IT IS like some long-running big reveal on a reality show. For hour after hour, we crawl the 300km across Ireland from Dublin to Cork through thick fog. But thanks to Colm O’Regan, a standup comedian from Cork, and the sensation he created on Twitter, plus three best-selling books and slogan memorabilia, we marvel over the Irish Mammy cult sweeping the country.
Details
- TITLE: The Book Of Irish Mammies
- AUTHOR: Colm O’Regan
- PUBLISHER: Transworld Ireland
With gems such as, "Don’t go using the good scissors for that", "Isn’t that cup too near the edge?" and "Those biscuits are for visitors", the Irish Mammy is universal to any family that lives by thrift and the firm hand of a matriarch.
Mammy is always with you — and given you’ll be reading this two days before Ireland celebrates Mother’s Day and four days before St Patrick’s Day, you might find you can channel an Irish Mammy more easily than you think. Not that in SA’s late summer you’re going to get the same message we did in the middle of our pea-souper: "You’d want your big coat."
We drive through the clouds in our own little 20m-visibility bubble. Road signs loom out of the mist to help us guess at the landscape on either side of the broad, new, European Union-funded freeway.
Our road-trip game is the Power of Mammy’s Potato, based on some of the meals we’ve eaten in Dublin. Award-winning Syrian-Lebanese restaurant Damascus Gate in gentrifying Camden Street was sparsely populated, though the food was deliciously fresh, with a kick of pomegranate juice in the fatoush salad, and pomegranate also featuring in a sauce with quail.
But Green 19, further down the street, was packed and featured potatoes in four out of six side dishes on the menu — homemade chips, mashed potatoes, Dijon mash and crushed potatoes. At the Botanic Gardens Café in Glasnevin, our hearty plates of poached sole came with equally hearty servings of veggies, plus mashed potatoes with flavour to make your heart sing as well as Mammy’s.
Musing on how the Irish compare the flavours of potato varieties the way South Africans do grapes, we suddenly find ourselves out of the fog into crisp sunshine. At last, we can see the lush green pastures and rolling hills of Cork, Ireland’s largest county, with Cork City calling itself, with very little irony, "the real capital of Ireland".
It also calls itself a Food Capital — and in this food-crazy age, the county is a major source of the seafood, beef and cheeses that helped feed all those Celtic Tigers. You might have thought that would have peaked in the glory days before the global financial crisis wrapped its fingers round Ireland’s gullet, but Cork folk are stubborn and ingenious survivors.
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CORK harbour is said to be the largest in the northern hemisphere and liners docking today on the eastern side at Cobh (pronounced Cove) follow in the wake of the Titanic. This was the last stop on its fatal voyage — and there’s the museum to prove it. This year the centenary of the sinking of the Lusitania off Kinsale, about 25km west, is also commemorated.
Cork itself is a city of roistering jazz and film festivals but also one where serious commerce has ruled the River Lee for centuries. On the northern bank, among rows of Georgian townhouses and terraces, stands a monument to "Irish time", the equivalent of African time.
St Anne’s, Shandon, is another elegant, 18th-century building but the clocks on each of the four faces of its bell tower (the Shandon Bells) told different times for centuries.
Thirty years ago, the politically correct vote won out and the "four-faced liar" was set right. Appropriately for Ireland and many visitors’ aspirations, St Anne’s weather vane isn’t in the shape of a boat or a bird but a salmon.
Almost next door, food is to the fore again at the monument to the world’s greatest butter industry, an inspiration to Tony O’Reilly’s first fortune as he snatched the idea from the neighbouring county, Kerry, and built the Kerrygold brand. Cork Butter Museum is housed in what was the city’s butter exchange, grading butter from its opening in 1770 till 1924.
At its peak the exchange was grading 500,000 casks of butter a year for export as far away as the West Indies.
Our next stop has to be the fabled English Market — "the best covered market in the UK and Ireland", says top chef Rick Stein. It was also voted one of Europe’s top 10 markets by London’s Observer newspaper.
The white columns and broekie lace of the main entrance might make you feel at home — but the market has been rebuilt or extensively refurbished at least five times since it was founded in 1788 by the Protestant ("English") corporation that would run the city for the next 50 years or so. The market mostly escaped the 1920 burning of Cork by the notorious UK auxiliaries, the Black and Tans. It stamped on plans to redevelop the area as offices in the 1970s.
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THE market’s reopening coincided with the birth of Cork’s foodie boom, partly driven by "blow-ins" from across Europe and the world, keen to find a more relaxed and sustainable way of living away from the late-20th-century rat race. Now you’ll find mouthwatering seafood displays, butchers giving masterclasses in knife skills, and tempting ranges of olives and cheeses to sample.
Foreign influences from new immigrants and emigrants returning home during the Celtic Tiger years gave Irish food the modern twist for which it has become celebrated around the world. Clodagh McKenna, brought up in County Cork, showcases the fresh delicacy of this comfort food — including potato alternatives such as soda bread and oatcakes — in Clodagh’s Irish Kitchen (Kyle McCathie, available shortly in SA).
Sometimes she pushes Mammy’s envelope. McKenna’s fennel and nectarines wouldn’t have been around for Mammy’s roast lamb. "So what’s nettle gnocchi with Cashel Blue sauce but cheesy potatoes?" Mammy would ask.
It was the Allens at Ballymaloe who led the way for four decades. TV made the influence of Myrtle, daughter-in-law Darina and now the next-generation daughter-in-law Rachel even stronger. Until venturing into the rebel stronghold of Cork late last year came London’s own bad boy of food reviewing, AA Gill.
Instead of siding with the New York Times in favour of Ballymaloe’s Irish country-house food with a modern gloss, Gill dissed it as producing "chalet-girl food" with "timid seasoning and flavouring" in his London Sunday Times review. At the end of his stay, Gill braved a long queue to discover his "unexpected treasure", the Farmgate Café at the English Market — in fact, featured since at least 2006 in Rough Guide To Ireland. Gill revelled in the tripe, smoked fish and beef stew. He wanted to award the mashed potato a gold medal.
Without realising it, he had succumbed to the nouveau-mammy comfort food that is sweeping Ireland as it recovers from the financial crisis. Like Gill, rolling from one highly recommended Cork restaurant to another, we ate our way through potato showcases — luscious chive champ at Isaac’s and sumptuous truffle chips and smoked salt at the Cornstore.
So if you ever go across the sea to Ireland, don’t be dazzled by the menu’s parade of lobsters and crubeen (pig’s trotters). Judge your chef’s style by the side dishes — right now, that means returning with a more comprehensive appreciation of the potato than you’d ever thought possible.
Mammy can’t argue with that.…
• @IrishMammies has 173,000 followers to date.
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