These are just a few of mine, please send us some of yours.... Derek

Food Memories as a child.

I was lucky to have known both of my grandmothers and one of my grandfathers.

They both lived within walking distance from our house and ,as kids, we used their door numbers to say where we were going.

So, for example, if I was going to Nana Mullen, I would be going to 41, if I was in Pop’s, I would be in 254, and if I was at home, I was in 75.

Nana Mullen was a widow who lived with her widowed sister and a hippy daughter in a rented Victorian house and as kids we would be dumped there quite often when my mother was busy being busy.

This was a  4 storey house which would in the past have had staff working there and it had a scullery where all the food provisions were kept in an annex off the kitchen.

Ask someone what a scullery is now and they wouldn’t have a clue !

Nana Mullen,(41) who was a deplorable snob, was also known among ourselves as Skippy, as she used a tut-tutting sound to express her dismay with children having a personality or an  opinion and sounded like Skippy , the bush kangaroo.

However , She was an excellent cook and baker and there was always home-baked Brown bread made with Buttermilk and White Soda bread and a vast selection of cakes and goodies.

She passed on her baking skills to my mother who in turn was quite brilliant at baking and there were always tarts and cakes in our house.( 75)

I can remember camping in Glenbeigh one Summer, and picking wild Blueberries from the mountain which my mother turned into Blueberry jam for the entire campsite.

Pop Mc Loughlin (254) was an amazing man.He was pensioned out of the British Army at 21 with a heart complaint, and lived to the jolly old age of 90 something, out-living 3 of his family doctors.

He had a shed in the Garden where he had Bayonets and Gas masks and other Army stuff that was fascinating to us as kids

Pop was an active man and could turn his hand to anything.

He would make go carts for us that were the envy of the road, and he also had a fabulous orchard that contained all types of fruits and berries that was like an Aladin’s Den to us kids.

Fresh Logan berries, Raspberries, Blackcurrants, Red currants, Brown , Yellow and Green Gooseberries, Strawberries, Rhubarb, Pears,  Apples as well as vegetables to beat the band….

Pop taught me how to swim in Dollymount and how to fish.

In those days, in the Summer when you passed the bridge at Fairview park , from there ,all the way up to the bridge at Dollymount, there were people fishing when the tide was in,  and digging ragworm and lugworm  for bait when the tide was out .

Pop made his own fishing rods from bamboo and reels from scrap steel and used to cycle down to Clontarf to fish with the rods tied to his bike and his dog running alongside him.

On our very first outing, at age 7, at the bottom of Castle Avenue, I caught a 7lb Seabass, and a 2lb Plaice, while Brian, my brother, who was with us also, lost another even bigger fish trying to pull it over the sea wall .

Then it was straight back up to 41 where Skippy cleaned and filleted the fish , boiled some spuds, and fried the Bass in butter. I can still almost taste that fish , it was mind blowingly good, and the nearest I came to it was years later at a fish shack in Portugal where I had Wreck-Bass , incredible…..

Another occasion on a family holiday in Cork we got some Mackeral from some shore Fishermen who had hit a shoal.

They were brought back to the house and fried with Floury New Potatoes and frozen peas, nearly as good as the Bass….

The only fish we knew up to this was tinned Sardines, Pollack and Mackeral that we caught in Howth, very occasionally tinned Salmon, and what was commonly known as Red fish.

This was Smoked Coley and served on Fridays as it was a fast day, and bore very little resemblance to anything else, all I can remember was it was red and salty with the odd bone, never a great favourite of ours.

Beef Blood and the Outside Piece.

We didn’t have a lot of money in our house growing up but we always had food and usually on a Sunday it was Roast Beef, Topside or Housekeepers cut, and while my mother liked her meat medium rare , my father was a well done man .

The shape of the Beef enabled both of them to be satisfied with the centre being medium rare, and the outside being well done.

The meat was placed on a carving board covered in foil to rest in the kitchen and my mother would carve as she plated.

We used to take turns to” Bagsy “the outside piece which we all loved, but the jewel in the crown was the blood and juices that used to gather in the gulley of the carving board during and after carving.

This would be strained into a cup and we looked forward to our turn to savour the beef juices, we looked forward so much that we regularly fought  and lied over whose turn it was.

Batch Toasted Northside Style on the Open Fire with real butter 

In those days there was no central heating in our house and during the winter the fire in the breakfast room was kept lit almost constantly.

You could also buy a toasting fork which was a long wide skinny fork with an extendable handle that you had to organise the bread onto and then toast it on the embers of the fire. There was no such thing as electric toasters then and the way you usually had toast was by using the grill on the cooker.

In our house, we always toasted bread on both sides but as I found out later, a lot of my friends on the southside never bothered to turn it and toast the other side, heathens!

There was a great deal of skill required in toasting the bread properly on both sides on an open fire without achieving third degree burns, but the pain was worth it . Often at the very last minute the bread would fall off and be engulfed by the flames .

There was no comparison between this toast and electric toast, this was the Mutts.

It had to be Batch, cut thickly and smothered in real Butter, none of this spreadable stuff.

The whole process was a theatrical delight, from the anticipation, the concentration required to fork the bread securely, the smell of it toasting, watching it brown and then the celebration of a perfectly toasted piece of bread, Magic.

Croissants and Milk. 

The only foray I had to mainland Europe as a child was supposed to have been a camping holiday in Nice.

We left Dublin well laden down with 3 kids , tent and bags, in a Fiat 127 and took the ferry to Hollyhead, and on to London.

We stayed with friends overnight and took the Dover/ Calais Ferry the next day.

Our plan was to drive down through France to Nice but the Car broke down in Cannes in Normandy and we were forced to find accommodation until it was fixed.

This was a major problem as there was a postal strike in France at the time which meant my Father had to get a train to Paris to pick up the car parts required .

We ended up staying in Cannes for 3or 4 days in a family room in a very cheap hotel. During the day my mother would bring us to the park and make sandwiches ,or we would watch the tennis at Wimbledon on telly standing outside a shop window, and at night we would have chips with wine vinegar, a taste really alien to us.

In the mornings however, the lady who ran the hotel took a shine to us kids, and used to bring us into the hotel kitchen while she baked her breads and croissants.

fun in seeing our delight as we did in eating them.We never did get to go to Nice in the end…..

The nearest I came to this since was a bakery in Earlswood in Sydney , where arriving back to the hotel @ 5 or 6 in the morning, after a few sociables, we used to buy a bag of croissants straight from the oven in a local bakery next door and have breakfast before going to bed.