At the Edge of Ireland (16 page)

“Concentrate on your breathing—the slow in and the slow out—forget everything else,” our guide says. So we do, and for a while it seems that the pathetic prattle of consciousness—that messy porridge of lists and forgotten must-dos and should-haves and could-haves and guilts and fears of futures that may never come and fears of repercussions of past action, or fears, as FDR suggested, just of fear itself—the whole ridiculous frantic flurry and scurry—it seems that it might actually be quieting down for once.

For a while at least.

But inevitably I do catch a sneak thought or two creeping in, even as I am studiously not thinking about thinking. I tell myself firmly that I shouldn't think about the thought but instead try to think about nothing until the thought slinks away, unexamined, and leaves me nothing else to think about except wondering when the next sneak attack of thinking thoughts might be on its way. It's that whole elephant-in-the-kitchen thing. Trying not to think about something everyone is thinking about but that you've all agreed not to think about because thinking about it would be a mutual recognition of the elephant's existence, which of course you're all trying to ignore.

I think possibly, maybe, there were a couple of interludes in my half hour of meditation on my little cushion that you might say were blessed by pure unthinking silence. Moments of modest illumination expanding in a place where loose, dangling threads of thought and experience can coalesce into more enduring tied knots of perception and insight. But most of the remainder was occupied by a mental jousting match in which those errant (and ridiculously random and meaningless) thoughts would be challenged by the “wannabe a better me” advance guard of mind-protectors, valiantly warding off invaders but trying not to think about it too much!

Finally—our guide tapped her brass bowl with the small stick, slowly lifted her head, and allowed herself a modest, rather shy smile, and it was all over. Anne thought the experience was great and was eager to return. I thought, maybe—next week, or—whenever…but first I need to have a serious chat with this lump of gray stuff that contains my rambunctious, restless mind. Whatever a “mind” actually is…

Gastronomic Romps Around Beara

T
HE HEADLINES OF A LOCAL NEWSPAPER
were blunt: “US foodie magazine says ‘Ireland is no gastronomic wonderland' but we beg to differ!”

The editor, with obviously little patience for arrogant American journalists with overblown gastronomic claims to fame, made it very clear in unambiguous terms that, for all the international array of fancy restaurants in Dublin and Cork, there is also a marked emphasis today in Ireland on true “local” cuisine, which in turn has helped maintain local farmers and create new cheese makers and a wide array of other artisanal producers.

After blasting the American penchant for pasteurized, homogenized, sterilized, emulsified, genetically modified, and hormone-pumped food products, the editor suggested that one of the first purist proponents of “genuine Irish menus” was Hedley MacNeice, wife of the renowned poet Louis MacNeice, at her Spinaker restaurant in Cork. Then in 1964 came the celebrated Myrtle Allen and her extended family at their Ballymaloe complex of restaurant, hotel, and cookery school. They, along with the irrepressible Ryans at Arbutus Lodge, have celebrated the abundance and excellence of Irish native fare and stimulated a well-overdue resurgence of culinary crafts.

In the early days, when Irish cuisine consisted primarily of gargantuan breakfasts with black blood pudding as the featured attraction, watery “Irish stews,” and overbicarbonated soda bread, Myrtle Allen was dismissed as a quirkish “middle-aged farmer's wife in the wilds of east Cork.”

With the same determination of purpose and emphasis on authenticity as Julia Child, Elizabeth David, M. F. K. Fisher, Alice Waters, and others, Myrtle celebrated the seasonal bounties and varieties of fruits, fish, vegetables, and game. She offered menus of simply prepared dishes redolent with real, not manufactured, mélanges of flavors. She introduced—or actually reintroduced—recipes from the past utilizing often unfamiliar local ingredients such as wild garlic, cardoons, rocket, zucchini blossoms, nettles, flower-flavored honeys, and all those aromatic seaweeds—carrageen, laver, dulse, sloke, sea spinach, samphire and dilisk. Add to all these wild “fingerling” eels, unusual game birds such as snipe, woodcock, barnacle goose, plover, thrush, and even puffin, home-smoked fish and hams and salami-type sausages, wild salmon, crayfish and lobsters, salted herring and mackerel, limpets, whelks, cockles, sprats, periwinkles, rogham (blue octopus), and sea urchins, and you begin to see what a celebration of choice exists. In addition one finds heirloom breeds of farm-raised ducks and chickens, a vast array of wild mushrooms, golden raspberries, boysenberries, worcesterberries, enormous “dive scallops,” and some of the ugliest fish I've ever seen starting with the gelatinous mouth-for-a-head monkfish and progressing rapidly into “beyond nightmare” territory.

Then top all this panoply of peculiar—but oh, so delicious—culinary ingredients with such utter delights as marshmallow-tender Connemara lamb, a vast array of potato types, superb freshwater fish, boar, and venison galore—and, of course, fine porters, whiskey, and even (if early promise reaches fruition) regional wines. And what we have here is a nation on the cusp, maybe well above the cusp by now, of an enticing gastronomic revolution.

 

A 2006
SPECIAL ISSUE
of
Saveur
magazine on Ireland—the one the local editor had strongly objected to—gave modest, if guarded, encouragement to this process:

Let's be honest here. When it comes to food, Ireland is not France or Italy, China or Japan. It has no elaborate court cuisine, no lengthy restaurant tradition, no world-famous chefs. What it does have is a damp, relatively mild climate where things love to grow. It has, in other words, the raw materials. Almost everywhere we went we saw things happening: rural entrepreneurs building little food production businesses; restaurants revising their menus to take better advantage of native bounty; writers delving seriously into the history and culture of Irish food. If we didn't exactly find a gastronomic wonderland, we certainly found a delicious work in progress.

