Erin Go "Bleh"; or, I Hate Leprechauns (but the Craic Was Great)

Erin go bragh-less.

Saint Patrick's Day this year coincided with a visit from my sister, who lives clear across the country.

As her birthday is in March, we decided to combine celebrations and enjoy an extra-special day, starting off with homemade brown bread and ending with the stock-in-trade St. Patrick's Day meal of corned beef and cabbage.

From what I've read, this dish seems to be more of an ex-pat iconic sort of meal than what the Irish actually eat on St. Patrick's Day.

Many sources indicate that beef, corned (cured with salt for preservation) or not, was too expensive for most of the Irish population to obtain and was principally a dish for the well-off. As a holiday meal, corned beef was considered a special Easter feast and not a St. Paddy's one.

Some sources suggest that corned beef was actually invented by Irish immigrants in the United States in the late 1800s and, over the next few decades, this "tradition" was exported back to Ireland (though Darina Allen, the doyenne of Irish cookery, states that "corned beef has a long history in the Irish diet" and that corning beef was the most important industry in the city of Cork between the late 1680s and 1825.

On March 17 in Ireland, it seems, a family would more typically tuck into a bacon joint (cured pork).

The main dish for the day ought to be a bit of a question mark, I suppose, since the holiday itself is a bit of a bùrach (Gaelic for "mess").

My maternal grandparents were Irish immigrants, and St. Patrick's Day didn't seem to be a big deal to them. My mom didn't make any special meals or fuss about the holiday, either. They all thought the onslaught of leprechauns and harps and shamrocks was silly, and pointed out that St. Patrick's was a feast day for a saint and that in Ireland people went to church in the morning and celebrated in the afternoon (and until the 1970s, pubs were actually closed by law on March 17).

In recent years, I've wondered a bit about why it's OK to depict Irish people via the stereotype of a pipe-smoking leprechaun hoisting tankards of beer. Not that I felt all picked-upon and insulted (in fact the issue doesn't twang a single nerve, I just think it's all stupid, and I really do hate leprechauns).

Pig, shamrock, shillelagh: check.

But I'm old enough to recall the Frito Bandito being kicked off TV as an insulting depiction of Mexican people, and I can't imagine other ethnic groups being celebrated in the form of a grotesque figure with a drinking problem.

(Though it does appear that even in modern-day America, one can go a step too far in depicting the Irish as nothing but a bunch of drunks: various Irish heritage organizations took Urban Outfitters to task a year ago for their insulting images of Irish people.)

Of course, Irish stereotypes that are entirely flattering can be pretty cloying to people of Irish extraction, too--the principal one being the Wise, Twinkly-Eyed Storyteller, usually male and typically clad in an Aran sweater, smoking a pipe, and wearing a flat tweed cap.

This individual often appears in films to the tune of Irish pipes and whistles and speaks in a way that suggests he's got direct links to an ancient world of selkies and spirits that we mere modern mortals have cut ourselves off from.

This droll, wise being makes my  mom's eyes roll whenever he or she pops up in a movie. I once loaned her a copy of The Secret of Roan Inish, which I thought she'd find charming, but she found the uber-Irish islanders even cornier than corned beef.

He's very clean.

She got a kick out of the old grandfather in A Hard Day's Night, however (the one who, when arrested by British police officers, starts hollering, "I'll go on hunger strike! I know your caper. The kidney punch and the rabbit clout. The third degree and the size twelve boot ankle tap....I'm a soldier for the Republic! You'll need the mahogany truncheons on this boyo!" and starts singing A Nation Once Again.).

Being the daughter of a woman who really, truly, for-the-record did transport guns in a baby carriage during the Easter Rising in Dublin, my mom no doubt heard lots of talk about the Troubles and knows the difference between a patriot and a poser.

(For the non-Irish-affiliated among you, having a grandma who transported guns in a baby carriage is frequently claimed by Irish wannabes but is not always true, just as it's unlikely that all the people claiming to have a Cherokee great-grandmother really do have one, as many Cherokee themselves have noted.)

Faith and begorrah, but I have digressed. I was going on about corned beef, wasn't I? Which I have made for the first and last time. It cooked up just fine, but it's nasty. Almost as nasty as leprechauns.

