At the Edge of Ireland Page 12

  “OH—WE’VE BEEN DOING all that gathering for generations,” said eighty-six-year-old Nellie O’Connolly in a dismissive tone.

  I met her by chance in the Hawthorn Bar in Glengarriff on a rainy day when I’d planned to visit the Garinish Island—Beara’s sumptuous Italian gardens—but didn’t.

  “In the bad times—and they were mostly bad times—you had to dig deep in the hedgerows and field edgings t’get the stuff y’needed. Meat was very rare—maybe a bit once a week if you were lucky. Mor’n likely, once a month. And it was always just the end bits—pigs’ ears, snouts, tails…oh! And those lovely crúibíní. Always the crúibíní—the trotters. Hind ones were best—they had more fat and meat. Nice and salted too, to bring out the flavor. Then y’simmered them up in a big pot with some herbs and spices—allspice was very popular—and when they started to fall apart you could begin nibbling and sucking on ’em—Oh, so so good they were! Or you could do ’em the ‘Frenchie’ way by splittin’ ’em after cookin’, fryin’ ’em up covered in bread crumbs, and served ’em with a mustard, brown sugar, and vinegar sauce. Oh—and a whiskey or two. Always a nice warm whiskey to wash all the lovely stuff down. Oh, Lord! All Hail Mother of Jesus! I can taste ’em like it was yest’d’y. Y’can keep all y’ fancy joints and chops. Give me a plate of hot crúibíní an’ that’s all I need for the day…or forever!”

  “You’re making me very hungry,” I said.

  Nellie laughed. Her gypsylike, sun-scorched, very wrinkled face broke into a wide smile. Her eyes were witchy with icicle glitters—but not unfriendly. I had no idea who she was or where she lived. I suppose I should have dug a little deeper, but I felt it didn’t really matter. When you’re talking food—food is really all that counts. And she did that with a captivating enthusiasm, rubbing her wrinkled hands together furiously as she spoke.

  “The thing that fascinates me is how much a whole country survived mainly on praties—potatoes. From what I’ve read, you had to send most of your meat—your beautiful grass-fed beef and lamb—off to England to make enough to live on here. It sounded like potatoes were really all you had left.”

  “Well,” said Nellie with a sad smile, “that’s true. But we’re a canny lot, y’know. Leastways we can be when we have to be, and we certainly got pretty nifty with the old potato. Many times that’s about all we had to eat. You’re right. ‘Specially during the Troubles with the British from around 1914 to 1921. Real difficult times, those were. When y’think that eatin’ up to five pounds o’ potatoes a day each, if you were lucky—even y’r typical poor cottie and all those other landless laborers—y’had to do something a bit extra with ’em. Most of it was pretty basic. Boil ’em up and serve ’em with anlann—a buttermilk dip—or onions and a bit of mustard. Some added a meat bone or a few strips of salted herring to the pot to give a bit of flavor. It was strange, though. A lot thought fish—’specially herring—was rubbish food. They called it ‘paupers’ porridge,’ which is a bit daft when y’think how poor they were themselves! If they’d have liked fish a bit more, they might have got through the great famines of the mid-1800s. Much better than dying by the hundreds of thousands from starvation. Anyhow, where was I? Oh yeah, so—when all the potatoes were cooked, you’d pick one out of the sciob, a basket made of sally saplings—some people even grew an extra-long thumbnail to use as a kind of fork. And then you’d peel it as fast as you could so you could grab another one and then you’d dip it in the mix. And you’d go like the devil. Otherwise you’d lose your share. We’d not s’ much in the way of manners in those days, I’m thinkin’!”

  “But weren’t there all kinds of other ways of serving the potatoes? I’d tried something called colcannon in Dublin. It was potatoes and cabbage mixed. A bit like England’s bubble and squeak but not fried. Just lovely and creamy…”

  “If it was in Dublin, they usually add some onions and even boiled parsnips or turnips—but you know what the secret is to really enjoy it? When you cream and fluff your potatoes, you use boiling milk before you mash them. Then you add the cabbage cooked down to a soft mush. Then you make a hollow in a big spoonful of colcannon on y’plate and pour in some melted butter and then spoon up the potatoes and butter together…just gorgeous.” Her wrinkled fingers were flailing away now.

  “My hunger is really getting worse.”

