Síle with her Auntie Emer aged about three.

Ever since my early teens I have had an itchy head.
Nothing too manic, just the necessity for the odd surreptitious scratch.
I would say that over that thirty three year period I have tried most cures.
The assumption was that it was dandruff.
During the sixties and seventies dandruff must have been the most fashionable affliction, that is if the preponderance of television ads is anything to go by.
It seemed that the whole world at that time suffered from dandruff.
As time went by the cures became more quasi medical and could involve one in letting the shampoo or lotion stay on your hair for some time, I even remember one that made you put a shower cap over your head during this time.(That one even I baulked at)
None of these worked for me and I assumed that I would continue living with my head itch for the future.

About three years ago in a market in Vaison la Romaine I noticed a soap called Savon d’Alep which claimed to be particularly good for people with dermatitis.
As someone who also suffered from this from time to time I decided to give it a try.
It is a strange dull brown rough primitive looking soap, usually with some Arabic letters on the front.
As you use it the soap gradually turns into a rather more appealing bright green.
It worked beautifully on my skin itches.
I did a little research on it and discovered that it is soap which was originally from Aleppo in Syria is in fact a very simple product.
It has been made for several hundered years in exactly the same way, its only active ingredients are bay leaves and olives.
I decided that it was the soap for me, and bought enough that summer to last me through the Irish winter.
The following summer I was again buying my annual supply, this time in a shop in Pezenas in Languedoc when the kind assistant said that it was also very good as a hair washer.
I gave it a try as that and to my delight finally got rid of my head itch.
.
Maybe this has as much to do with the amount of hair I now possess (a fairly light dusting ) but I certainly am not going to put this to the test.
I am firmly committed to Alep now.

Tomorrow is Sile’s birthday and her request was to have a Cardamom cake for the occasion.
This is our current favourite cake and there is a copy of the recipe on my recipes page.
This time however I managed to persuade daughter Caitriona to make it for us and we experimented with making the whole thing in a food processor.
It worked beautifully.
Here is the new method.

225g (8oz.) Butter
225g (8oz.) Caster Sugar
175g (6 oz.)Walnuts
280g (10 oz.) Ground Almonds
90g (3 oz.) Nibbed Almonds
3 Large Eggs
1 teaspoon Baking Powder
Grated Zest and Juice of two small lemons
3 teaspoons Ground Cardamom.

Whizz the walnuts and the nibbed almonds in the processor until they are like coarse breadcrumbs.
Then tip these out and keep in a bowl.

If you haven’t been able to get ground cardamom you will have to bash some in their pods and grind the seeds yourself.

Bring the butter to room temperature, to soften it a little,(or put into a microwave for a few minutes at defrost)
Whizz the butter with the sugar in the processor until light and pale.
Then add all the other ingredients, including the nuts, and process until they are all well beaten together (not too much or the nuts will start to oil).
Line a 12″ round quiche tin or a Swiss roll tin with non-stick paper and spoon in the cake mixture.
Pre-heat the oven to Gas 3, 160C, 325F.
Cook at this temperature for 60 mts.
Check for with a fork or skewer to make sure the batter is cooked.
Leave it cool in the tin and then on a wire tray.

As it was a birthday I made a little basic icing by beating three table spoons of caster sugar with an egg white and a tablespoon of lemon juice and spreading this on the cake while it was still warm.
It is very crumbly but delicious.
Also note it is flour free therefore suitable for coeliacs.

The thought strikes me that in my last piece I blithely said that my eldest daughter Caitriona could cook brown bread before she was 7.
This is quite true.
In fact what is more to the point is that she could make the same bread before she was six.
I remember a night when I was working in Ballinakill House in Waterford when a customer admired the bread and asked whether it was difficult to make that I replied with perfect truth that it was not, in fact my daughter had made the loaf they were eating that very morning and she was just five years old.
In all fairness I now feel I must give out the recipe for the same bread.
It is an adaptation of the Doris Grant loaf which I acquired via Ballymaloe.
At the time I called it Ballinakill Brown Bread and as that is the title on the tattered copy which I still have I don’t see why the name should not stand. The only thing I will change is to give metric equivalents of the weights.

