As anticipated, Tuesday's trick-or-treaters had little interest in fruit, less again in (boo hiss) monkey nuts. In fact I had also over-bought in the sweets department as it's only a small estate and there weren't that many trick-or-treaters. I've hidden the surplus choccy bars and chews in a kitchen press, shelled the nuts into some tupperware and stashed them on the "baking" shelf. The fruit bowl on the kitchen table is now full to near overflowing, which should be all the encouragement I need to eat more of it. Today I nixed two unappetisingly fleshy pears - ripe but juiceless. Then I ate two satsumas and an apple, well done me.
Last Halloween myself and some musician friends materialised as The Wicc to give the premiere performance (and the only one so far) of Wolf, in Old Saint Mary's Church, Clonmel, Co Tipperary. Apples were something of a theme then too. The album spins out as a kind of spectral folk tale and I wanted to use some recognisable tropes in the staging, so the whole ensemble was kitted out in red hooded cloaks and we dotted the church with baskets of Tipperary apples.
Tipperary is the apple-basket of Ireland, which is why Bulmers (Magners) has made its factory home there and every September Clonmel hosts its harvest-time Applefest. A couple of weeks ago I thought about those delicious, crunchy orbs and fancied I might get a hold of some, but I wasn't mustard keen on driving all the way to the Apple Farm in Cahir. So I looked online and saw that it was possible to order a box by courier.
When I placed my order I got an email back from Cornelius explaining that the apple boxes are only available as a side to a crate or more of fresh-pressed apple juice. I understood the reasoning - the cost of couriering a cheap and perishable commodity across county lines - but I would struggle to get through a box of apples, let alone a whole crate of juice. So I asked if the fruit might be reachable at retail anywhere in Wexford. I was told that Dunnes Stores and selected Aldis would be carrying some in time for Halloween.
I also mailed Ballycross Apple Farm in southern Wexford (near Bridgetown). They are open to visitors and host family events this time of year. But alas their apples could only be bought from the farm premises. As it happened I did buy Irish apples in the Enniscorthy Aldi and delicious they are too, though I can't be sure they came from Tipperary since the precise provenance wasn't given on the label. In the meantime though, I checked the origins of eating apples that I saw on any supermarket shelf and was maddened by the homogenous stock of Pink Lady and Gala from anywhere but Ireland - Portugal, France, even as far away as Chile.
When we were kids the family went a few times to an orchard which I think was somewhere in south-west county Dublin - a place that is probably suburban housing estates now. The deal was you took plastic bags on the way in to pick your own fruit, ate your fill while there, and then your haul was weighed and paid for on the way out. Myself and my sister would roll to the exit with belly-ache but those apples were red-green gold that was too hard to resist. And for weeks after there were homemade apple pies and occasionally fritters. My mother could cook, as can all three of us kids. We learned the base of what we know from her, and from there you can pretty much learn to make anything.
I can't be sure where the apples we had at other times came from but I'm fairly certain they weren't shipped in from mainland Europe or thousands of miles across the Atlantic from South America. I also don't think we had them year round - and that was normal. If you consider my age, the rapidity with which we've come to where we are now, with so much available at all times, is extraordinary. Less than four decades.
Even in my childhood some fruits and vegetables were imported, citrus fruits for one. Oranges were an exotic delicacy when my parents were young in the 50s and 60s - so much so that it was customary to place one in the foot of a Christmas stocking. Which I suppose is why oranges are associated with Christmas in many northern European countries. But I don't remember my mother using lemons with the abandon of most cooks today - guilty as charged, I love my lemons. In fact we only ever had the plastic squeezy-bottled Jif lemon juice to put on our pancakes, which were only ever had once-yearly, on the eponymous Tuesday in the run up to Easter.
I vaguely remember my mother discovering she could buy red peppers, which must have been some time in the late 70s/early 80s. I've no idea where she bought them but it wasn't the corner shop. And peppers were alien in our neck of the woods. I wish I'd quizzed her more about her adventurous spirit as a cook before her memory (and her taste buds) started to go. She mastered her own version of an Indian curry, a slow-cooked spicy gravy with chicken, beef or prawns (the prawns added later in the cooking). She made quiches, casseroles and Chinese-style stir-fries when other kids on the road were having butcher shop spice-burgers. Well, my friend Audrey from two-doors down was having them - on a certain day of the week, mind.
Audrey's mam Margaret was a working woman with two children and zero interest in cooking. Her husband Jerry was a working man who, like most men of his age including my father, assumed cooking to be something done by the women in one's life. So the Byrnes' dinner diet was dictated, in an organised fashion, by speed and convenience, whereby Monday was fish fingers, Tuesday was spice burgers and so on. I know for a fact that my friend's palate is as advanced as anyone's these days but when she was first offered my mother's quiche to try Carmel wasn't too thrilled with the response. I can vouch nonetheless that it was very good quiche.
At some time in the late 80s my mother learned that a Chinese shop had opened in Patrick Street and that she could get there on the bus from Crumlin. On special occasions my parents would bus to a Chinese restaurant on the Naas Road called Charlie Chang's and that may have been where her interest in Chinese cooking began. At least I think it was on the Naas Road. Can't find a single Google reference to it now, although the first Chinese restaurants in Dublin opened as early as the 1950s.