  “Y’wanna hear a song? Something my mother used to sing when she served colcannon?” Nellie didn’t wait for a response. She just sang this little ditty softly and slightly off-key. I was utterly charmed:

  “Now did you ever spoon colcannon

  Made with yellow cream

  With kale and praties blended

  Like a picture in a dream?

  And did you scoop that hole on top

  To hold that melting lake

  Of our clover-flavored butter

  Which dear mother used to make.”

  “Beautiful!” I gushed.

  But Nellie ignored the compliment. She was deep into potato lore. “’Course, colcannon’s pretty easy. But it was always fun serving it around Halloween. You hid a ring and a thimble inside. The one who got the ring was ripe for marriage, but the poor girl with the thimble would be a spinster forever. Although, to be honest—from what I’ve seen of Irish marriages, she most likely was the luckier one of the two!”

  Nellie chuckled at her own joke, then coughed and continued. “Bruisy is a bit stronger as a potato dish because you’re adding nettles. They have to be young shoots and well cooked to kill the sting. And lots of white pepper. They said it was a very healthy dish because of all the iron. I’ve tasted some done with spinach, but it’s not as good. And then there’s champ—a bit like colcannon and another popular dish at Halloween. You’re supposed to leave bowls of it out for the fairies—usually under hawthorns or whitethorn trees, the favorite trees of fairies. You could add various things to be fluffed up into the potatoes—I use chives, peas, and browned chopped-up onions—and again, you put that hole in the middle with the melted butter. The secret was not so much in the recipe but in the tasting. You could add in whatever you wanted, so long as it tasted good. Like that old saying ‘To cook without tasting is like painting a picture with closed eyes!’”

  Nellie O’Connolly

  “And what about Irish potato cakes…?”

  “Oh—y’mean the boxty—the pan boxty. Well, they’re pretty obvious but—if you add some nice fresh herbs to the potato mash and let it cook in butter real slow for up to half an hour, it’s beautiful. My dad used to like boxty big—covering the whole pan and about an inch thick and with a real beautiful crisp golden crust. And then he’d have it brought to the table to ‘cut farls with a fack.’ A farl is a slice and a fack is a special spade they used to use to cultivate the raised potato beds—the ‘lazy beds’—on the rocky land. They’d be raised up to make very fertile strips of soil with manure from the pigs and cows, and seaweed if you lived near the coast. He obviously didn’t use his fack for the boxty—it was five feet long! He used a sharp knife and—oh, it tasted so good! And so were all the other potato dishes too—all wonderful stuff—poundies, cally, pandy, lutoga, strand, stovies, fadge, stampee. And then you had all the soda breads—not just your basic one with plain flour, salt, bicarb, and buttermilk. That was easy. But you had to watch your bicarb. Too much could make it what we used to call ‘mouth-pucker bread.’ Ugh! Not nice. But other types were your goaties made with goat milk, small gátarí griddle cakes, yellow buck, bocaire, oat bread with lots of rough-cut oats, Kerry treacle bread—my mother was one of the best for this one—potato bread, seedy bread, and my favorite of all—spotted dog. That’s a soda bread with raisins and, if you could get it, some molasses or black treacle. Oh Lord, heaven love us, now I’m getting hungry m’self, too!”

  “Nellie, you’re a gem. A treasure trove. You should be running your own restaurant…!”

  She laughed—a deep, rumbling belly laugh that set all her wrinkles wobbling and her eyes gleaming. “Oh—I would have l
oved but…well, in our family…the whole idea of eating for pleasure was considered almost sinful. ‘You should never come to the table with gratifying your stomach or your taste buds in mind,’ m’ dad used to say. Almost a mortal sin, it was!”

  “But so much of the folklore—your Irish folklore—seems to involve food and feasting. In the long poems like The Cattle Raid at Cooley and that great Irish warrior—Finn MacCool. Didn’t he celebrate the salmon, claiming he gained all his poetic intuition, his imbas, from eating the great salmon of life—bradán beatha—something like that anyway…”

  Nellie looked at me and gave me a coyish grin—which can’t be easy for a woman of eighty-six with a very weathered, wrinkled face. “Aha—a reader too! Not just another hungry blow-in!”

  I laughed. “Well—I’m definitely a blow-in and I’m certainly hungry…so listen, why not join me for a snack or something and you can give me a few more recipe ideas while we try to get rid of this emptiness in our midriffs!”

  Nellie’s grin became even more coy (and her finger rubbing even more enthusiastic), and off we went together—two new foodie friends—down the street to a restaurant she said had “the best Irish stew this side of Bantry—and a pretty good batter pudding too…”

  “What’s batter pudding?”

