Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson

Am just half way through this gripping read, brilliantly researched and written, and cannot recommend it highly enough.

Answers questions like ” Why fish knives?” at last.

A must for anyone serious about food.

Friend who was staying said, as he left, ‘you know there are two packs of cigarettes in the back of one of the drawers in our room’.

I went and checked. Yep. sure enough 2 packets of still sealed Benson and Hedges Gold, but bought in France, in one of the tiny drawers in the secretaire.
None of the people who stayed there for the last while were likely smokers.
First reaction, just chuck ’em in the rubbish.

But they are now, post budget in Ireland worth over €20.
I cannot throw €20 worth of stuff into the trash.

But then, if I give them to a smoker surely I am just adding to his ill-health ?

Dilemma.

Ten things the French do not get (quite) right.

1. Tea: They never boil the water

2.Websites: Too pretty and unpractical and often with music-why?

3 Sliced pans: Too sweet.

4.Beef: Often too tough, in marked contrast to their excellent Lamb

5.Aperitif drinks: Again too sweet like Muscat or Pineau

6.Wholemeal Flour: They sieve out and discard the bran so it is just brown dust.

7.Middle budget clothing: Prices swoop from the supermarket to expensive boutiques.

8.Blackberries and Sloes : Not enough rain I’m afraid.

9. Breakfast: Top quality establishments will sometimes offer only bread and jam.

10. Driving: They always drive too goddam close behind me.

Ten things the French do better

1. Villages : Beautiful houses and churches untouched for years, all with something to offer.

2. Motorways : Expensive yes but with regular places to stop and usually clean toilets.

3. Fruit : Okay it is probably the climate but the Cherries, Peaches, Apricots Greengages* !

4. Wine : No contest

5. Aperitif Nibbles :Tasty olive and anchovy bits rather than crisps and nuts.

6. Old People: Live at home if possible and are walked to the baker each morning.

7. Weather: I know Ireland tried this summer but still, no contest.

8. Lunch: Good three course Prix Fixe can still be found for under €15.00

9. Second Hand Stuff : Brocantes, Trocantes, Vide Greniers, Puces.

10.Mushrooms: The fact that you can get these checked out at the chemist is a winner.

*and figs.

Yesterday Le Ferme Bitteroise provided me with some delicious local figs and some amazingly late Red Rousillon Apricots, a little shook but wonderful for a Clafoutis.

Beau-Frere Colm had a couple of these gentlemen land on him today, the larger one flew off but this smaller one stayed.

He was left, in fact with the lesser of two weevils. (Ahem)

On tonights menu.

Ace forager brother-in-law Colm is staying with us at the moment and yesterday he arrived back with some little green objects which resembled acorns on a bad year for oaks which he claimed were wild pears.

After several hours strong boiling they still resembled acorns but yes, now they did have a faint pear smell. Not at all disheartened Colm continued the boiling process having beaten the shit out of them with a potato masher. The smell of pears became a little stronger.
Then I took over, strained them, dropped in handfuls of Garrigue Rosemary which we have in the garden, and boiled them up with their weight of jam sugar.
While this was going on I met my neighbour taking her little boy home from school while I was taking a bin out.
“What is that divine smell !” she said.”Just my Pear and Rosemary Jelly” I said modestly. ” I will serve it with Lamb”

Just yesterday we finally brought home this stunning watercolour which was painted by Geraldine Garcons and shows the wonderful ochre coloured roof tops of Beziers painted from a garret in the centre of the city.
This was out anniversary present ( we were 40 years married this July) from our three daughters and their respective partners.
We are very grateful.

The paintings of the lady in question were spotted last year in a shop in Beziers and pursued and bought on line. As this one was part of an exhibition which only finished last week we were only able to collect it yesterday.
It looks wonderful on the wall.

