The Menu: Learning about food provenance — as Gaeilge

Irish Examiner

28-06-2025

Daughter's departure to the Gaeltacht outside Dingle has transported me back through the decades to the late 1970s.
However, while she is experiencing a rite of passage familiar to generations of Irish teenagers, summer camp as Gaeilge, my 'sentence' was of a different order.
I had won a Gael Linn scholarship, six months total immersion, living with a Gaeltacht family, attending the local school, not a word of Béarla heard or spoken from morning 'til night.
It would become a life-changing experience. It was also where, to my mother's ecstatic disbelief, an often sickly child through my early years, I began to eat properly for the first time in my life.
Someone cadged a spin and late one cold Sunday night in early January, I was eventually handed over like contraband in Dingle's darkness, bundled into the back of my host family's van headed for An Riasc, near Ballyferriter, my new 'home'.
Within days, I dreaded school as it became apparent my outsider status was immutably set in stone; just 11 years old, first time away from home, I began to miss my family.
Bean an tí Cáit, a shrewd woman, saw me floundering. On Monday morning of the second week, she said she needed my help so I'd have to miss school.
She kept me off for the entire week, having me muck in with chores she did twice as fast on her own. By Friday, she had made me feel like her third son.
School never got better but I felt safe in my new home. I began to help, Ben, Cáit's husband, around the tiny farm, just 10 milking cows on 10 acres of land so poor, Ben had a side hustle, driving a truck.
I began bringing the cattle to the milking parlour, hooking them up to the machine, except the aptly named Cantankerous who Ben milked by hand.
Afterwards, I'd brush out cow dung and hose down the parlour. I began rising unprompted at 6am to bring the cattle in on my own for morning milking and would head to the creamery with Ben before school.
A British study showed 90% of children alter their eating habits for the better when involved in growing/producing their own food.
Each evening, this city boy reared on fridge-cold pasteurised, carried a jug of still warm raw milk across the yard to the house for our own consumption. Within weeks, I was supping all the way, eventually bringing along a separate cup.
On Sundays after Mass, I would head up the lane to Bríd and Micilín, an ancient couple who seemed older than their famine-era cottage.
Hooked up to the grid just five years previously, electricity powered a fridge chilling only milk and a solitary light bulb, rarely used.
By the open hearth in semi-darkness, turf smoke stinging my eyes, I read about punk rock in the Sunday World, eating brown soda bread cooked in a bastible over the fire, smeared with raspberry jam, pot of tea always stewing nearby.
One morning, bringing in the cattle, I noticed chalk white globes popping out from green grass. Mushrooms, the first I'd ever seen.
The next day, I filled the straw sun hat I wore everywhere with fresh mushrooms which Cáit fried in butter with white pepper and salt for breakfast.
We saved the hay by hand, slashing with scythes, neighbours pitching in, then moving on to their farms in turn.
Early morning, we stashed glass lemonade bottles of milky, sugary tea in the ditch. Still scalding at lunchtime, it would slake thirsts like no ice-cold beer has ever done since, washing down sandwiches of batch loaf, butter and ham.
Best of all were the duck eggs I'd collect from a woman a mile away on the road to Trá an Fhíona. Rich, viscous yokes of coppery yellow, I'd have two, boiled, in a sitting.
Instead of going home as expected at the end of June, my mother forked out, buying me another month in my rural paradise.
For the first time in my life, I was beginning to see the bottom of a plate and every night I dreamed in Irish.
FOOD FARE
Taste Waterford's City Select Taste Tour is a three-hour lunchtime walking tour of Ireland's oldest city, with five food stops, including blaa sampling and a coffee cupping tasting session, at Trade coffee shop, all the while learning about Waterford's serious food and beverage history from tour guide Pamela Flanagan.
Fab food writer Blanca Valencia, with a serious history when it comes to combining food and art, presents a French gastronomy tour (July 3 at 5pm) for the National Gallery of Ireland July as part of Thursday Lates French Evening.
Exploring French gastronomy as seen through the eyes of French and Irish artists, significant works highlight themes such as the pivotal role of French cafés in art, the importance of the meal and harvest scenes celebrating rural life, as well as Brittany's culinary and artisanal traditions in the works of Irish painters.
The gallery café will serve up French and Irish artisanal products in homage.
TODAY'S SPECIAL
Garlic on sale at Dripsey Castle
The magnificently refurbished Dripsey Castle Estate, a medieval castle, Georgian Mansion and vacation rental on 110 acres, 25 mins outside of Cork City, is growing wonderful chemical-free produce which I've been very much enjoying of late, including excellent carrots, onions and beets... a reminder of how well we grow root veg in Ireland.
Garlic is especially good, biting astringency and potent flavours.
But where do I get this fine fare, says you? Other than a few independent outlets around, not very easily, the point being that you need to seek out similar growers in your own area and support them as much as you can, as part of a great national rebuilding project to revive our ravaged horticulture sector.
Details of Irish food events and new Irish food products can be emailed to [e-mail]
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