The writer Leo Cullen wrote a piece about his time working as a young man in the hotel in Ardmore in the mid sixties, this my brother has Ted just found and sent to me.

The owner of the Hotel, Frank, took the young Leo under his wing to teach him about wines:

“You had to be good on wine in Ardmore in 1966- the Claude Cockburns, the William Trevors, the Molly Keans dined here in the evenings; the Fleischmanns, the Dwyers of Montenotte, the Beresfords, the Sir John Keanes .
You didn’t give them red wine with fish, you gave them German hock. You left the St Emelion breathe: Beaujolais you popped and poured fresh, Ardmore, where G and T was grace before meals.”

Thank you Leo, you have placed the family in lofty company!

I remember a long time ago Gus Kelleher, the man from Kanturk who told the Post Mistress stories , telling me about going on holiday in the Kerry Gaeltacht in the sixties.
Himself and his wife Úna went walking by the beach of Couminole and got talking to some of the young lads hanging about there.
Gus, who was a fluent speaker of Irish , was keen to find out their pastimes and enjoyments.
One of their favourite occupations, hardly surprisingly, was to lure young ones down towards the beach in an evening.
As Gus told their story, when he asked them what they did there their reply was;
“We take off their caps and we croosh ‘em with stones.”

This I felt was a story which was not very sympathetic to the young men of the Gaeltacht.
Surely in the sixties we were capable of more sophisticated methods of courtship.

All was changed for me this morning when I was listening to Eamonn Dunphy’s surprisingly subdued interview of Professor Niamh Brennan, she happens to be the wife of our own Tainiste Michael Mc Dowell.

She describes their courtship, also in the sixties, in mainly similar terms.
When Eamonn asked how they met, her description was at a party when they were both working on the campaign of Adrian Hardiman to be elected as president of the Students Representative Council.
“I sat next to him” ( Mc Dowell) she said and “eventually he asked me to go away as I was annoying him”.
“When I refused” (Yes!) “he threatened to pour beer over me if I stayed”.
She stayed, he poured.
“Then” she said in the interview without turning a hair “he realised I was serious”!
I can‘t quite decide whether I think this was a good or a bad decision.
Certainly a weird way to start a marriage though.

I just got this unsolicited mail from a translating service telling me that they would translate my blog into French.

The above is an example of their work, it is (believe it or not) a translation of the title of my last blog: Hip, Dip Hurray.
They have the Hurray right, Dip is translated as immersion which is a quick swim, the Hanch roughly corresponds to the haunch or rump in butchery.
So my title has become
Hurray for the quick swim of the rump.
Now why didn’t I think of that as a title of the piece?

I am very attached to dips, they seem to me to have neatly jumped into that place in our lives formerly filled by the boredom of sandwiches or the fiddlyness of canapés. Both of these had the disadvantage that unless made a few moments before eating the bread, in the case of sandwiches, or the base of the canapé became soggy and pretty revolting.
Dips, because the base is added to the topping virtually on the way to the mouth, dodge this downfall.
Dips can also be as healthy as you want.
Serve them as crudités in the French style with raw vegetables and they can be eaten guilt free.
I have a good stock of all purpose dips which I produce for appropriate occasions, Hummus, Guacamole, stuff I call Norwegian Pate, and I have a good Rilettes of Smoked Mackerel which, while too stiff to be a dip, makes a good spreader.
(All these can be rummaged out in my recipe section)
Last night we hosted our book club and, because it was Valentine’s Night I felt I should come up with something a little extra.
I went to find a new dip. I was (and still am) convinced that with a little tweaking I could turn the old war horse of the seventies, chicken liver pate, into a dacent dip.
This however was not to be.
I could find no chicken livers .
The hell I thought let me instead experiment with producing a dip from the smoked Mackerel.
I did, and the result was terrific, here it is.

Smoked Mackerel Dip.
(You will need a pestle and mortar for this.)