In the seventies Sile and I went to work in The Wife of Bath restaurant in Wye near Canterbury in Kent.
This restaurant was owned and run by a Chef called Michael Waterfield, a man who turned out to be one of my greatest influences in my chosen career as well as a good friend.
While we were in Kent Michael was in the process of editing for Penguin a cookbook which had been published in hardback a few years before. This was Leaves from a Tuscan Kitchen originally published at the end of the 1800s by Michael’s Great Aunt Janet Ross which he had brought up to date in the early seventies.
Little pieces of information trickled down to us in the two years we worked in The Wife of Bath; one was that Michael’s Aunt Janet had lived in a fairly impressive Castle in Fiesole outside Florence called Poggio Gherardo which had featured in Boccaccio’s Decameron and that Michael himself had inherited a castle in Tuscany called Fortezza della Brunella in Aulla also in Tuscany which was in the process of being compulsorily purchased by the Italian government.
As I said Michael continued to be a friend, he is the godfather of our eldest daughter and has stayed with us here in the Languedoc on a few occasions.
Then in 1995 I fell upon a book called A Tuscan Childhood written by Michael’s Aunt; Kinta Beevor (mother of the historian Anthony Beevor) which is a wonderful history of her childhood in the Fortezza and in Poggio Gherardo with her Aunt Janet. She brings these houses beautifully to life as well as evoking her childhood in Tuscany in the 1930’s .
Then just last summer I came across another book about the Waterfield family:
Queen Bee of Tuscany : The Redoubtable Janet Ross written ( and also very well written) by Ben Downing.
This was the final straw that clinched our holiday this year.
At the end of the Autumn we are going to spend two weeks in Italy, one near Aulla and the Fortezza and the other in Fiesole close to Aunt Janet’s old house.

This should be certainly named :

This one from November 2007.

This all started with a mail from my old college friend, full time anthropologist and part time folk singer, James Flanagan, late of Baile Mhuirne, now of Hattiesburg, Mississippi in the US of A.

Now Jim knows me well, he knows that at least two of my passions are for food and etymology, so when he was dangling the following carrot in front of me he was both going to guarantee he get an answer and also give me hours of harmless fun trying to find same.

Jim wrote :

“I’m doing some Christmas gigs in Michigan with the band Legacy and in my role as MC and continuity man will be singing Amhrán an Steampaí. As you recall from the song it’s a food made with lots of sugar and mouthfuls of brandy with great aphrodisiacal qualities. However, neither Theodora Fitzgibbon nor Darina Allen mentions it in their Irish traditional food/cooking. The first line of the song says Is anall ó Shasana a tháinig an steampaí ‘gus thíos I gCorcaigh a chuireadh an slacht air”. A goggle search turns up a Jamaican dish called Stamp and Go which might well be related. It’s a kind of pancake. Any ideas? Have I piqued your interest?
How’s everybody?
Jim”

Piqued my interest ? I was enthralled.
Partly because I felt I had a rough notion what it was but then had to find chapter and verse.
As Jim said neither Theodora, nor Darina listed it.
Neither did Myrtle Allen, nor Florence Irwin nor could it be found in Alan Davidson’s excellent Oxford Book of Food. I then trawled through Biddy White Lennon’s and John Mc Kenna’s Traditional Irish Food books to no avail. (I am nothing if not thorough)

I then turned to dictionaries.
Chambers was dumb on Stampy as was my large, double volume, Shorter Oxford although that did eliminate Jim’s Jamaican connection (see below).
Then it was the turn of the Irish dictionaries.
The (I would have thought) comprehensive Mr. Dineen couldn’t help me nor could the more compendious O Donaill/De Bhaldraithe, at least not on first reading.
It was in fact there, under a slightly different spelling that I caught my first glimpse of Steaimpí (again see below).
From there it was a comparative doddle to re look at all my previous books, but this time in search of Boxty Cake. Alan Davidson was the man who finally cracked it.
His source was our own Regina Sexton whose Irish Traditional food is hiding somewhere in my shelves (or else on holiday in the Languedoc)

So I was able to reply, an hour or two later, to Mississippi:

“Jesus Jimmy you know my weaknesses.