Ballinakill Brown Bread

1.4kg (3 Lbs.) Wholemeal Flour
1.2 Litres (40 fl.oz.) Warm water
3 teaspoons salt
3 Tablespoons Treacle
14g (½ oz.) Dried yeast

Fill a sink or basin full of warm water.
Put the yeast and treacle in the jug and add some of the water from the sink.
Stir well together and note the amount of liquid in the jug.
Leave the jug stand in the sink of warm water until it froths up well .
Meanwhile put the flour into a large bowl with the salt and mix well together.
Add the mixture in the jug to the flour with sufficient warm water to bring this up to 1.2 litres altogether.
Mix this well with spread fingers making sure that there are no pockets of dry flour left.
(This gives a wet mixture which does not get kneaded)
Divide this mixture evenly between three 1 Kg. loaf tins.
(Make sure these are well greased and place a piece of tinfoil on the bottom of unseasoned tins )
Pat gently with your hand to smooth the top.

Prove the loaves in a warm place for about one hour or until they reach the top of the tins.

Heat the oven to Gas 6, 200C, 400F
Place into the oven and cook at this temperature for 30 mts.
(If yours is a modern fan oven I would reduce this to 190C)
After 30 mts. Shake them from their tins and put back in the oven for a further 5 mts out of their tins.
Cool on a rack.

As a retired chef/restaurateur I now find that cooking is a total joy.
I look forward to that time in the day when the jumper comes off, the sleeves are rolled up and the apron is put on for the cooking of the dinner.
There cannot be any activity which is so sensual, stimulating, creative and wins you as many friends as being able to cook .
For 35 years of my life I cooked professionally and yet what did I do on my holidays? That’s right, cook some more.
I think that all of my children have a fairly good appreciation of good food, some of them can even cook.
I sometimes think that if I did nothing else at least I did achieve that.
Without some knowledge of food and cooking I don’t believe we can ever eat well.
I find it shocking to read that in many modern apartments and houses the only thing that distinguishes a kitchen from the other rooms in the house is the presence of a sink and a microwave.

We have lost the tradition of cooking and no-one is teaching our children how to cook.

When I was little I was always in the kitchen, I can remember so clearly the way everything was cooked, the fat being spooned over the fried eggs to whiten the yolk, the cakes being mercilessly prodded with knitting needles to see if they were cooked in the middle, the roast potatoes being turned in the oven to insure an even browning.
We were lucky in that we had a vegetable garden and kept hens.
As the youngest, and the one most likely to be hanging around the kitchen, I would often be the one sent up the garden for a few spuds, or some horseradish for the beef, or, in the summer some apples for a tart.
In that way I had a natural appreciation of the goodness and freshness of the food we ate, I could taste the amazing sweetness of the new potato when it was only out of the ground an hour before being put in the pot.
I could see eggs being poached which were so fresh that the whites remained oval in the cooking. I tasted raspberries which were still warm from the sun on their canes.
It is no wonder really that I became a chef.
Children who live in houses where food is never cooked have to rely on other sources to give them that stimulation.
Their taste buds are formed by such loving mentors as Mr McDonald and Mr Tayto, or worse.
It is in these mentors interests to form the taste buds in a way to insure return of sales, rather like the way a heroin supplier gives out free samples to keep continuation of sales on track.