  Nellie laughed. “It’s like the first thing they try to feed you when you’re born and the last thing they try to stuff down y’when you’re dyin’! It’s the same thing as what you’d maybe call Yorkshire pudding—only flatter and floppier!”

  Something with the thwack of a virtual mallet whacked the side of my head. A mental breathrough was occurring. A quandary—decades old—suddenly seemed to be resolving itself.

  “So…” I said to Nellie, “the Irish equivalent of Yorkshire pudding is…batter pudding?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “One’s a bit flatter than the other, but they’re made with the same things.”

  I stopped suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk. Maybe I was mumbling something. Nellie certainly seemed a little perplexed. But in fact I was offering a sincere apology to my grandmother. On my father’s side. The one with the Irish roots, whose tentacling complexities we are tracing with increasing expertise and flair for genealogical exactitude and technique. In fact, it’s an apology about that. About expertise and flair for technique. And about Yorkshire puddings too.

  Now, for those unfortunate enough not to be born and raised in Yorkshire, England, the pudding produced there, when done according to the very rigid and meticulous rules, is a soufflé-like masterwork of crisp cumulus-ballooned golden batter with just the suggestion of a softer, more meltingly textured interior. The ingredients could not be more simple and classic—equal portions of flour and whole milk, two or three eggs, and seasoning (some show off by adding a little sage or thyme for pungency), and the mix left to rest and chill in the fridge for a couple of hours. Then oil (preferably beef dripping) is heated in a baking pan to smoking point in the oven, and as the blue smoke roils out of the pan, the fridge-chilled batter is thrown in with gay abandon. A sudden signature snap of oil and batter is indicative of a perfect meld—and then the pan is returned for baking at 450 degrees for half an hour or so until gorgeously golden bronze-brown globes arise and beckon the avaricious palate.

  Now that is my mother’s (and my own) Yorkshire pudding—to be enjoyed either as an appetizer with thick beef stock gravy or as an accompaniment to the traditional Sunday standing rib roast. (My mother’s mother occasionally served it as dessert with trifle or treacle—a very odd habit.)

  Unfortunately we often had to endure what I decided was a far inferior concoction at my father’s mother’s house when we would make our monthly trek for Sunday lunch. It was the same lunch every time—a small beef brisket tied tightly with twine and cooked to stringy gray dryness with vegetables boiled to a tasteless mush (I think she believed anything from the earth was bound to contain impurities and thus needed ritual decimation in cauldrons of boiling water or ovens set at about-to-melt levels)—and of course her so-called Yorkshire pudding.

  Only this was no Yorkshire pudding. It was more like a thick, gooey pancake, a half-inch slab of barely baked dough with just the slightest pucker of a puffed edge along the rim of the baking tin. The only way to digest it was to slice your square into the smallest strips and try to swallow each with a minimum of chewing lest your mouth become a mess of gooey flour paste.

  So why the apology, you might ask?

  Well—I had subsequently learned, thanks to Nellie’s offhand remark and years after my poor grandmother’s demise, that I may have misjudged her doubtless well-intentioned efforts because, according to a most authoritative cookbook authored by one of the doyennes of Irish cuisine, there is indeed a dish here known as “batter pudding” using a similar ratio and range of ingredients as the true Yorkshire pudding. And my grandmother’s creation was apparently a pretty accurate interpretation of it, insofar as it did not require smoking oil (lukewarm is fine) and the batter was meant to be flat and un-souffléed and “moist” and barely brown. And while I still find it hard to comprehend such a terrible misuse of a perfectly fine batter when the creation of a true Yorkshire pudding requires so little extra effort—I do ask forgiveness, dear Gran, for my former ignorance and arrogance. You were merely following a time-honored Irish recipe and—while ghastly—it was doubtless a fine interpretation of your odd ethnic rules! (Oh, and I love you too…)

  So there I was slap bang in the middle of the sidewalk, grinning and chuckling away to myself, and poor old Nellie looking at me in a most peculiar way…

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Ah—Nellie. Sorry. It was just…well, you helped resolve something that’s been confusing me for decades…”

  “Well, that’s nice. Now d’y’think we could move on for that snack. Don’t know about you but I could eat a nice fat chunk of batter pudding with some thick beef gravy…”

  “Absolutely!” I said. “And I don’t care how flat it is…”

  Nellie smiled quizzically and shook her head, obviously unsure as to the mental stability of her newfound foodie friend.