I have spent the last two hours knee deep in every Irish cookbook
and dictionary I possess.
Focloir Gaeilge Bearla by O Donaill/De Bhaldraithe
provided me with the first reference:”

Steaimpí ……(Ciste) Cake made of grated raw potatoes, ‘Boxty’

“The Shorter OED rules out any relationship with the Jamaican Stamp and Go
as that is a Cod fish fritter taken from on a naval slang term for a command at sea.
I found then it, under Boxty in The Oxford Book of Food:”
“…..another variant dish (of Boxty) called Stampy was made in the same fashion as Boxty Bread but prepared with the new season potatoes and often enlivened with cream sugar and caraway seeds.
In the south west regions (of Ireland) the end of the potato harvest was marked with a Stampy Party when the harvest workers were rewarded with copious amounts of stampy bread.”
Boxty Bread ( I know) is made from a combination of mashed cooked and grated raw potatoes with flour, baking powder and milk.
If you remember the Irish song” Sweet Potato cake”;
(I’m sure it must refer to Stampy)

“Did you ever bring potato cake
in a basket to the school,
Tucked underneath your oxter
with your book, your slate and rule,
And when teacher wasn’t looking
sure a great big bite you’d take,
Of the flowery flavoured buttered
soft and sweet potato cake.”

The addition of Brandy to further celebrate the end of harvest sounds just about right for the people of South West Ireland.
So here is a cobbled together (and totally untried) recipe for stampy.

Steaimpi Uí Fhlannagáin

1lb (450g) Raw Potatoes (peeled and grated)
1lb (450g) Cooked Mashed Potatoes
1lb (450g) Self Raising Flour
2 Teaspoons Baking Powder
2 oz. (60g) melted Butter
4 oz.(150ml) Cream
2 Eggs (beaten)
3oz. (90g ) Caster Sugar
1 Tablespoon Caraway Seeds
2 Tablespoons of Brandy.

Mix all together and make into four balls.

Flatten these into four round cakes and put on greased baking sheets.
Mark with a deep cross so they can break into four farls when cooked.
Cook at Gas 4,175C 350F for 35 to 40 minutes.
Eat hot with (of course!) more butter and a glass of brandy.

(Pay all medical insurance before consumption)
I reckon it was called Steampai becouse it was mashed
(or stamped) before being made.
If you make it, and live let me know and I might try it myself.
(As for its aphrodisiac qualities, discretion is probably the better part of vigour

And could you send me the words of the song as I can’t find it in Google.

Slan
Martin

Which he did:

Amhran an Stampai
From the singing of Sean O Liathain agus Diarmuid O Suilleabhain
on Ceoltoiri Laigheann

Is anall o Shasana a tháinig and stampaí
Is shíos i gCorcaigh a cuirfeadh an slacht ar
Do bhí súicre a dhothain ann is bolmacaí brandí
‘S an té a bheadh ‘na ithe san, ba mhire na an stal é

Is raitheannach……………

……………………………………………………………

Then this entry from November 3rd 2008 :

…………………………………………………………….

There is an American/Irish band called Legacy which specialises in Irish Traditional music.
With my old friend Jim Flanagan, they have issued a CD called An Irish Christmas, Music and Songs from West Cork.
I am intrigued to have just discovered that that on the sleeve notes for the song Steampai
I actually get a royal mention!

Voila:

15. Amhrán an Steampaí [Song] (Song of the Steampaí). Having failed to find any reference to this, obviously wonderful, dish in either Theodora Fitzgibbon’s Traditional Foods of Ireland or Darina Allen’s Traditional Irish cooking, Jim turned to his friend from college days at U.C.C., former owner and chef at Dwyer’s of Mary Street, Waterford, and now consultant chef Martin Dwyer. Martin rejected Jim’s initial possibility that ‘steampaí’ might be related to the British Naval/Jamaican dish called Stamp and Go, and went ploughing through his collection of Irish/English and English/Irish dictionaries and his vast gastronomic library to establish a connection to Boxty and to Sweet Potato Bread. The entire story, and a recipe for Steampaí Uí Fhlannagáin (Flanagan’s Steampaí) can be found on Martin’s Blog of November 5, 2007 (www.martindwyer.com) and on Jim’s website (www.flanagansongs.com)

Pretty cool eh!