Our children are becoming more and more obese, as soon as we decide on another initiative to help, to control school lunches for example, the cynical multi nationals spring in with their own loaded “solutions” as dairy lunchables or cheese strings.
The Italian Slow Food organisation have discovered that the only way to re-educate children is to bring them back to the source of food.
Children who “can’t stand” tomatoes will devour one which they have seen growing on a vine.
This was my privilege while I was growing up.
It would be more or less impossible to do that in every home today.
We no longer have the gardens.
It could possibly be achieved in schools but only if we had a truly enlightened minister in command.
In the meantime one thing we can do is to allow our children back into the kitchen.
Get them cooking.
Often the best way to start is with foods which prepared off the stove and then finished on the heat.
My eldest daughter could make bread before she was 7.
It was as easy as making mud pies and many times more rewarding.
I seem to remember that to stop me annoying them in the kitchen at home I was taught how to make biscuits, I became a dab hand after a while.

Food you cook yourself always has more value than ready made purchases.
Take the time, even one day a week to teach them (or even yourself) how to cook.
It is a wonderful gift to have.

I came from a cultural background that wouldn’t have had much respect for the native culture or language of Ireland.
Being educated by the Christian Brothers, with their ideas of beating the Irish language into us, did little to foster love of my native tongue. In fairness I do remember a particular brother who used to roll the sonorous sounds of the poem Urchnoc Chein Mhic Cainte around in his mouth in a way that indicated to me, for the first time, that the language had great beauty;
“A chiúin-bhean tséimh na gcuachann péarlach,
Gluais liom féin ar ball beag,”

Otherwise my appreciation of the language has been almost entirely due to chance and falling into it in accidentally.

While still in college I had a great friend(and he is still one!) Jim Flanagan from Baile Mhuirne, in the Gaeltacht area of Cork, and I spent many happy times in their family house in “The Mills”. Another friend Maggie Loughnan had a summer house in Dun Chaoin in the Kerry Gaeltacht, I have a great memory of spending days perched over Cuminole Strand watching then film scenes from Ryans Daughter.
Almost incidentially I managed on these occasions to pick up a love and some small facility with the language.

My significant moment with the Irish language was however to arrive later.

One of my great friends in school and college (later to be the best man at my wedding and indeed a great friend still) is one Michael Healy.
Now Michael was talented in many ways but he was (and is) a bit of an electronics genius.
In the sixties, while we were still at school the Pirate radios started to broadcast in England.
Michael, fired by this , started up what must have been the first Irish pirate radio station, Radio Juliet.
As I remember it most of the necessary parts for the studio were in a biscuit tin and they travelled around Cork , moving from location to location on the backs of Honda 50s.
This received enormous coverage from the Irish press and a certain notoriety for Michael.

In 1970 he was approached by the civil rights movement of Connemara, Gluaiseacht Cearta Sibhialta, to help set up an Irish language pirate radio station in the Gaeltacht there.
This was to start broadcasting in Easter of 1970.
Michael was delighted to do this and asked me along for support.
My actual helpfulness quotient must have been fairly low.
My Irish wasn’t too bad but my knowledge of all things electronic was abysmal.
The people of Connemara were wonderfully kind to us however, and fed and housed us royally.
The transmitting station was this time a fairly sophisticated caravan, a long way from a biscuit tin but equally mobile.

On Easter Sunday 1970 Saor Raidio Chonemara hit the air to enormous press coverage.
The reporters and cameras arrived the following morning all keen for pictures of the Irish Pirates.
As most of the broadcasters had proper jobs to go back to it was decided that the expendable (and never publicity shy) Mairtin O Duibhir would be photographed as the token pirate.

The following day the Irish Independent front page was decorated with a picture of yours truly, taken from the back and presumably totally un recognisable.

(This is actually the shot which was on the Independent much battered by being carried around by me for 36 years.)

The day after I decided to ring in home.

The entire Saor Raidio project had of course been carried on in total secrecy.
I had told my family that I was going camping with Michael in Kerry.

“Well” said my mother to me on the phone., “And are you enjoying your time in Kerry”. When I said I was, she was quick to call my bluff.
“You are up in Galway with that Pirate Radio station “ she said.
“There is no way I wouldn’t have recognised the Aran jumper you are wearing on this morning’s Independent, I knitted it for you myself”
So I was hoist with my own gansey!