Anne and I arrived on Beara quite a while after this long and photo-rich feature was published and were curious to see to what extent the gastronomic wonderland potentials had reached our home in Allihies.

“This is not gourmetland by any means,” one local told us, almost offended by the idea. “Although, when they're finished building that ultraposh hotel at the old Dunboy Castle down the road, things could certainly change. At the moment, if you want fancy, you go over Moll's Gap to Killarney or to Kenmare and the Park Hotel. Or closer in you can go to Josie's overlooking the lake at Lauragh or Mossie's at Adrigole—but I've heard that's closing—or that new place over O'Neill's in Allihies. Most local places are more basic—chips-and-peas-with-everything at the pubs and a bit more uppish at The Olde Bakery in Castletownbere. Then there's places like Jack Patrick's—the butcher across from MacCarthy's. His wife runs a small restaurant next door, and she puts out some real solid Irish dishes—Guinness stews, lovely lamb and pork,
colcannon
,
boxty
, that kind of thing. Nothing too fancy—just good stick-t'-y'-ribs kind of food. Oh, and beautiful fresh seafood too when the boats come in.”

“We'd heard there was someone here on Beara who made his own cheeses. You know anyone like that?”

“Ah! Of course—I forgot!” Our informant slapped the side of his head rather vigorously. “Norman! And Veronica. I forgot to tell you about them and their son Quinlan. Out this side of Eyeries. Very nice family and beautiful cheeses. Go and see them—I'll show you where they are.”

He drew us a map on the back of an envelope dragged from his pocket. “Now be careful—if you miss this lane here you'll end up miles down the road in Eyeries.”

So, inevitably—we ended up miles down the road in Eyeries.

“There's a sign telling you when you've got there,” insisted the elderly lady cashier at O'Sullivan's store in the village when we asked her for directions. And after a couple of erroneous attempts, we discovered that she was indeed correct. Norman and Veronica Steele's farm is certainly elusive, although it's only a mile or so west of the village of Eyeries and perched on a steep slope overlooking the local graveyard. The “sign,” which read
MILLEEN'S CHEESERY
, was barely the size of a paperback book and camouflaged by globs of sprayed mud from passing tractors.

“Yeah—I've been meaning to put up something a bit bigger—we love people coming here…if they can find the place!” said Norman, a gentle, stocky giant of a man in crumpled jeans and an enormous gray sweater that drooped off his torso like melting lava. He'd emerged from his stone-built house to quiet a ferocious lion-size dog apparently determined to keep us locked up tight in our car.

“Oh, don't worry about that stupid creature.” Norman's generously bearded red face crinkled into a chortling laugh. “He's all noise.” And we watched bemused as the dog's aggressive, bite-your-arms-off attitude of a moment ago morphed into a cringing, crawling, Uriah Heep–type of creature which, if human, would have been fawning all over us while pulling its forelocks out by the roots.

“Good trick, that,” I said, pulling myself out of the car.

“Yes, well, it works both ways. If you're somebody I'd rather not talk to…”

“Like an EU regulations cheesery supervisor, for example, I suppose?”

Norman's grin diminished somewhat. “Y're
not
…”

“Gotcha!” I said. He was laughing again, this time with real Santa Claus ho-hos, and I'm standing there thinking he's a far more convincing Santa than I'll ever be with that expansive beard of his. Not quite ZZ Top–length yet, but certainly a promising start.

“Well, you're definitely a better-looking man in person than that photo in
Saveur
magazine,” said Anne with a flirty smile. (She does that on occasion. And the results can be fascinating…)

“Oh m'God, have you seen that horror? They just sent me a copy from the States. It wasn't fair, y'know. They didn't tell me they were photographing, and I'm standing by our cooking stove, which is all clogged up with pans, cheesecloths by the dozen dangling from the rafters, m'shirt hangin' out and trousers with the zipper halfway down, lookin' like they're about to drop off any second and expose all m' crown jewels to all and sundry!”

Norman Steele: Cheese Maker

“That just about sums it up,” Anne said, laughing, looking at the photo in the article. “In fact it almost looks as if you're intentionally pulling them down yourself!”

Norman peered at the photograph, one of a montage in an excellent feature on Ireland and its cuisines and farm-based produce that takes up most of the magazine. “M'God! You're right…or maybe I was pullin' 'em up.”

“Could go either way,” said Anne.

“Story of my life.” Norman laughed. “So many ways I could have—actually did—go.”

“From what we've read in this piece, you certainly seem to have had an interesting existence,” I said, remembering Norman's transformations from counterculture teenager to star pupil to professor of philosophy at Dublin's Trinity College to older counterculture New Ager to farmer in the 1970s who found that he didn't know what to do with all the milk from his one-horned cow, so he started to make cheese.

“Yep—I've led quite a dance. But somehow Veronica's stuck with me—in fact, she's really the power behind everything we've done.”

“And your son…Quinlan?”

“Oh, yes—great lad. He's in the cheesery now, packing the curds into the frames. Doesn't like to be interrupted at this stage. Random mold spores and all that kind of thing. He's not so sociable right now—needs to focus on our two main cheeses: the big yellow Beara made with cooked curds and our Milleen's, which is smaller, flatter, and much more pungent. I guess I'm the front man for this operation—sometimes I'm so loquacious I think I deserve an Equity acting award! Veronica's the one who really got the whole thing rolling for us, though, and for a lot of others with her teaching. I was messing with pigs and all kind of fun things, but she's the focused one in the family. A real determined Dublin lass.”

“I love how
Saveur
quotes her,” said Anne. “She describes your Milleen's cheese, named after the farm, as a ‘brine-washed-rind cheese with a complex floral flavor and a creamy texture—the kind of cheese that wanted to be here.' That's a great description.”