Not that the rubbery, salty corned beef was the star of the occasion. We also had pork shoulder, carrots, mashed potatoes, cabbage (of course), and an orange Bundt cake for dessert. And the craic (pronounced "crack" and meaning fun, talk, and laughter) was great; I woke up with a pulled rib muscle the next morning, from laughing.

(Honestly. This is not just a cliche about side-splitting here; it must be how the term came into being.)

Next year, however, we go back to our standard St. Patrick's Day  meal of roast salmon, mashed potatoes, and cabbage.

Now please excuse me while I go look for me shillelagh.

Boo to You, Too

Jack o' lantern from 2010 .

Very behind on Halloween this year.

Scrambled to assemble small bowl of candy for the lone trick-or-treater who might show up.

Pumpkins are sitting on the front steps, uncarved.

No time to make barmbrack, the traditional Irish yeasted raisin-studded bread that's also stippled with fortune-telling treats such as a silver coin and a ring.

No time to make the Halloween costume I'd thought up this time last year but did nothing about for the next 364 days.

No decorations. Not like in past years, when even the cats got into the spirit of things.

We did manage to stop at a pumpkin farm, though instead of scouring vast fields for Just the Right Pumpkin, indulging in hot apple cider, and then paying a buck to stuff a small pumpkin into a Pumpkin Cannon and send it flying hundreds of yards across a field and into a marsh, we spent just 10 minutes looking among a selection near the parking lot.

We used to pour a lot more energy into Halloween: there was all the excitement of helping our daughter put together a costume and showing up at the elementary school Halloween parade (I am astonished, but delighted, that the school was able to continue this tradition, as a hurricane of objections with winds blowing from vastly different ideological directions have caused it to be abolished in many places).

And twice we turned the basement into a haunted house, complete with a maze of paths, flickering lights, spooky noises, a bubbling cauldron, dry ice fog, and once, a computerized brain that answered kids' questions (the brain behind the creepy image being my brother's creative mind).


Oh well. My daughter has at least gotten into the Halloween spirit and went to school dressed as a cowgirl, wearing a white hat bordered with silver sequins. And Mother Nature has not stinted on seasonal decor.

A Halloween display of gourds at local supermarket

Local crows

Eerie moonlight

Big fat autumn garden spiders

Sox and the Kitty, Continued

Django the Art Cat, as regular readers of this blog (all 2.4 of them) will know, does not consider the day officially underway until some article, preferably something highly absorbent, has been placed in the dog's water bowl. In a pinch he'll dunk hair elastics, but he really prefers paper, particularly paper towels and napkins.

Socks are a recurring theme, mainly because they are not only very portable for a cat but also because there exists a reliable source of them: the laundry basket of clean clothing in the hallway that the resident teenager is supposed to take upstairs right away.

Said basket actually sits in hallway for weeks unless thunderous ultimatums are issued. The result is that we actually have about a dozen socks that never, ever are worn in between washings. They go from the dryer into the basket, where the cat seizes one each day and transports it to the water bowl.

There it soaks up water and, if not retrieved and hung to dry in time, eventually becomes a magnet for dog/cat hairs, crumbs, and other debris. Then it is flung down the basement stairs to go into the washer again. Such is the cycle of life for these footloose socks.

There is a long sock striped in emerald and lime green that often ends up in the drink, but right now it's hanging out somewhere in limbo-land between hallway, water bowl, washing machine, and dryer, so I couldn't get a picture of that. Hence, I've substituted Django's installation entitled "The Cat-tain and Chenille: A Study in Pipecleaners, Hair Elastics, and Water."

He appears to be celebrating St. Patrick's Day. Did he actually foresee this holiday? Is the cat known amongst my daughter's friends as "Fat Looie" and "Mr. Stupid" actually smarter than he lets on? Unlikely, as he's not only mostly colorblind but also illiterate. Heck, it took every speck of his gray matter to become litterboxerate.

The Lynching of a Family Legend; or, the Color of Blarney

Every nation has its own abundance of folklore, customs, and traditions, but those of Ireland have so thoroughly saturated American culture that you could be forgiven for momentarily thinking that the Emerald Isle has more of this richness than others. Particularly as Saint Patrick's Day approaches.

