She's out there, is Birgitta Curtin. There is wildness about her, a sense of limitless youth, all allied to a work ethic that never loses its focus.
She is the flip to the cliché that sees Swedes all supping from a tortured Bergmanish-Calvinistic cup. Instead, she is the Sweden that made Robyn, or The Cardigans, the cut of cloth that fashioned the supreme elegance and self-control of the young Bjorn Borg, or the brilliance of Abba, or the skills of Liv Ullmann. She sees through a glass, brightly.
The wildness is also there in her understanding of wild things, to which she brings a forensic exactitude and appreciation, a clarity of purpose. Talking about food, she will use a term like “gathering”: you could drop her into a forest and she would eat well. She knows stuff, stuff you wish you knew, like how to make candles, how to use what is all around you.
She's a player, and always has been, though being tucked away in a wee town like Lisdoonvarna in County Clare has maybe slowed appreciation of her gifts. She established the Burren Smokehouse in 1989, which was when we first met the handsome and hard-working twenty-something blonde, bringing to it what she learnt from her parents on their farm in Sweden: "enjoy freshly and preserve cleverly!”
That exclamation mark gives her away; her nature is studded with exclamation marks, a true child of the 60's, one of those people who sees the dynamic in food, the dynamic possibilities, and so the success of the Burren Smokehouse has never been in doubt.