4 Scallions
2 Tablespoons Olive Oil
2 Smoked Mackerel Fillets
Juice one Lemon
2 teaspoons of Horseradish Sauce
2 Egg Yolks
Good grating of Black Pepper
90ml (3 oz. ) Sunflower Oil
90ml (3 oz. ) Olive Oil

Trim the scallions and chop them finely.
Put these in a small pot with the 2 tablespoons of olive oil and cook very gently, covered, for about ten minutes until they are soft.
Take the mackerel off its skin and shred it gently with your fingers into the mortar. (be sure to discard any bones)
Pound this to a paste with the mortar gradually incorporating the scallions with any of the oil they were cooked in, the lemon juice, the horseradish and the black pepper.
Now change the mortar for a hand held electric beater and add the two egg yolks to the pounded mackerel.
Now in a very thin dribble, drop in the oils into the mixture beating all the time as you would make mayonnaise.
Once this is done, taste again for seasoning, mine didn’t need salt.

I am fairly sure that if making this in larger quantities it could be all done in a food processor.

Then transfer into a bowl for serving and serve with crackers, baked strips of pitta or (a la Francais) with raw veg.

This was a really strange day in the restaurant.
We were usually booked out, for two full sittings about four weeks in advance, not from our normal customers, from people who only seemed to go out on that one night of the year to a restaurant.
Once there they often seemed ill at ease in their surroundings and very quiet.
The quietness was a bit of a problem.
One always was anxious on a night of only couples, they never quite made sufficient noise to create a buzz and, once one couple started to whisper the whole place became positively sepulchral.
I remember reading an article in an ancient Guardian about a pair of actors who used to cruise restaurants on Valentine’s night, paid for by the proprietors, to have mock loud rows at tables in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

My heart was always broken by the young fellows who would ring up about a fortnight before the date and be filled with disbelief when they discovered that they had missed the boat and would now have to face the wrath of their disappointed girl-friends.
It was for them that I started a tradition of giving out a menu for a Valentine’s Dinner for those who would be at home.
It was often fairly corny, with contrived references to love dragged into the menu titles but then Valentine was never the most sophisticated of saints was he?
I did it again this year, mainly because I got a couple of despairing boat missers who phoned me at home looking for help.
Yesterday on wlrfm I put out a menu and recipes for a four course Valentines feast.
For those of you not within the Waterford area I now offer you the same.

Valentines Menu

Oysters with Fennel and Garlic
~
Valentines Soup
~
Beef Steak with Sauce Françoise
~
Passion fruit Crème Brulee

This is a fair compendium menu of the old, new and borrowed .

I pinched the idea of the Oysters from Mairin Ui Chomain’s excellent book on Oyster Cuisine , I tried it out on some of the family on Monday but their courage failed at the last moment so I ended up eating 11 of the dozen oysters purchased myself.
They were delicious!

The soup was an experiment of a few weeks ago when I wanted soup and a single beetroot was the only interesting veg in the cupboard. I attempted it with some reluctance, not being a lifelong fan of the traditional thin Borsch, and discovered that it makes an excellent cream soup, with a startling, and not unappetising bright crimson colour.
Perfect for Valentine.

The Steak sauce is my mother’s treat sauce for steak and has gone out on the menu in various restaurants in many guises.
Originally called Monkey Gland Sauce, from the time when it was thought that these glands contained the secret to eternal life and therefore, must be ambrosial but this is hardy a romantic title for the 2000s .
In my restaurant it has been known as Granny Dwyer’s Sauce and Frances Dwyer’s Sauce but now, for Valentine I have decided to give it a small French accent. I’m sure the Mammy will forgive me.

The dessert is my twist on a recipe I pinched from Rick Stein.
He bakes his creams in the oven which does make for a firmer set, I rather prefer the softer texture I get.

Here are the recipes.

Oysters with Fennel and Garlic Butter
(for two)

12 Oysters

60g (2 oz) Butter
Juice of Half Lemon
Small Bunch Fennel
2 Cloves Garlic.

Finely chop the fennel and the garlic and tip, with the butter and the lemon juice, into a small pot.
Heat until the butter is bubbling then keep warm.

Rinse the oysters in cold water to remove outside sand.

Pre-heat the oven to 200C, Gas 6, 400F

Lay the oysters out on a baking tray with the deep side down and put into the pre heated oven.

Let them open at this heat for about 10 mts., they should be just yawning.

Slip a knife along the top flat shell to release and then discard the top shell and drain off the juice from each one.
Place them on two plates, in the bottom shell and spoon over the melted butter.
Serve with bread to mop up the juices.

