He has that sort of face, Frank Hederman has, a Dr Mesmer face. You can see why photographers are drawn to it, for there is something ancient about that look, the way it looks not so much at you, as through you.
If you saw the face in a painting by Rembrandt – the famous self-portrait of 1629, perhaps, or one of the characters in “The Night Watch” – then it would seem right: it would fit, it wouldn't be incongruous. Rembrandt would spend an age getting the eyes right, tousling the hair, getting the gaze just not-quite direct, leaving everything slightly puzzling.
There is a photograph of Frank Hederman in Colman Andrews' book, “The County Cooking of Ireland”, taken by Christopher Hirsheimer. The photograph is slightly and artfully fugged by smoke, but the smoke isn't the point of the shot: the ancient nature of the face is the point, the ancient mien, the timeless look in the eyes. He looks like he is just about to set off for the Antarctic with Tom Crean. Or to be painted by Rembrandt. Or just heading off to work in the smokehouse.
We have described Hederman as “The Mozart of smoke”, for his culinary signature is lithe, impish, unpredictable, wildly creative. His favoured wood for smoking fish is beech, not oak. The great naturalist, Richard Mabey, writes that the beech has an “intriguing eccentricity... They don't conform to the image of the 'good' tree”. That wildness, that rascal nature, surely suits Hederman's approach: he doesn't want a blanket of smoke on his fish: he wants a suspicion of smoke, a conspiracy of its elements, its ethereality.
He is a child of the 60's – just – and credits Myrtle Allen as the primary influence on his work. But whilst he may have adopted Allen's vision and practicality, he quickly adopted it to his own stride, for his culinary aesthetic is all and entirely his own: he has a poet's judgement, and judgement is all.