Saor Raidio was a great success and is generally admitted to have forced the government’s hand in starting up Radio Na Gaeltachta.
In several histories of broadcasting in Ireland they talk of the starting of Saor Raidio by the Gaeltacht civil rights movement “helped by two engineers from Cork; Micheal O Healaithe and Mairtin O Duibhir.

Is mise Mairtin O Duibhir.

At last, the Birch tree at the bottom of our garden has acknowledged
that winter is over and has started to put on its summer leaves.

A huge change from its winter starkness

But still nothing like summer’s full foliage.

At the age of 57 one is not supposed to develop sudden passions for pop singers but I have to confess to having become obsessed over the last few months with a French singer called Sanseverino.
For the last twenty odd years I have remained fairly aloof from modern trends and movements in music, preferring to leave these to my three daughters while I revisited the favourites of my teens and twenties.
Occasionally I succumbed to an artist because I had fond memories of their Father/Mother, as in Tim Buckley’s son Jeff, Joao Gilberto’s daughter Bebel and in the case of the Wainwright/Mc Garrigle alliance, both children, Rufus and Martha.

Last Christmas, at a third world sale I bought an album which I intended to give to one of my daughters in a stocking, this was called French Café Music, and was a compilation of some modern and some not so modern examples of this genre.
As a last minute thought, that it might help my French language skills, I copied the album before putting it in the stocking.
The inevitable happened and I found myself playing it obsessively.
It is full of little gems, some admittedly have only curiosity value.
There is a recording of Brigitte Bardot singing “C’est an jour comme un autre” which amply explains why she never became a star of musical comedies, a similar effort by Jane (Je t’aime) Birkin, but also a song from that lady’s erstwhile lover, Serge Gainsbourg, which displays a great musical talent. This track has the unpresupposing title of “Marielou Sous la Neige” (this was the moment when I realised that my excuse of using the album to improve my French was wearing a little thin, I mean how many times was the sentence “ Mary Lou is resting under the snow” going to come in useful?)
Also on the good side were a few tracks by the Paris Combo, a superb George Brassens;”Je M’Suis Fait Tout Petit” but the song which really got to me was called “Mal o Mains” and sung by Sanseverino.
This is a brilliantly catchy, instantly likeable but still extremely clever song.
Sanseverino combines elements of gypsy music with some modern rap elements and lots of different modern jazz influences to come up with something all his own.
I immediately ordered the album from which the track came, from Amazon.
As it was an import, coming from that distant planet France, it took Amazon nearly six weeks to get it in.
It finally got to the Dwyer mansion last week.
I haven’t stopped playing it since.
Just to give you an idea the very first track was called Frida.
This was not just about any Frida but
“La fille du Nord des chansons Brel”
Anyone who has read any of my earlier blogs will know that I still carry a lighted candle for the songs of Jacques Brel.
This man Sanseverino was certainly singing my song!

My major problem at the moment is deciding which song is my favourite.
The “Frida” is terrific but then so is “Les Films de Guere” (C’est ce que je prefere).
The final track “La Mer” is laden with references to my favourite Brel poem; Le Plat Pays but then I also find myself singing along endlessly to the chorus of the polyglot “Swing du Nul” with its mindless chorus of ;
“Swing du Nul, Swing du Nul, Mellow, Mellow ,Mellow.”
This said I have finally managed to be able to sing along, in time to the syncopated rhythms of my first favourite “ Mal o Mains”
Best advice is to buy it for yourselves, the album is called:
Le Tango des Gens and is, eventually, available from Amazon here.

This is my brother Ted,
looking particularly pleased with himself.

And why wouldn’t he be?

Yesterday his eldest son Eamon married the
girl of his dreams; Gene Fitzgerald.

And his two daughters, Nora and Oonagh
sang a beautiful Pie Jesu in the church

And his younger son Owen was a groomsman
(seen here with his Auntie Sile)

The Bridal Party

Peter and Bridette FitzGerald with
Eamon and Gene and Ted and his wife Mary