(It's hard to believe that this feast day for a saint was celebrated quietly and without much fanfare in Ireland and only evolved its current boozy, maudlin, stupid-leprechaun-hat-wearing, kiss-me-I'm-Irish raucousness in the United States over the past 275 years.)

My maternal grandparents were Irish immigrants, so Irish folkways threaded naturally into the fabric of our household rather than in some corny Erin-go-bragh way. With their gentle Irish brogues and old-world ways, and my mom's own experience of growing up in an Irish household, the mists of Mourne were virtually in the very air we breathed.

Like every family, Irish or not, we had our own family folklore--and blarney (as in malarkey, hooey, a load of nonsense) was not a part of it. At least, not intentionally. Our folklore came with stalwart conviction. We never questioned it; there was no reason to. It took until the 1990s and 2000s for us to realize that some of the old chestnuts we'd been roasting, however, had been toasted a bit too much.

The first yarn to come unspooled was one of the most sacred of all: the one involving The Very Cane Used by Michael Collins Himself.

Michael Collins, as you may know, was an Irish revolutionary leader who played an important role in the Easter Rising and subsequent events. He loomed large, physically, in life just as he still towers over Irish history and hagiography: he was fondly known as "the big fella" because he stood about 6 feet tall and had the build of a boxer.

Apparently, the oversized wooden cane that came into my mother's possession after my grandparents' passing once belonged to Mr. Collins himself. My grandmother was very much involved in the Rising (she carried weapons and messages), and before she left for America was given this cane by a comrade in honor of her service. Sometimes my mom would demonstrate how hard it was for her to lean on the cane because it was clearly made for a tall person. Such as Michael Collins.

Fast-forward to my mom's opportunity to share the cane--and its story--at an "Antiques Roadshow" event. It did not take long for the expert to gently debunk this cherished legacy. He merely had to point out the date of manufacture etched onto the cane. I believe it was 1936.

Michael Collins, however, died in 1922. (As my dad said to me at the time, his eyes crinkling as he suppressed a chuckle, "He was well past needing the use of a cane at that point.")

Ah, well. My mom took it in stride and thought it was quite funny, actually. And of course the new cane story became the new folktale to replace the old one.

Just this past weekend, however, a smaller bit of folklore likewise straggled to the wayside.

When I was little, my grandparents often invited an elderly woman named Agnes Dooley to dinner. Agnes was a friend who had likewise emigrated from Ireland. She'd never married and enjoyed being honorary "Aunt Agnes" to the four of us.

Every time we saw her, she'd slip each one of us a dollar bill: She would shake your hand, and lo and behold, when you withdrew yours from hers, you had a dollar bill rolled up in your palm. (She also slipped us a valuable lesson on one visit: Instead of greeting her nicely, we assaulted her with "Hi! Where's my dollar? Where's my dollar?" There were no dollars doled out on that visit, and we displayed much better manners the next time we saw her.)

Agnes, we were told, had once worked as a cook for the founder of Merrill Lynch. My mom recalled a story my grandfather told of his stopping by to see her and finding her weeping at the scullery table because she did not know how to prepare spinach and was supposed to be serving it that night. He helped her out and all went well. Mom also gave me some costume jewelry that Mrs. Lynch passed along to Agnes, as well as an old cookbook that had belonged to her and that she was said to cook from for the Lynches.

This weekend, I happened to peruse many of my cookbooks looking for a chicken recipe, and paused when I got to Agnes's book, which is held together by duct tape because the binding split long ago. It became clear that the bindings of the Merrill Lynch story could benefit from some duct tape, too.

For starters, Merrill Lynch wasn't just one guy. There was a Mr. Merrill and a Mr. Lynch. So Agnes couldn't have worked for Merrill Lynch unless she was in banking. Who was her employer? One piece of evidence comes from the jewelry: there's a brooch with the initials "H.M.," and Merrill's wife's name was Harriet. But the cookbook, dated 1949, is inscribed to a Lynch and, indeed, Agnes added in pencil that the book belonged to "Mrs. Lynch" in the 1950s.

