The old picture of Dwyer and Co. on Washington Street in Cork, was in fact a calling card from a commercial traveller from the company.
It says “”Mr Blank will have the pleasure of calling in a few days when your orders will be esteemed”

Dwyer’s employed a lot of travellers on the road, one for each department. A story is told about one booking into a hotel in Letterkenny one winter and, when he came down to breakfast finding eight other fellow reps eating there, all from Dwyers of Cork !

A traditional Quincallerie shop in Montlucon yesterday.
Quincallerie is one of my favourite French words .

Because the original kitchenware or hardware shops in France traded in goods in iron and steel and these articles tended to rattle (French clinquant.) Quincalleries (there I’ve used it again !) are one of the few places which can boast an onomatopoeic origin to the name of their metier,
– for non-french speakers it comes out as something like Kan-ki-ary.

At the moment I have an anthology called Windharp by my bed, edited by Niall Mac Monagle (where would Irish Poetry be without him ?) and given to me by daughter Eileen, it is subtitled Poems of Ireland since 1916.
It includes this one from Austin Clarke written in 1963 called:

“Unmarried Mothers”

In the convent of the Sacred Heart,
The long room has been decorated
Where a bishop can dine off golden plate:
An Oriental Potentate.
Girls, who will never wheel a go-cart,
Cook, sew wash, dig,milk cows, clean stables
And, twice a day giving their babes
The teat, herdlike, yield milk that cost
Them dearly, when their skirts weretossed up
Above their haunches.Hook or zip
Has warded them at Castlepollard.
Luckier girls,on board ship,
Watch new hope spraying from the bollard.

This was written, do not forget, in 1963.
54 long years ago.
Plus ca change……………….

Kilkenny college students leave their ash plants outside while they attend mass on Ash Wednesday.

It was on the 27th of February, 2005, just over 12 years ago that I put up my first blog, one about mayonnaise which I repeated here last week.
Daughter Caitriona and husband Aonghus had just spent , what I suppose would now be called a gap year, in Australia and instead of writing home weekly letters they both blogged about their experiences. This was of course brilliant, they covered all friends and family with , basically, one letter. I wanted to do this too so the savvy daughter showed me how. Ducks to water were not in it and soon (this was shortly after I had sold my restaurant) I was blogging busily, sometimes several times a day.
The following year I was short listed for a blogging award and later my blog was featured in the Irish Times. It was an exciting moment.
But then, around 2010 blogging became passé, and I, like must of the internet fraternity, took to Facebook and Twitter. I have kept up my blog but lately have been remiss, like communicating with an elderly parent, I am inclined to put up a blog only when challenged by guilt. Last month, I have just noted I only managed four posts in February.
Shame on me.
I will try and do better.

This is my very first blog.
Written 12 years ago yesterday.
A Lifetime !

I have always loved mayonnaise. Loved to eat it but I think even more loved to make it. Before I ever started to cook professionally I had read Elizabeth Davids inspiring essay on mayonnaise in French Provincial Cooking. I say essay very deliberately because, far from being just a recipe this two page treatise and hymn to mayonnaise tells you all about its history and the legends that surround its birth, but also of course, tells you how to make the stuff.
However the bit that inspired me is where she says
“I do not care, unless I am in a great hurry, to let it, (an electric beater)deprive me of the pleasure and satisfaction to be obtained by sitting down quietly with bowl and spoon, eggs and oil, to the peaceful kitchen task of concocting the beautiful shining golden ointment which is mayonnaise”

These poetic lines moved me instantly into mayonnaise manufacture.

There is something almost magical about mayonnaise everytime you make it.
Two entirely liquid ingredients, runny almost, when blended in a certain painstaking way can merge into such a thick unctuous, well… ointment.

My very first job was in a very chic basement restaurant called Snaffles in Leeson street in Dublin. This was run by an eccentric but essentially lovable ascendancy couple called Nick and Rosie Tinne. Rosie was at this time compiling her book “Irish Country House Cooking” (still available occasionally on the internet). The time was the very early seventies and I was in my very early twenties and very naive.