Valentines Soup
(will serve 6)

2 Med Onions
1 Med Potato
2 carrots
1 Med Fresh Beetroot
60g (2 oz.) Butter
850ml (1 ½ pts) Stock

Some Greek Yoghurt

If you want to just serve two portions of this the rest will freeze beautifully.

Peel and dice the onion, potato, carrots and beetroot.
Put these in a heavy pot with the butter and put it on a low heat with the lid on.
Let them sweat for 30 mts or so until soft.

Add the stock to the pan and simmer for another 20 mts.

Liquidize and (for extra smoothness) pass through a sieve.

Serve with a swirl of yoghurt and a scattering of chopped chives.

Steak with Sauce Françoise
For 2

2x 8oz. Steaks (Fillet, Sirloin ,Rump, striploin)
Salt and Pepper
110 (4 oz.) Mushrooms
30g (1oz.). Butter
Squeeze of Lemon Juice
110g (4 oz.) Vine Tomatoes
110ml (4 oz.) Cream

First get Sauce ready:
Bring a pot of water to the boil and then slip in the tomatoes, put the put into a sink as soon as it comes back to boil and pour in cold water. When they are cool enough to handle slip off the skins and then chop the tomatoes with a large knife.
Rub the mushrooms in a clean tea towel to remove any compost (there is no need to wash cultivated mushrooms)
Slice these, Melt the butter in a large pan and cook the mushrooms in this until all their liquid has evaporated and they are starting to go brown. Sprinkle over the lemon juice, now put in the chopped tomatoes and bring to the boil stirring all the time.
Next add the cream and again boil, season and continue simmering for a few minutes.

Season the steaks well and cook on a hot pan until to your liking.

Pour the sauce over the steaks before serving.

Passion Fruit Crème Brulee

300ml (½ pt Cream)
4 Egg Yolks
2 tbs. Sugar
Half Vanilla Pod
6 passion Fruit
Sugar for top.

Halve the Passion fruit and spoon out the flesh into a sieve set over a bowl.
Push the flesh through with a wooden spoon and add to the cream.

Scrape the seeds from the centre of the vanilla pod into the cream.
Pour into a pot and bring up to the boil.
Beat the yolks up with the sugar.
Pour the hot cream on to these and beat together.
Pour back into the pan and, stirring all the time with a wooden spoon,
Reheat until the cream coats the back of the spoon and a finger drawn along the back of the spoon leaves a trail.
Pour this into 4 or 5 ramekins or 1 pudding dish.
Chill well until it is lightly set.
Sprinkle a light covering of caster sugar on the top.
Pre heat your grill and when very hot set the crème under it and grill until the sugar first melts and then turns a pale brown.
If you have a cooks blow torch it makes this job much easier.

This is a very lightly set cream, not at all jelly like.

Sad to see Ben Kiely has gone.
A man who never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
The best memory I have of him was from a Sunday Miscellany about thirty years ago.
In this he described how as a three year old he decided to punish his mother by running away from home and then committing suicide.
To accomplish this he ran to a nearby patch of waste ground and sat down on the wet grass to await his maker. He knew, he had been told enough times, that to do so he would catch his death of cold.
It was a great treat for us all that this took another eighty four years.

When we were in Carcassonne in the new year I found a rather classy, if a little retro, pair of Ray-Ban aviators in the glove compartment of our hired car.
We found a home for them today with D’s boy-friend Ano.
“I can wear them for driving” he said, secure that not too many people would see him in them that way.
Ah Ano! Have you forgotten the power of the Internet!

This is a superb portrait, painted by Velazquez in 1650.
The Pope in all his glory as a temporal ruler, looking at the world with unflinching eyes.

It is incredible that Francis Bacon’s also brilliant version of this picture
but showing Innocent as a cowed and broken man should have made
€21.2 million at Christie’s last night.

