Joe McNamee: Why August is truly the cruellest month — for weather and food alike
An Irish August is a fickle creature, capable of raining on any parade in the most literal fashion, but when August is in a good mood, there is no finer month, the high point of summer.
An Irish August is a fickle creature, capable of raining on any parade in the most literal fashion, but when August is in a good mood, there is no finer month, the high point of summer.
If it has rained through June and July, August bears promise of redemption; if June and July have honoured their seasonal solar contract, and are then followed by a fine August, then it is gloriously excessive — after all, who ever spurned sunshine?
But, for me, August will forever remain the eternal heartbreaker, the cruellest month of all.
As I write, August is in one of her good ‘moods’.
In the tree-lined square below my balcony, squealing six-year-olds at a birthday party are chasing each other with water pistols, hysterical shrieks, raucous laughter, timeless and eternal grace notes in the soundtrack of high summer, and though it is still afternoon, barbecue smoke is drifting through the air like a culinary pied piper.
August is also the repository of my most evocative childhood food memories, more than any other month, including December, the ‘home’ of Christmas.
Most probably, it is because we always seemed to go on our holidays in August, when shop-bought alternatives supplanted my mother’s cooking.
I recall a scorching August in Ardmore, in a time before sun cream, when we browned to mahogany, then peeled to prawn-pink, spending more time in the ocean than fish.
And we ate like kings. Even my mother would struggle to ruin a sandwich.
Ours were made from pillowy, black-crusted batch loaf, filled with country baked ham and local tomatoes.
We ate hard boiled eggs, seasoned with sand and the sea salt on our lips.
Tayto came from bottomless bags. We guzzled flasks of sweet milky tea and warm bottles of Cadet white lemonade and all seven children had at least one ice cream cone every day.
In the evening, we were given a few pence for a bag of chips, an endless novelty to children who rarely ate them, and never, ever ate them at home.
But my animus towards August stems from the fact that it can give so much and then, so cruelly, whip it all away.
To be more specific, it is the final days before the return to school, when the sweetest of summer dreams morph into the nightmare of the impending return to the classroom.
I wasn’t a bad student, actually pretty good, if I paid attention, but events taking place in my head each day were always of far greater interest and those events always took place far away from any place of education.
It became infinitely more painful when I was sent to boarding school aged 12 and the run-up to that annual September exile was the source of my other August food memories, though less blissful, more bittersweet.
Once the solitary apple of my mother’s eye, our annual return-to-school shopping trip into town had become pretty much the only substantial time we spent alone together.
I would get my annual pair of jeans — pleading for Levi’s, settling mournfully for deeply uncool Dingos — and ‘school shoes’.
And then we would go for lunch in one of Cork’s late, lamented tea rooms, either Thompson’s cafe on Princes St or the splendour of the Pavilion tea room, peering regally down over St Patrick’s Street.
Delighted though I was to be squiring my beautiful mum, it was ultimately all about the cakes: chocolate eclairs, custard slices, jam and cream doughnuts, coffee and walnut, chocolate gateau, and on and on and on.
The choice was infinite and dizzying but my mother would ease my indecision by allowing me to pig out and pick three, which I’d then eat as if it were my final death row meal, knowing all hope ended with the very last morsel.
August, not April, truly is the cruellest month.
Quite some years ago, I wrote about Ailbhe Gerrard’s inaugural Field Exchange festival, on her Brookfield Farm, on the shores of Lough Derg, and it now returns for a second outing, bringing together artists and farmers in a celebration of sustainable agriculture and local food, in a three-day celebration (September 5-7) featuring art installations, musical performances, expert speakers, and lunch from chef Valentine Warner.
The Island Drift (September 5/6/7), presented by The Good Room and the Office of Public Works, is a small yet most perfectly formed cultural festival taking place on the impossibly beautiful Garinish Island, in West Cork, and the headliners in a programme of walks, talks, music, live concerts, poetry and plants includes Susan O’Neill, Blindboy, and Declan O’Rourke,
I want to flag a public conversation I will be having with Dr Steve Collins, a most fascinating character indeed, who spent many years delivering aid to famine-stricken African countries and conceived radical new strategies that have since saved millions of lives, and now lives in West Cork with his family, where he works as a highly progressive organic farmer.
Writing recently in a restaurant review of of my love for that iconic West African rice dish, jollof, it was surely serendipity that then drew my attention to Joyof Jollof Sauce (€5.95), a perfect introduction for anyone curious about a dish increasingly available on these shores, courtesy of the New Irish originating from that part of the world.
Granted, you’ll never top jollof — or pretty much any dish for that matter — that has been made from scratch but real care and attention has gone into putting together this blend of red peppers, garlic, ginger, chillis and spices, available in as both ‘mild’ and ‘spicy’, and brimming over with that smoky jollof musk.
Cooking is simplicity itself, adding the sauce to rice and water, try it with chicken or, better still, seek out and fry plantain, and it is absolutely sublime with anything from the barbecue.
