I have such a strong memory of an entirely politically incorrect poem which used to be printed in Theatre Programmes in the Cork of my youth.
To the best of my memory this was was part of an advertisment for Riordens Wines and Spirits which stood next door to Dwyers Wholesale Warehouse on Washington Street in Cork.
It extolled the benefits of drinking above those of eating, neither of which would be permitted today.
I can only remember a couple of snatches of the verse which I had always imagined, it was so wittily phrased, was by someone of the calibre of Coward or Nash.
I have searched the internet in vain for the original poem so can only assume it was written by a copywriter with a particularly fluent pen in Cork in the fifties.

The central theme was to contrast, Mr. Brown who overindulged in food to, someone who (in the phrase of the day ); “ drank.”
It finished with something like;

The sober diner may depart
With fatty something of the heart
Yet he whose wickedness is wine
May totter on to ninety nine
Yet no-one whispers in the streets
“Poor Brown the trouble is, he eats”

Is there anyone out there old enough to remember the rest of it?

(pinched from this weeks New Yorker)

Some of the most beautiful objects in my kitchen are also the most useful.
I am talking about my white china bowls, of which the one above is my most recent acquisition.

White china is the most perfect foil for all fruit, vegetables and salads.

Lettuce looks far greener and fresher than in wood or glass, even carrots or cabbage look stunning and appetising.
Because they are evenly concave every amount looks a perfect fit as it settles in the base.

Even a few cranberries in a white china bowl looks like a Christmas decoration.

The good news is that Dunnes Stores have a great selection of Paul Costelloe designed white bone china bowls for sale this christmas.

The better news is that I bought the one above, (the biggest in the range) for €8.00 yesterday.
In fact I bought 4, intending to give them as presents, but, I don’t know, now that I have two kitchens to furnish…..

This is the title of one of my favourite books.
It is written by Julian Barnes, possibly an even more obsessed Francophile than I, and consists of a series of short pieces about France.
One of his first articles in the book he calls; Spending Their Deaths on Holiday, which, as anyone who has had the stamina to get through my recent Brassens translation will know, is a direct quote from “Supplique….”
This is an article on three French Chanteurs; Brel, Brassens and (one whom I do not know yet) Boris Vian.
In relation to Brassen’s Supplique he adds a codicil to my piece by telling us that he was in fact buried in the overstuffed family vault, from where “the sea is barely visible and his grave after all less “marin” than Valéry’s.”
But Barnes ends his essay by saying of Brassens
“he was France’s greatest and wisest singer, and we should visit him-spending his death on holiday-in whatever way we can.”

But it was for another piece in the book that I really treasure Barnes’ ability to amuse.
That this is about yet another hero of mine, Elizabeth David, should come as no surprise.
This piece, called here; The Land Without Brussels Sprouts” is about Barnes’ attempt to cook a tomato soup from E.D.’s Italian Food.
Her instructions read that he should peel the tomatoes, cube them, and then “melt them in olive oil”
Here is Barnes reaction;
Melt? Melt a tomato ? Even a chopped one? The implausibility of the verb froze me. Perhaps if you are south of Naples, and beneath the intense noonday sun your fingers have just at that moment eased from the plant something that is less a tomato than a warm scarlet deliquescence waiting to happen; then, perhaps the thing might melt under your spatula. But would these muscular cubettes I was now easing into the oil ever do such a thing? I found myself, as the anxious pedant frequently does, caught between two incompatibilities. On the one hand, I believed, or wanted to believe, that with a few encouraging prods the tomatoes would, by a culinary process hitherto unknown to me but promised by my trustworthy tutress, suddenly melt; at the same time I was pursued by the sane fear that cooking the surly chunks any longer in the oil and thus adding to the over-all ten- minute time limit would make them lose their freshness and vitiate the whole point of the recipe.
For several stressful minutes I waited for the miracle “melt”.
Then with a cookish oath I seized the potato masher and mashed the shit out of them…

On the lines of comic writing about food I note with some humility that I have been nominated for an award here.
If there is any one out there who feels pity enough to add their vote to the list they merely have to add my address in the comment box of the listing.

This is my Christmas cake recipe as it appeared in our local free paper, Waterford Today, today.

No great deal, they have been printing my recipes for several years now.
The difference this time is that they have, for this occasion, included a picture of the cake and the picture is one I took myself.
First time I have succeeded in getting one of my photos in print!