For the last three days I have been sick, not ill, not poorly, not unwell, these are words that just don’t occur in Ireland, we had only one word for it : sick.
In the last twenty or thirty years I have had various diseases, some of which ended up with me being in hospital but the last time I remember being sick like this was in January in 1972, 35 years ago(I remember the date because it was in bed, listening to my transistor radio, that I heard about the burning of the British Embassy in Dublin) when, staying with my sister in Dublin I had Quinsy.
This has plainly become a most unfashionable disease, when is the last time you ever heard of anyone having Quinsy?. The OED tells me that it is an inflammation of the tonsils so, presumably, it is the name and not the disease that has gone out of fashion.
On both occasions, then and the last few days, I had a fever and all those bizarre sensations that go with a fever, terror of cold, going to the bathroom from the bed being akin to slithering along ice, ridiculous sensitivity of the skin which felt abraded by anything rougher than a sheet and the bizarre sensation of cold, teeth chattering cold, when I was in fact displaying a temperature of 101F.
The nights were still more outrageous, the mind going off into realms somewhere between sleep and unsleep when the very sheets that constrained one had personalities, mainly evil, and time somehow became yet another character in the drama which my confused mind was playing.
In the middle of last night I woke up, drowned in sweat, and realised that, as in those wonderful Victorian novels, The Crisis had passed and I was now going to live.

One good thing about being sick is that one becomes ones own doctor.
There was going to be no way that I was going to count calories about meals and would happily have eaten melted butter off a spoon if I felt like it.
In the same way I stopped reading Anthony Beevor’s: The War for Spain (I will get back to it) and started to reread Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories.
I had only read this last Spring but, as it had been picked for our book club read I felt I should re-read bits in the unlikely scenario that I might not have enough to say at the book club meeting next week.
This was an extremely good decision.
Untold Stories is a compendium volume of various pieces of biography, journalism, plays and diaries written by Bennett over the last few years.
I suppose that, in modern terms, he is near as we are likely to get to a 21st Century essayist.
He is also of course perfect sick in bed fodder as he can be picked up and read totally randomly.
This I did until I realised that, to my complete surprise, I had read the whole thing through again, for a second time, and within a year.

Here are a few random quotations,
from his diary:
“A letter from a reader comparing her experience of evacuation to mine. She was sent to Grantham and says that Alderman Roberts, Mrs Thatcher’s father was thought to be in the black market and that Maggie used to lean out the of her bedroom window and spit on the evacuees”
on finding himself lunching next to Pinochet and friends in a London restaurant;
“they were tucking into their fish this October afternoon, the murmur of polite conversation drowning the screams from the cellar”
his description of a primary school teacher;
“Miss Timpson is a thin, severe woman with grey hair in a bun and the kind of old lady’s legs, which seem to have gone out now, which begin on the far corners of the skirt and converge on the ankles.”

Bennett went through his life avoiding and form of “splother”. This was his Father’s world for anything that could be termed the very least bit showy.
This included, in Bennett’s case, a refusal of an honorary PhD. from Oxford, and a knighthood on the new years honours list, from the Queen.
The best words on his writing are perhaps his own description of the poetry of a man he much admired, Phillip Larkin;
“He writes with clarity and a determined ordinariness that does not exclude (and often underpins) the lyrical.
He is always accessible, his language compact though occasionally arcane”

Good on you Alan, and thanks for helping me over the ‘flu!

I have written before about my illustrious if very worthy Great Great Grandfather, John Francis Maguire.
He was an MP, a Lord Mayor of Cork, a prolific writer about things Catholic (for which he was made a Papal Knight by the Pope).
He wrote long and fairly unreadible tomes about Fr Matthew-The Apostle of Temperance, and a history of the Irish in America (which is on line, should you be tempted to try to read it) but I discovered that part of his oevure was a most surprising book of fairy tales, called Young Prince Marigold and other fairy stories
Thinking that this would be at least more readible than the others I put in a request to several second hand booksellers to see if I could get a copy.
No luck.
Unlike his more worthy efforts this seems to have disappeared without a trace.

Just last week in The New Yorker I read an article about Google and their marathon effort to get every published word on line.
This has become accessible as
books@google.com
It was there, for the first time, I came a lot a lot closer to this book.

1. Young Prince Marigold : and other fairy stories
by John Francis Maguire MP;
Illustrated by S E Waller
Publisher: London : MacMillan and Co., 1873.

I am fairly sure by the cut of the man that these tales will be highly uplifting and intended as moral tracts but they also, hopefully, will show a slightly more frivolous side to the ancestor.
Presumably this evidence indicates that there is at least one copy extant so I may yet get the chance to find out more.