Youngest daughter Deirdre in tonight’s Evening Echo:

Photographs taken when we launched the book last week

(And the signs are good it is selling well!)

Tony Foy (one of our sponsors) with brother Ted , author Mary Leland, sister D, and brother George

The whole seven together , a rare occurence !
L to R
Martin, Fifi, David, Valerie, George, Deirdre and Ted

The same crowd- more than a half century before.
Deirdre, George,Valerie, David,Fifi, Ted and Martin.
(I seem to be the one who has changed most!)

Some of you may not know this but before I ever started to write my blog I have been posting recipes weekly on my site.
These recipes, the ones which I give out on my cookery piece on our local radio station, WLRFM, I have been putting on line since sometime in 2001 or 2002 or as soon as I became sufficiently computer literate to manage it. There must be about 1000 of them under various categories at this stage. (Click on to Recipes on my page for a wallow)
Now yesterday someone from Sweden, Stockholm in fact, came and busily hoovered up about 650 of these recipes, thereby sending my statistics for recipes uptake for one day into an all time high.
Now all the info my Statcounter gives me is that this was from someone in Stockholm, no names no numbers.
I am, just a little bit fascinated.
Could someone, lets call him Lars, be planning a cook-book and be taking one hell of a short cut?
Maybe Lars has just moved into a flat and has realised (as I once did) that he will now have to learn to cook or else starve ?
Or maybe Lars has just got married and this is his new bride anxiously taking the fast lane to fill Mama’s apron?
Do you know in a way I am glad I don’t know anything about this Lars.
I can have hours of harmless fun conjecturing.
I will however be looking through Swedish cook books with a new eye from this on.

Liquid Amber tree in the Quad in Maynooth today.

Our signature dessert in Dwyers Restaurant was a Marquise of Three Chocolates.

This I used to make as a sort of chocolate terrine with a layer of dark chocolate at the base then white chocolate and with a milk chocolate layer on top.
All attempts to drop it from the menu (it is a huge fiddle to make) were greeted with howls of outrage from our regular customers.
I think I vowed when I finally moved on from the restaurant that I would never make the wretched thing again.
Well.
I lasted nearly five years.

Today I tackled the Marquise again.
This time, even though I stuck religiously to the original recipe, I made it in individual glasses, and I used Green and Black Chocolate (which wasn’t around in the time of the restaurant) to I think very good results.

Here is the technical stuff first.

I used all Green and Blacks Organic, Dark 70% Cocoa, Milk 34% Cocoa and White 30% Cocoa.
My glasses are Waterford Sheila Claret Glasses-quite their best cut ever in my humble opinion.

This should give you enough for a generous 6.
(It is a recipe composed of high fat chocolate, butter, egg yolks and cream so any silly questions about whether or not it is fattening will be treated with contempt-keep it for a once a year blow out!)

Marquise of Three Chocolates

100g. Dark Chocolate
100g. Milk Chocolate
100g. White Chocolate
3 Tbs. Honey
3 tbs Milk
1 Tbs.Orange Juice
6 Egg Yolks
225g. Unsalted Butter
250ml. Cream.

Break up the chocolates and put each one into a seperate microwaveable bowl.
Add 1 tbs. Honey to each one.
Add 1 tbs. milk to the milk chocolate
Add 2 tbs milk to the dark chocolate
Add 1 tbs orange juice to the white chocolate.

Heat the chocolates in a microwave at med or low until completely melted.
Let them cool a little but remain liquid.
Add 2 Egg yolks to each bowl and beat in well.
Heat the butter at defrost for 30 secs approx in the microwave until soft but not melted.
Beat this well until light and fluffy.
Divide this between the three chocolates and beat in.
Beat the cream until stiff,divide between the three bowls and fold carefully into the chocolates.

(For perfect results keep one third of the softened butter and one third of the whipped cream to one side and do not mix into the milk chocolate until just before spooning it on top of the white chocolate layer- this improves the appearance of the marquise {Well… I did warn you it was a fiddle!})
Have ready your six glasses.

Spoon the dark chocolate mixture on the bottom of each one and smooth down with a teaspoon which you dip in a little cup of boiling water.
Spoon over the white chocolate mix and smooth on top as before.
(As the white chocolate mix doesn’t set as firmly you will have to refrigerate the glasses for about an hour at this stage to make a firm base for the next layer)
Once the white chocolate layer is set you can gently spoon on the milk chocolate layer.
Refrigerate until just before serving.

Winter sunset on the Youghal Bypass at about 5.00 this evening.

My parents had seven children, at the time not an amazing amount, in fact I would say probably common enough in 1940s Ireland.
These children, in turn produced somewhere around 29 more children of their own, putting my parents descendants at about 36 people.