The cake recipe is one we have been cooking for about 30 years.
It originally came from Margaret Costa’s brilliant (and now again in print) Four Seasons Cookbook.
It was religiously made by Sile for around twenty something years until I had more time than her, when I retired a few years ago.
The important thing is to note the varities of fruit are not sacroscant and you can add any you happen to find so long as the weight remains the same.
This year I added some prunes and some apricots to the mix and it tastes great.
If, like me , you find it difficult to just look at the thing for three weeks the best advice is to make a double mixture, divide the extra mix into three, well lined, one kg. loaf tins and just get these out of the oven much sooner than the main cake.
These can then be nibbled, guilt free, up to the Christmas.

One more point, and an important one, is that fan ovens and Christmas Cakes are not great friends.
If you can possibly turn off your fan before cooking (I can with mine) do so.
This stops the cake drying so much.
Otherwise the best advice is to watch it like a hawk and take it out of the oven the minute it is cooked.

About two years ago Daughter Dee designed a play which was put in in the Quad at UCC.
This was based on the history of the college and at the final moments the cast planted hundreds of large white windmills all over the quad.
They looked wonderful but unfortunately were pinched immediatly by the audience.
Dee managed to save two and, as I was the one who had to shift her out of her flat in Cork last summer I then stuck these two, on a whim, as sentinels about the old shed which is at the bottom of our garden.
The same shed is known, picturesquely, as the Bothán, mainly to distinguish it from the real, modern and roofed shed which actually serves a function.
I rather like to think that this same Bothán served a pig sty when the house was first built in the 1930s but have absolutely no evidence for that.
We had great plans when we bought the house first of reroofing this and even making it into a spare room but all we have done is to plant some clematis on it and to encourage some ivy to climb up its walls, thereby , we hope, entitling it to live up to its fancy name.
But I digress.
For the last six months these windmills have obediently stood sentinel, whirring around as if they were generating electricity, until today.

Last night, or yesterday, in the winds which have been storming about us, one of the windmills took off.
It must have taken off with a vengance, with its sails working like the propellers of a plane, because it cleared the six foot hedge and has vanished we know not where.
I hope it is giving someone pleasure where ever it landed.
Meanwhile the remaining twin, a little battered in the winds, is whirring away happily.

It is east to forget that one has four great grand fathers, seeing as the possibility, in my child hood, of meeting any of them was unlikely.

I have a memory of a photograph of this man, in stout old age but still wearing his impressive moustache, which is in the family album somewhere.
My father was always proud of the fact that we were of the side of the Magnier family which retained the original “i” in the spelling, the others were contemptiously referred to as the “blind” Magners.
He may even have been right, the ones with the “i” in have done pretty well for themselves. My father even managed to establish a family connection to the man with the stud in Coolmore.

There were always great stories going about the farm Duntaheen (pronounced, for some reason, Duntane) and about the various high jinks there.
The two sons, Cyril and Fred were contempories of my father, even though they were technically his uncles, and there was another daughter, Irene, born in 1912 who was to become my god-mother, and also there are another four children in the family tree who don’t make it here, presumably because they died in infancy.(Although there is one, Frank, who has a cryptic; K. In Sudan after his name. Whether this was in a war or by a tiger we will never know now)

I was puzzled by the Kathleen until I realised it was, of course, Auntie Kat.
She was the unmarried aunt who spent her life being ferried from one relative to another. When she stayed with my Granny (who was Mamie, the eldest) she was treated as a sort of unpaid servant but she got her revenge by smoking like a chimney (a habit my grandmother loathed) so much so that she had a wonderful streak of incongruous red, nicotene stained, hair right over her brow.

William’s children I would also have known a little; Veronika having married Ken Kiersey the architecht I feel a connection to as I inherited a lovely painting this man made of their house in Glenageary and a cousin of his, John Kiersey of Kilmacthomas is a great friend of ours and sings in Sile’s choir.
There is also the interesting Mary, the wild one, who ended up marrying a rather bohemian artist and moving (long before it was fashionable) to Spain.

So a thanks are due to my brother Ted who unearthed the reference to the Great Grand Father, and the picture from a sort of Cork Who’s Who of the 1910s.
There is no doubt in my mind that the older one gets (and the closer to them!) the more fascinated one becomes with ones forefathers.

The three sisters up the Minaun, circa 1985, in the back of the red Cortina.

My friend Isabel took this picture of a sign outside an internet cafe
in Berlin to point out that things are not always lost in translation.

Good Point.