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On St. Patrick’s Day – Giving Thanks for Memories of Food

Posted on | March 17, 2009 | 2 Comments

St. Patrick’s Day 2009. I give thanks today for having experienced a brief glimpse of Ireland; nine years ago in Galway on the blustery west coast of that beautiful country. Fresh out of college and fresh off the boat, I grew up in Ireland, landed my first job out of college, discovered my first sense of freedom, and in the end, made my first major life decision – to forgo conventional wisdom and travel the path of aspiring writer and journalist. And there was the food, always the food. Often, it was the only entertainment I could afford, and it served the dual purpose of feeding me and teaching me new things, like the fact that pastry is so much easier to make when you can see your breath in the kitchen.

I used to make tart shells in the mornings while the peat fire slowly warmed the dining room, then the hall, then the kitchen. My roommate read the paper wearing her gloves and hat. I’d eat brown bread and butter, and drink black tea; how could I ever forget the rush-to-boil-then-pop! of the electric kettle, pulling duty dozens of times per day. Kitchen-sink savory tarts were a fabulous way to reuse all the food we had, every crumb, because I often wasn’t able to buy groceries until Saturday. Tips, after all, paid for pints. That was the rule.

I remember these things so clearly now, as I do each St. Patrick’s’ day, when for a flash, Ireland is everywhere in the American consciousness – maybe a fantastical, manufactured version, yes, but it spurs me to memory all the same. The food I remember is not corned beef, or shepherd’s pie, though I love those foods in their own right. My starkest memories are of that black tea – at least nine cups a day, and the warm brown bread with butter.

People have many opinions about what a blog should and should not be. I too sometimes fall into the trap of thinking about content in the frame of optimized, eye-tracked grids of keywords and short bulleted lists — all things that distract me from sharing in this space what makes this tiny slice of cyberspace mine alone.

In the crowded, competitive space that is FOOD on the Web, I want to return to a bit more of what makes cooking unique to my own experience. Food, like taste, is intimate and personal. It can be cool and glamorous for some, I suppose, but at it’s core it is tied intrinsically to each individual based on what a local restaurant in my neck of the woods calls “memory and comfort.”

So, I’m thankful today for my comforting memory of Ireland. It has reminded me, perhaps indirectly, of the intimacy of what we share when we share what we eat. These memories after all are at the core of the reason I cook, and why I continue to seek some measure of mastery over the quest to satiate myself and others in personal ways.

Thank you to all of you who read this blog and to each of you who visit and spend some measure of your surely busy days listening to what I have to say.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

WBS

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