Now these children have in their turn started to produce even more children, by my very rough estimation it has climbed recently very close to 40.

My sister Val has much to be responsible for my parents tally of descendants fast approaching 80.

In the course of about three weeks during last summer Vals children produced two sets of twins and a singleton; three boys and two girls born to three sets of parents.

This is a photograph of all five together.

Today is the official launch of the book about my family in Cork.
Written by Mary Leland and called Dwyers of Cork
It tells the story of my family from 1820 when they set up Dwyer and Company up to the present day.

As a little taste I am going to post up a few random pictures from the book.

This is James Dwyer, the founder, my great great grandfather.
(And not at all unlike the person I face in the mirror each morning)

Walter, my Great Grandfather who had an eye for the ladies and whose three marriages (and consequent three families) proved in the end too much for the family firm to support.

His son Billy, my Great Uncle who made good his escape from the family firm to found Sunbeam Wolsey, probably the best known of the Dwyer Factories.

Some Dwyer and Co. workers having a day out in 1931.
(one hopes that carrying the banner was optional)

My mothers official engagement portrait in 1938

The family home, Tree Tops in 1950, ten years after it was built.

The Seven Dwyers in about 1953
(I am the little blond runt, clutching himself, at the end of the line.)

And now the commercial :

The book is currently available for purchase at Liam Ruiseál and Easons in Cork,
and in the Ardmore Pottery Shop in Ardmore.

It can also be bought directly from:

Mr Ted Dwyer
Unit 2
Nore House
Bessboro Road
Blackrock
Cork.

The book retails at €30.00.

Cost including P&P
For Ireland: €33.00
For Rest of Europe: €37.50
For Rest of World: €40.40

Cheques/ bankdrafts payable to:
Mr. Edward Dwyer

e-mail address for any queries:
gene@citylife.ie

Or you can order it here
at
www.amazon.co.uk
and at Kennys in Galway
www.kennys.ie

A friend who took up carpentry in the seventies (when he was in his twenties) used to hunt second hand bookshops for books on his subject.
As he explained, nothing had really changed in relation to either tools or equipment in the last hundred odd years and the second-hand ones were far cheaper.

It is definitely to show my age if I confess that my feeling about cookbooks is very much the same.
Except for the proliferation of colour photographs in modern books most are just rehashes of books written decades and sometimes hundreds of years ago.

Bar the techniques of someone like Albert Adria (and how many of us had a home facilities to dynamite tomatoes to make the correct texture of foam) all you can do in a kitchen in 2008 could be done (even if it took sometimes a little longer) in 1908-and vice versa.

Having led a fairly nomadic life while training to be a chef I discovered that most of my constantly acquired library of cookbooks had been lost, stolen or loaned and not returned (or plain worn out) by the time I settled into my own restaurant.
Searching bookshops to replenish was only partially successful (although now Grubb Street publishers are doing a great job reprinting out of print classics)
My best hope of success was a long and tedious rummage in second hand book shops to try and retrieve my essential classics.
There are, I know, good second hand cook-book shops in London and Edinburgh but these are a bit off the beaten track for someone living in Waterford.
Then I discovered Liz Seeber.
She is an internet specialist in out of print and also rare old cookbooks.
Through her list (it changes completely each month) I have now replenished nearly all of my lost library.
Just for example take her most recent list here.

In this she had a sort of bargain basement of recently out of print books and offered three for £10.
I acquired for my tenner, Alan Davidson’s Mediterranean Seafood, a companion volume to North Atlantic Seafood my bible for buying fish in these waters.
I had been searching for a good copy of this book since I realised that I was spending all of my time in French fish mongers completely confused both by the types of fish available and their names- Mr. Davidson’s book immediately solves both problems with accurate drawings and a special title under each fish giving their names in about eight different languages.
Also for my tenner I got Roger Verge’s Cuisine of the Sun , another cookery bible of mine in the Eighties when I was in Ballinakill House but as it had been borrowed from a friend of the owner (a lass called Darina Allen, unknown at the time) and she had put her name on it I felt obliged to leave it behind.
My third book for my tenner was also by Alan Davidson and called “A Kipper with my Tea” this was an unknown to me, but is a wonderful compilation of beautiful essays about food written by a most knowledgeable food historian(now sadly departed) who writes with both erudition and humour-lots of humour-about his adventures in the food business.

I think anyone will see that I got good value for my tenner, especially with the current pound/euro rate in our favour.

Click on to my link or find her at www.lizseeberbooks.co.uk

She certainly merits a detour.

Post Script.

On the foot of writing this piece I wrote to Liz Seeber to thank her for my order delivered and she replied, telling me that I was out of date with my info about second hand cook book shops, apparently the one in London now only stocks new books and the one in Edinburgh has closed down.