Furthermore, the inscription appears to be made out to what looks like a "Willard" Lynch--a name I can't match up with that family's offspring. It's signed by a Jack Aaron, who could be anybody but probably isn't the actor of that name in the first part of the 20th century.

I suppose the details don't matter all that much, really. Agnes did work as a cook for some unspecified amount of time in the kitchen of a family associated with the founders of Merrill Lynch . Did the gifts come from the family she worked for, or did the Lynches dole out cookbooks while dining with the Merrills, or Mrs. Merrill give out jewelry while lunching with the Lynches?



"Yes, I'm happily serving you
 my very own children for breakfast!"

Who knows, and, I suppose, who cares. The main thing is...

• Granddad helped save Agnes's bacon by teaching her how to cook spinach

•  Agnes's profligate giving-away of dollars indicates she clearly didn't work at the bank

• We learned good manners

• There's a more valid six-degrees-of-separation between us and the Merrill Lynch founders than there is between us and Michael Collins

• I inherited a great cookbook with some wonderfully weird illustrations.

Brown Bread from the Emerald Isle

Brown bread was just one of the many scrumptious baked goods that my Irish grandmother, affectionately known as "Mamo," regularly produced in her tiny kitchen in Elmhurst in Queens, New York.

Mamo emigrated from Ireland in the late 1940s and brought with her a wealth of recipes for delights such as lemon cookies, apple pie, custard tarts, Turkish delight, sultana cake, tipsy cake, spotty dog (which was a soda bread), and a yellow cake with chocolate frosting that we have never been able to reproduce and for which the recipe was never written down.

Her recipe for brown bread is as basic as it gets. I've tried several recipes from as many sources, and they all seem to simply tweak the amount of each ingredient; the results are pretty much the same.

Not the best picture of Mamo but the
only one near to hand. She was in her
mid-80s in this snapshot.

My dad, an engineer who was a lifelong fan of hearty bread and a baker of same for the past few years, could not resist fiddling with the amount of the ingredients, either. He saw fit to email me with changes to Mamo's various recipes that involved increasing the amount of buttermilk by an ounce or two or changing the brand of flour.

Every Saint Patrick's Day, I make a big round loaf of Mamo's brown bread. Slathered with butter, it makes for a filling breakfast with a big cup of coffee. It makes me think about Mamo and my other Irish relatives, too.

As a kid, I used to think Mamo was, like, a patron saint or something. She certainly was very religious (we kids said she was "holy"). When I visited her home, I slept on a fold-out cot in her bedroom, and when I awoke, I'd see her sitting up in bed, holding a well-worn, black prayer book, a cup of tea brought by my grandfather at her side. All I would hear is the sibilant whispering of her morning prayers. A painting of the Last Supper arched across the wall behind her.

Oddly, for such a pious woman, she taught me only two Irish phrases: Póg mo thóin (kiss my...erm, backside) and Go hifreann leat! (go to...uh, heck).

I'm glad I got to bake up a loaf of this bread at least once in Mamo's company. She showed me how to knead the gluey mass (today I toss it into the Kitchen Aid mixer and let the dough hook do the work) and how to slash it twice at right angles (according to Mamo, to bless it; according to my mom, who baked this same bread frequently, to make it easier to cut).

I regret, however, that I never asked Mamo to teach me to knit. Wow! What a knitter she was...Aran sweaters, boucle skirt-and-top sets, adorable cabled cardigans for children...and here I can't even cast on and can barely sew a hem.

Go raibh míle maith agat! (May you have a thousand good things!) Here's her recipe. The bread should sound hollow when tapped on the bottom after removing it from the oven. Be sure to put the bread on a cooling rack or lean it at an angle against the wall after you take it out of the oven, otherwise the bottom of the bread will get soft as it gives off moisture. Store it when cool inside a paper bag, not plastic.

Mamo's Brown Bread
(in her words)

2 cups of wheat flour
2 cups of white flour
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
About a pint of buttermilk or sour milk

To make soft dough mix with wooden spoon. Knead it a few times on board or table with flour spread on it. Bake in cooking tray in oven at 400. (Sprinkle flour on tray.) You know how to flatten it on tray and make cross to make four squares.