There's a nice bit of history about this on the Come Here to Me blog, which draws heavily on a study by academic and chef Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire. Máirtín is the brother of the brilliant musician Colm, with whom I have been fortunate enough to collaborate. And which, by way of random journal wandering and web-searches, goes to illustrate the villagey inter-connectivity of Ireland and its social structure. Oh the Kevin Bacon-ness of it all!
https://comeheretome.com/2012/07/25/dublins-first-chinese-restaurants-1956-mid-1960s/
Speaking of bacon, it's quite possible to locally source meat in Wexford. And strawberries and potatoes in season. Wexford is of course famous for its strawberries. Dairy too, by way of the meat products - I do like Wexford cheddar. Even the mild variety has a sweet nuttiness that is very moreish. I ordered a veg box from Regan's Farm in Dranagh, outside Enniscorthy, and on Tuesday evening drove a few miles along an up-and-down road in sight of Mount Leinster to collect it. Helen rang to arrange the pick-up and gave me an Eircode so I would know where to go: "Now that's my house, not the farm. The farm is two houses up the road. The shop is closed but we'll leave the door open so you can just go in and collect your box."
I pulled up in a puddle and stepped out, a bit unsure that I was in the right place. It was dark and raining and I was parked in front of an old cottage dwelling with no sign of life. But I could hear business going on in the back and I heard dogs barking. I found that the door of the side-building was open and, sure enough, inside there was a box of veg with my name on it. When I turned back out to the road I was greeted by two gregarious farm dogs - a collie and some class of mutt, jumping on me with their muddy paws. Lovely mucky dogs. Sign of good people. And that was a happy, if oddly hands off (and paws on), transaction completed.
I know that local provenance and seasonality are buzzwords in the professional food community right now and I won't mock it. We definitely need to scale back on food imports where we can produce it ourselves - not least because it tastes fresher and offers diversity over cherry-picked homogeneity (give me the "ugly" stuff). And we need to protect and support local producers in the marketplace. But my god Irish food was awful before we discovered "foreign" ingredients and what could be done with them.
I lolloped into Dunnes Stores in Cabinteely on my way home last night. At the fancy fish counter, beside the fillets of sea trout and salmon laid out like gauzy trollops, were bags of clams and periwinkles. I asked the price and couldn't believe that winkles were 11.99 the kilo. We used to pick them off the rocks in Howth as kids - it was a day’s excursion, then my mother would boil them up and turn them out to be “winkled” with a sewing needle and eaten. I'm not sure I'd know a periwinkle now if my life depended on it, but I'm thinking I might trek around the coast of Wexford with a sewing needle in hand and take my chances. 11.99 per kilo my arse, thinks I. And then I wonder who picked the ones on the fancy fish counter in front of me.
Ireland is no longer a "white" country. It is more ethnically diverse than it has ever been in recorded history, even taking into account the poorly recorded history of inter-ethnic contact around our trading ports. So what does "local" mean in terms of food provenance now? Or the idea that we should only use locally-sourced ingredients?
I'll just throw out an image: you are facing a bunch of families with roots in different parts of Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa, maybe with kids born and raised here - and you're telling them that they can only access food products that originate in Ireland. No spices, such as cumin - imported here since the 14th century. No soy sauce because we don't make that here. No vegetable, roots, legumes, nuts or seeds that aren't locally grown inside or out of a poly-tunnel, including okra, turmeric, galangal, cardamom, cashews, black beans, to name a few. Oh and rice - we don't produce that either, in any variety. Or zero zero flour for pasta and pizza dough, or parmesan cheese for that matter.
I imagine that message could be quite othering. Especially when you consider what was done to some of their antecedents in order to procure some of those things.
Faced with a similar scenario, I imagine hopping on the first mode of transport out of here to anywhere relatively safe with better food. But it would be a locked down world where nothing could travel (except uber-rich people, because it's unthinkable that they would abide by the rules applying to the rest of us). I'd be buggered.
Then non-white Irish, might have some solutions. They might know some shit about seeds, they might have some arcane knowledge of how to ferment soy beans grown in Ireland, for example, or how to grow rice on the ever-increasing flood plains of this island. I hope so. Otherwise we're all gonna be stuck here eating turnips. We had better let them out of Direct Provision so they can show us what’s what.
We live in a world with a fast-paced global market where whizz wangs over to Wollagong and then whooshes over to Wiesbaden all for the price of whatever is hot. That stock exchange thermometer frankly needs to fuck off. People are quite capable of making their own commercial exchanges without it.
Anyway, while I can still get my hands on it, I love a food bounty and I love to cook for people. I get it from me Ma.
Tomorrow's lunch options for the friends coming are moules (Irish mussels) and oven-baked pommes with leftover chicken gravy; (German) asaparagus risotto; spaghetti vongole con bottarga (from Sicily) or my very Irish winter veg broth with some sourdough bread on the side. I also have some cheeses that are mostly Irish but for a French Bleu D'Avergne that I just couldn't resist. Not an everyday cheese like Wexford cheddar but cheaper in the supermarket with the 2 for 3 deal than the locally made and supplied.
I might put some Tipperary apples on the side.