I have just finished devouring Julie Powell’s book; Julie and Julia. I managed to read it in 24 hours, virtually in one sitting.
How could I not be totally taken over by a book which combines a passion for cooking with one for blogging.
Briefly, and do read it to discover much more, the book describes how a young New York woman decides to cook her way through Julia Child’s 1961 cook book; Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
She does this over a year and blogs about it as she goes.
Her final dish, her Piece de Resistance, is Pate de Canard en Croute, or boned and stuffed duck cooked in pastry.

This is the dish that brings me to the Miss Mc Coys.

In the seventies when Sile and I came back from England we settled in Kilkenny with a vague idea of opening a restaurant there.
While we looked about for a suitable premises, and to keep the wolf from the door I decided to do a little outside catering.
This consisted mainly of making Pate and Lasagne for people but occasionally I got asked to something a little more up-market.
It was while doing some food for a party at the Smithwicks house, the same family who brewed the beer, that I first heard of the Mc Coys.
They were a pair of fairly impoverished Protestant sisters who had at some stage in the distant past run a café in Waterford but for the last fifty odd years had been running an outside catering business, often doing weddings in marquees for the gentry in the South East. Their skill in cooking was legendary as was the length of time they had been practising their skills in the area.
They had , so the story went, in recent years catered for weddings where the bride was a grand-daughter of a wedding they had catered for previously.
They lived in Annstown in Waterford on a small farm by the sea, which they farmed industriously.
One woman told me that on one occasion when the sisters were standing behind a beautiful starched linen clothed table, groaning with a wedding buffet, she had glanced behind the cloth to see that one of the sisters was still wearing her manure spattered wellies.
On another occasion they were spotted carting a huge monkfish ( the most terrifying thing to see when it still has its cats head on its slender tail) into the local fishmongers to sell.
Apparently they had caught it while fishing off Annstown that morning.
They were a pair of feisty old ladies.
We left Kilkenny in 1979 and I went to work with George Gossip in his old family home in Waterford which he had turned into a restaurant called Ballinakill House.
One of the dishes which I had on the menu there was the Pate de Canard en Croute which I had stolen directly from Julia Child’s book.
This I served as a cold starter with a little orange salad.
One night George came into the kitchen to tell me that one of the Miss Mc Coys was in the restaurant and would like to talk to me, she wanted to know how I boned the duck for the pate.
Rather flushed with pride I went to boast of my skills to the famous Miss Mc Coy.
Now as anyone who reads Julie Powell’s book will find out it is no mean feat to bone a duck.
It involves making an incision all along the backbone and peeling the intact flesh and skin back from the bones until one is left with something not unlike a discarded and empty baby-gro.
I went out to Miss Mc Coys table and proceeded to tell her how this was done.
She politely waited until I was finished, then told me that that wasn’t the way she used to bone a duck.
She used, it turned out not to make any incision but to leave the skin intact.
She used to put her hand,(“There are advantages in having small hands “ she told me.)into the duck’s inside through the hole made to clean out its innards.
There, armed with a small sharp knife, she would scrape all the bones free of flesh, break them (there are advantages in having strong hands too!) and remove them through the same orifice.
This was not just skill, this was ingenuity of the highest order.
I retired, humbled, to the kitchen.