There is a rule in shopkeeping, which says that if you only stock stuff you like, and stuff you like to sell, then you will go bust, and you will go bust quickly.
Ruth Healy doesn't believe in that rule. URRU, her store on McSwiney Quay in Bandon, West Cork, sells the stuff Ms Healy likes, and likes to sell. The store is one of the most masterly examples of what we call “The Edit”, that magical process where the owner weeds out anything that doesn't fit the picture.
It's like a painter working on a canvas: nothing extraneous may be included, nothing superfluous must be allowed intrude into the exercise of capturing and evoking an aesthetic. And that, really, is the secret of URRU. It isn't truly a store, it isn't really a shop. It's an aesthetic, both in how it greets you and accommodates you, and in what you find when you get there. It's home. The ideal home.
Ms Healy learnt this secret – the aesthetic of home, and of home cooking – in a house where the cooking was bumper: “We had traditional desserts nearly every day of the week – rice pudding, queen of puddings, apple & custard, apple tart... and we had scones and freshly squeezed orange juice made every day before school in a family of 8 children!”
Later, Darina Allen showed her how to capture “a culinary lifestyle that really is possible for anyone at their own level and in their own way at home if you have the will”. Like Mrs Allen, Ruth Healy's curiosity never wanes, she is always editing the food world around her, so just give her something a bit daft, like The Observer's “50 Best Cookery Books”, and she will construct a masterly installation with the books, something to pique your interest, something to make you think, something to make you admire the way in which she has made something beautiful, all made out of a silly wee idea.
She studied in DCU, in Tokyo at Sophia University, before post-grad work at UCC. She thinks sideways, like when she talks about admiring the way in which people in New Zealand have created “understated innovation and edge in a natural, outdoor, traditional agricultural environment”. Think about it: isn't that just what Ruth Healy has done with URRU? Understated innovation and edge, opening out from the traditions of her own agricultural environment. Sometimes you just have to cross the world to frame the questions, and get the answers.