Today I am 60, ( and a grandfather to boot!) Dear God, I wonder does this mean I am going to have to start to act like a grown up?

One of the great joys of quitting restaurant work was knowing that I will no longer have to cook steaks to the specific desires of the Irish customer.

When I opened the restaurant first I attempted to avoid steaks altogether but very soon discovered that that was economic suicide as at least half of the population of Ireland (the men) had decided that it was to be percieved as certainly effeminate if not downright screaming queenly to have anything other than steak when they dined out.

Interestingly this rule did not apply when they dined with their wives when they would happily go for lamb or (the very brave) even fish.
(I will omit entirely the culinary disadvantaged men who, when confronted with the horrors of a menu would plead to their wives-“Would I like that dear”)

The male bonding steak was also interesting in that degrees of feminity could be put on to the sliding scale which allied with doneness.
Strangely in Irish culture the man who ate the rare steak was not reckoned to be the most butch, no, the macho man in Ireland would want his piece of cow “cremated”.

Picture then a table of 10 or 12 men dining out together-a quite normal circumstance.
That the order will be nearly all steaks is assumed but then comes the variations.
These are some I have been asked for over the years;
Rare in the middle but well done on the outside.

Very well done but still moist. (a impossibility)

Blue but still hot in the centre. (another oxymoron)

Between medium rare and medium, but more medium than medium rare.

And hundereds of versions of betweens in the same vein.

I remember once being with a non French speaking friend in a smart Michelin starred restaurant in Burgundy.
He decided to go for the steak and asked me to ask for it to be “between medium well and well done”.
I relayed this to the waiter.
He replied (in impeccible French) “Here we cook steaks; Bleu, Sangnant, A Point and Bien Cuit, no other way”

How I wish I had had the courage to instruct my waiting staff so in Ireland.

All this was brought back to mind by a quotation from the previously mentioned (and hilarious) Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations which I am devouring at the moment.
This particular moment came from the lips of Niles Crane , Frasier’s fastidious brother in the eponymous series.

Niles decides to order steak in a restaurant:

“I’d like a petite filet mignon, very lean, not so lean that it lacks flavour, but not so fat that it leaves drippings on the plate, but I dont want it cooked, just lightly seared on either side, pink in the middle, not a true pink but not a mauve either, something in between, bearing in mind the slightest error either way and it is ruined.”

The annual racing festival in Cheltenham always figured very highly in my parents life and they went there most years.
Almost inevitably it coincided with my birthday so I have fond memories of, on the times when they had done well, doing even better than normal for presents when they returned.

Despite my parents love of the turf it has always left me a bit cold but it was the Cheltenham Gold Cup which gave me my best racing moment.

In 1996 , still very much a restaurateur, I was given a tip for The Gold Cup in Cheltenham.
The tip, for a horse called Imperial Call, came directly from the mouth of the horse itself.
For once I decided to throw caution to the winds and put £25 on it.

Now my milkman, who was known as Billy The Milk, until he took his wife to Paris for the weekend and since had been called Guillaume Le Lait, was, unlike me, a definite punter.

On the morning of the race Guillaume arrived with the milk and I told him of my tip.
His face fell.
Apparently he had been put on a betting ration by his wife and his entire budget for Cheltenham had already been blown.

Of course Imperial Call (with a not related jockey called O’ Dwyer on top) won the Gold Cup.
I think I made about £200 but I rather dreaded meeting Guillaume in the morning.

I needen’t have worried.

Guillaume arrived beaming at the day after and I was hugged.

“God Bless you Martin Dwyer !” he said.

Apparently he was so impressed with getting a tip from me, and it’s provinance that he had gone and put his wife’s housekeeping money on the nose of Imperial Call.
If the horse had lost he would certainly been divorced.
As it was he had made about a thousand pounds and covered all his other losses in Cheltenham.

Without a doubt my best racing moment.

I got an early birthday present of a marvellous book on photography by Ian Jeffrey ; How to Read a Photograph and in it is this picture taken in Paris in the 1920’s by Gremaine Krull.
Called La Marchand de Frites (The Chip Seller) it shows this woman tending a wonderfully bockety deepfat fryer on a street.
I don’t think health and safety would much like the way the chimneys are held up, over their flame boilers, by wire.
The thing that gives it special resonance for me is it proves that the strange combination of Mussels and Chips has a long culinary history.
On each side of the word Restaurant on the banner over the Marchand’s head are the words Moules and Frites

As I am now within two days of getting into cinemas and theatres at concession prices, I want to make a plea for old men like me who perhaps have a slight tendancy to repeat themselves.
I will confess now that , especially in my cups , I do have a desire to tell anecdotes. My wife is convinced that each time I do I am telling the same story to the same people-again.
She is not, I am certain, always right.
But even if she were, given that it is a good story, what harm?

I have just recieved some support from that 20th century English wit and writer A. P. Herbert*;

There is no reason why a good story should not be appreciated more than once.
Imagine how little good music there would be if, for example, a conductor refused to playBeethoven’s Fifth Symphony on the ground that his audience might have heard it before.

*Found in the Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations

Now that my daughter has a child of her own (and a very good one I hasten to add) she is now begining to realise that he has certain claims on something she always took for granted- Sleep.

When Sile and I worked in The Wife of Bath Restaurant in Kent in the 1970’s we had a couple who were fery frequent customers in the restaurant.
I will call them the Mc Kays.