  10

  Padraig O’Reagan

  Ireland Then and Now

  “IS IT THAT CRAZY TOUCAN THAT’S wobblin’ or is it me?! For more’n fifty years now I’ve seen that stupid Guinness toucan ad and its bit o’ gimcrack rhymin’ nonsense—blah, blah, blah, blah…‘like a toucan can.’ Never understood it. Fifty years! How the hell does it go?…If he can say as you can, Guinness is good for you. How grand to be a Toucan—just think what Toucan do! Jeez, it’s enough to drive a man to drink which, in my case, is a bit redundant, as I’m up to m’eyeballs in the black stuff as it is and drownin’ the days away in thick, sweet darkness. It’s jes’ like m’mother said when I was younger. God rest her safe with Holy Mary, Mother of Jesus, Saint of all Saints—she said: ‘When the drink is taken and the drop is in, all the sense goes out.’ But I said back, ‘Ah yes—but youth sheds many a skin, so don’t worry th’self, Mother, I’ll grow up one day.’”

  Long pause while Padraig rapidly drains the last of his glass down his elegant, Adam’s apple–bobbing throat. Elegant may be an odd word to associate with throats, but his whole appearance and demeanor was a kind of rough-hewed elegance complete with wobbly wattles and just a hint of bulldog jowls. Even his eyes—a hazy green like crushed emeralds—reminded me of a sort of Oscar Wilde character with more masculine Orson Welles overtones until he opened his mouth and, in a voice deeper than a Pennsylvania coal mine, he descended into street lingo with all the flair of Brendan Behan on a binge or Dylan Thomas on a downer—and with a souffléd ego to boot.

  Padraig O’Reagan

  We had met by chance in this small, literary-flavored pub in Kenmare complete with yellow-smoke-stained ceiling and booths separated by etched glass screens. Very Irish in a way that so many “Irish” pub chains in the USA try to be. And invariably fail dismally.

  “You’ll be havin’ ano
ther one?” I asked, knowing well what the answer would be.

  “Now tha’s an eejit of a question if ever I heard one. Y’think I’m here just to display my erudite wisdom and counsel and fine eloquent volubilities t’the likes of you when I could be…”

  A pause. “Could be what?” I asked.

  A brilliant smile and a hoarse, smoky guffaw: “Anyway, what was I on about. What the bejeez was I…?” His right hand fluttered over the table like a one-winged butterfly.

  “Fifty years—you were thinking back fifty years.”

  “Ah, that I was. An’ what an epic time…Ah mean, can y’believe, fifty years. I been through the lot of it—the highs, the lows, and all the boggy bits of our folly-filled land in between. What our fine poet Louis MacNeice calls ‘the sob-stuff and swagger.’ Jeez! We’re such an arrogant, self-centered bunch. The Jews have got nothin’ on us, ah tell ’e. We’re the chosen people or so’s you’d damn well think. Always assuming the world around cares a tinker’s ass for all our horrors and terrors and murderin’s and bombin’s and lost battles that we sing about so proudly. Y’d think we’d won the stuffin’ lot of ’em instead of being beaten into the bogs and pulped into purgatory, as we usually were most time if we ever so much as lifted up our voices in protest!”

  Padraig had a distinctly pronounced nose with wide hairy nostrils and a tendency to drip. Nothing overexcessive—just the occasional transluscent globule that he removed delicately with a neatly pressed handkerchief hidden in his left hand.

  “True—but another one of your famous writers, William Trevor, claims that since Ireland joined the EU in 1973, the country’s changed more than any other country he knows in the world.”

  “Ah, my—so you’re one of those Celtic Tiger converts. I can see that. Y’thinkin’ it’s all mountains o’ money, megamartinis, mugs of Moët, and the gleam and shimmer of all those big fat Mercedeses? Y’thinkin’ the bogmen and the culchies and the Gaeltacht Irish speakers are all a thing of our evil, poverty-laced past. Y’thinkin’ that Sam Beckett’s endless proclamations ’bout the pointlessness of existence have all been erased by piles of gleamin’ euros or that Synge’s Playboy of the Western World couldn’t have his way anymore today with the fair farm colleens of County Mayo because they’re all reading borderline kitsch Vogue and Cosmo now and pickin’ up college degrees like beer mats on a Dublin pub floor!”