Rosie flew in the door of the kitchen one morning carrying a dozen crap splattered eggs, a large tin of Italian Olive Oil, and a huge wooden bowl and spoon.
“Maahtin, Maahtin! You MUST make some mayonnaise for me. I’m having a party tonight and I’ve got the curse, it ALWAYS curdles when I’ve got the curse!”
Needless to say I got over my shock and made her the mayo, and yes I made it in the wooden bowl with the wooden spoon as she had been taught to in her Cordon Blue school in Paris.

There was a lot of mystique about making mayonnaise though. I remember an aunt of mine doing something very complicated in a liquidizer which involved hard boiled eggs, cream and copious quantities of vinegar.

We mistrusted the simple and pure flavour of good eggs and olive oil in Ireland for a long time. (When my sister came back from an au pair job in Frejus in the late fifties, fired with the tastes of Provence, she discovered that Olive Oil was only available in minute bottles in Chemists shops and intended to promote suntans!)

Mayonnaise is perhaps the simplest of all sauces. I have often said in cookery classes that I can make a half pint of mayonnaise in much the same time as it would take you to find it in the Hellmans jar in the fridge – and I can!
I will follow Ms. David’s proportions for making the “golden ointment”
This is my very first blog, written twelve years ago yesterday.
A Lifetime !

Recipe:
3 large Freerange Eggs at room temperature
300ml Good Olive Oil also at room temperature
(I don’t always search out extra virgin oil for this)
Pinch Salt and grating of black pepper
1 tablespoon White Wine Vinegar

Beat the eggs thoroughly with the salt and pepper (I quite often use an electric hand held beater if none of my cooking mentors are looking)
Dribble in the oil, firstly drop by drop and then as the oil starts to thicken the yolks you can increase the rate to a thin stream and add the vinegar.
Again, I will quote Elizabeth David to tell you when to stop
“It should, if a spoonful is lifted up and dropped back into the bowl, fall from the spoon with a satisfying plop, and retain its shape, like a thick jelly”
this marvellous (and sensual) description is perfect.

Make your own mayonnaise, it tastes so much better and who knows, you too
might enjoy the process of making the “golden ointment”.

Brian Bilston ‏

PRESS CONFERENCE

searching
inside his cranium
trying to find
a brain to rack,
he found the word
“uranium”
and launched
an unclear attack

In 1996 Julian Barnes wrote “Cross Channel” -a book of short stories which were really a sort of love story to France.
One of the stories, “Hermitage”, is about two English ladies of a certain age, a couple plainly, who,at the turn of the last century bought a vineyard in Bordeaux.
By this time the Canal de Midi was established for nearly two hundred years and this linked Bordeaux to the Languedoc and went right down to the Bouche de Rhone into the Mediterranean.
The ladies employed a vineyard manager who ran all the aspects of the business. They were surprised to discover that, after their first harvest, and in the dead of night, their unfermented grape juice was loaded into a barge and taken down the Canal. Some time later, also at night, a barge full of grape juice returned to be unloaded into their fermenting tanks in Bordeaux. When they asked their manager to explain he assured them that this is the way it has always been done, this they accepted happily and went on with their lives.
With the advantage of hindsight we now of course understand exactly what the man was about. The wines of France have always been priced according to Terroire rather than Cepage. Wines of Bordeaux, Clarets, have long commanded a primium price in France and in England this, it is probably fair to say, irrespective of their quality. Wines in the Languedoc- down the canal from Bordeaux- have the opposite reputation and were always extremely cheap, this also irrespective of quality. Barnes’ guess (and remember this is a work of fiction) was that there could well have been clever substitutions made using the canal as the go-between.
There are times when, as I see great juggernaut wine tankers rumbling along the A9 in October, I wonder if, by chance, it could still be happening.

Paul Signac’s Etude pour le Temps d’harmonie in l’Annunciade Museé in nSt Tropez.