They were very wealthy Canadians who had decided to retire to the old country.
They had decided that he was the head of the Mc Kay clan so he always wore a kilt, but as he did this with style it passed unnoticed.
They were a most amiable couple, I remember them giving a present to Sile when Caitriona was born.
They were however completely out of touch with how the rest of the world lived.
As part of their retirement they were building themselves a modern stately home in Kent near the restaurant.
I remember Mrs Mc Kay chatting to me at the kitchen door one night and telling me that “Things have gotten So expensive, I have just had to pay £2000 just for the downstairs doorknobs! (At this time that sum would have bought a sizeable house) on further enquiry it turned out that these doorknobs were cut crystal.
Her finest moment however was in the restaurant one night when she turned to one of the waitresses and asked kindly why she looked so tired.
Janet explained that she had just adopted a little boy and he was a very poor sleeper.
Mrs. Mc Kay then delivered herself of her piece de resistance.
“I will tell you what I used do ” she said “And I never had that problem As soon as they were in bed I always went up to them, tucked them in, read them a story and then I just left them to their nannies!”

I think that it was the plural of the word nanny that we liked most.

For the last thirty five years my favourite cholotate cake and the one I most often cook is one I originally found in The Contsance Spry Cookery Book all those years ago.
It is a wonderfully moist , flour free, dark chocolate cake which Constance calls Gateau Négresse.

I have lived with this name, thoughtlessly and heedlessly for all this time and its inherent racism never crossed my mind until a few years ago when I started to put this cake on the menu of my restaurant.

Then I started to rechristen it, Chocolate and Almond Cake , Rich Chocolate Cake etc.
I find that in my various versions of it which are in my web page I call it my various other names, as The Ultimate Chocolate Cake or Gateau Les Jumelles.

I was curious to see if it still exists under the name of Negresse and I did a little research and then discovered worse, that it could become even more racist and sexist as when the same cake was swathed in Crème Chantilly it was known as Négresse en Chemise and when Robert Carrier did a version without the cream in the sixties he called his version Négresse Sans Chemise.
Or -not to put a tooth in it- A black woman without her slip.

All this was brought forcefully back to me when a great friend of mine who lives in Tramore and is of African American origin asked me to make a chocolate cake for her husband’s fortieth birthday.
The next time we met she said that the cake had been a great success and then the fatal words ” What is it actually called?”
Only her gales of laughter when I blushed deeply while confessing the name saved me from total embarrasment.

I have just made another of these (from here on only called Chocolate and Almond ) cakes for a party(my own) tonight so here is the recipe.

225g (8 oz.) Unsalted Butter
225g (8 oz.) Caster Sugar
225g (8 oz.) Ground Almonds
225g (8 oz.) Dark Chocolate
4 Eggs.

You will need a large cake tin preferably 12″ in diameter and at least 2″deep.

Have the butter at room temperature,
Beat this with the sugar until the mixture is soft pale and creamy.
(Use an electric beater to avoid coronary)
Separate the eggs and , while still beating , drop the yolks into the butter and sugar mixture one at a time. Melt the chocolate (easiest done in the microwave). Stir the almonds into the cake mixture and then stir in the melted chocolate.
Beat the whites until stiff and fold these into the cake mixture.
Line the cake tin with non stick paper and pour in the mixture.
Bake at gas 3 160C 325F for 35 to 40 mts (depending on the depth of the tin and on whether the oven is fan assisted or not)
Test for “done” by sticking a skewer in the middle- it can still be a little gooey. Leave it to cool before you take it from the tin. It is so rich it needs neither icing nor filling but a little whipped cream on the side wont go astray.

My Beau-Frere, Padraic de Bhaldraithe, who is spending his retirement translating scientific texts into Irish sent me this mail this morning:

“As I’ve spent the last few months delving into the biological nomenclature of approx 6,000 species, I’ve learned many new names. I had no idea that there were birds with the following appellations:

Uraeginthus cyanocephalus (Richmond, 1897) — Blue-capped Cordon-bleu

Uraeginthus bengalus (Linnaeus, 1766) — Red-cheeked Cordon-bleu.”

He is of course totally mistaken, these are not birds but chefs de cuisine.
We all know that the Cordon-Bleu is the ancient order of chefs.

Uraeginthus cyanocephalus is a second year Commis who wears a distinctive blue cap.

Uraeginthus bengalus is a second year Commis at the end of a busy night when he has been at the cooking wine.

As time goes on and we get nearer our date of moving and running a business in France little things strike me from time to time.
Like; How can people discover my telephone number in France ? (given that they don’t think to look for it in my site)

There is a France Telecom on line directory so I tapped my name and address in to this and there it was:

Dwyer Martin
14 r Rene Lentheric
34490 THEZAN LES BEZIERS
04 67 48 70 18

It also came up with any other similar names in the Languedoc area and strangely enough there were no other Dwyers.

On a whim I started another search and typed in Martin Dwyer, unknown address, anywhere in France.
Lo and Behold, there I was again.

At last I have become unique.
I am the only Martin Dwyer in France !
(it is going to make it very easy to find me though if I ever do anything illegal)

Having referred to Hedli Mc Neice and her seminal restaurant in Kinsale –The Spinnaker I became curious about her and have just spent some time Googling the lady.

I remember her as a glamorous lady of a certain age who was reckoned by Cork people to be a little eccentric but no fool.

She was a singer and actress of some note, trained in the art of Cabaret in Berlin (where else!) in Isherwoods time there and became friends with him and with Auden.
Her chief claim to posterity is that Auden wrote several songs especially for her to sing, in particular one called Funeral Blues.

Wikipedia tells us:
“Funeral Blues is a poem written by W.H Auden.
It was written to be sung by soprano Hedli Anderson in a setting by Benjamin Britten and included it in his book Another Time as one of four songs headed “Four Cabaret Songs for Miss Hedli Anderson”
The poem commonly known as “Stop all the Clocks” was made famous when recited in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral”

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.