farmers markets, but they immediately saw, despite the ‘cottage cheese’ cartons, that this was a specialty food retail product. Their enthusiasm and encouragement spurred us on to the next level, and before long we had done our HAACP (food production hygiene) training, had a pallet of 2000 glass jars sitting in the kitchen where the dining table had been, and were selling in to speciality shops around the country.

Now, less than a year after beginning larger-scale factory production, our Raspberry Rapture sauce has won a Gold Medal at the Great Taste Awards, and our other three sauces have each won Bronze.

I am not a professional chef, I just enjoy good food. My cooking style is not about complicated recipes and long lists of ingredients, but quick and simple cooking that depends on the intensity of the natural flavours of foods. Not too sweet, not too rich, just exquisite flavours, fragrances and textures.

East of Boston dessert sauces were born of this predilection, and John and I are delighted that lots of other people seem to be enjoying them, too.

Barbara O’Mahony
Proprietor
East of Boston Foods.