Michael Moynihan: In search of one of the most elusive native dishes of Cork city

No sign of tripe and drisheen on the menu in the restaurants of Cork

Customers buying tripe and drisheen at O’Reilly’s stall in the English Market, Cork in June 1959. Picture:Ref. 904K

THE precise year need not detain us unduly, suffice to say that your columnist was probably dressed in sensible short pants and Clark’s Commando shoes.

Which would locate the event in the fashion wilderness of the very early seventies.

The location was the English Market, where my mother was buying some provisions when she was stopped by an acquaintance. I use this term advisedly, but then again ‘frenemy’ was still decades away from everyday use.

I should have realised, small child though I was, that there was something up when this lady inquired as to what was in our shopping bag, revealing a shocking determination to intrude that would be anathema to a nosy parker like myself, even now.

When my mother said she had this and that, and mentioned some tripe and drisheen for our tea the pal laughed with the kind of affected, silver-bell effect known well to connoisseurs of Cork snobbery.

Working at O'Reilly's tripe and drisheen stall, St Philomena's Road, Gurranabraher, Cork in 1953. Picture:Ref. 95G

Then she said she “didn’t care” for that kind of food.

This stunned me almost physically, that someone would somehow not enjoy tripe and drisheen. 

I would have been prostrate with shock but in my mind there was an awful lot more sawdust strewn on the walkways of the Market back then. And I had my good short pants on, remember.

I don’t remember my mother’s rejoinder, though I have no doubt it suited the occasion, but the scene came back to me recently when I searched in vain for an outlet in Cork which serves tripe and drisheen, a truly native dish.

This journey was sparked by a clip of RTÉ television archive in which a cameraman appeared to amble around Cork on a random journey, capturing people and places now long gone given it was dated around 1975.

I can’t speak for other readers but the older I get the more fascinated I am with such clips, many of which can be found on the RTÉ archives.

The ordinariness has a shining poetry to it: people getting off buses and strolling Patrick Street, the surprise when a shop facade or laneway looks to have survived the decades, even the headscarves and shopping bags (whatever they contained).

Anyway. During this clip of life as it was lived 45 years ago, the action shifted to a pub, The Green Room, during a busy lunch hour. As customers came and went near the counter, many of them took in the food menu hanging near the bar, which offered a range of hearty options from Irish stew (at 40p), an unexpected sophistication in pate and toast (32p) to tripe and onions for a very reasonable 25p.

(An aside: kudos to anyone who can recall where The Green Room was; dubious congratulations to the man I met for coffee last week who not only knew it but had often been there.)

Mary Rose Moore and Donagh O'Reilly selling tripe and drisheen at the English Market. But why is no longer available in Cork restaurants?

Yet one of Cork’s signature dishes is now hardly available at all within the walls of the city, which I find surprising.

Not so much because Cork has a strong claim on the title of Ireland’s culinary capital but because according to outsiders nothing is more redolent of the Corkonian than identifying him or herself with all that Cork has to offer.

This is an observation with plenty of documentary evidence to support it. Older readers may recall the great newspaper columnist Donal Foley of Waterford suggesting that Cork people were so numerous in the civil service that reading this newspaper was a way to signal one’s pedigree and secure a promotion — as well as drinking a certain stout brewed on the northside of Cork city when in company with one’s superiors.

(Another aside: for the benefit of slow learners this drink has been identified by Theo Dorgan as “mother’s milk to those of us reared in sweet Blackpool.”)

During the same decade, Foley referred to we had a Corkman as Taoiseach of the country, of course. 

Again, readers of a certain vintage may recall Hall’s Pictorial Weekly lampooning Jack Lynch as the ultimate Corkman in exile: there were overt elements in the sketches showing Jack at home — puffing on a pipe at the fireplace, with the Glen Rovers jersey hanging on the wall — but the coup de grace usually involved his wife, Máirín, emerging from the kitchen informing him sadly that her Drisheen Mirabeau had been burnt.

(Yet another aside: this was a reference to The Mirabeau restaurant in Dublin, which may or may not have been the most sophisticated restaurant on the island of Ireland but it certainly seemed to be the only restaurant on Ireland, so regularly did it feature in the media. We were a simple people then, I suppose).

All of which brings me back to my initial issue.

Why is tripe and drisheen not to be found in the restaurants of Cork?

I had my hopes pinned on The Farmgate in the English Market but, unfortunately, on my research visit last week I discovered that it was closed for renovations, which was a major blow. 

I have in the past enjoyed tripe and drisheen in the restaurant, and it is the full experience: tripe with a good texture but not too chewy, drisheen cooked just right and delicious with some salt, boiled potatoes and onions drifting in milk to accompany the main element. Perfect.

(One further aside incoming from the food writers of this paper: stick to your lane there like a good man.)

Down memory lane: Drisheen meat factory in the 1950s.

I’m aware that other dishes have their adherents in establishing one’s Cork bona fides. Spiced beef remains a constant, particularly at this time of year, and not just in a performative sense: more than one city establishment incorporates spiced beef into its sandwich offering.

Bodice can be more difficult to find in a restaurant setting, certainly in comparison with the great old days a couple of decades ago when an establishment known to your columnist set plates of bodice on the counter when customers were at their most vulnerable.

(Yet one more aside: nothing like salty pork finger-food to stoke the thirst.)

Yes, Chester cake is available. Yes, you can get Tanora anywhere civilisation is indicated by the telegraph poles.

But tripe and drisheen appears to be elusive. I am open to the charge of laziness here — that there’s nothing to stop me from going into the Market some day and buying my own, and cooking it myself. Consider that acknowledged. I am open to lessons on the finer point of preparation.

But surely consuming the ultimate Cork dish  in the centre of Cork is the ultimate Cork experience?

Perhaps the reopened Farmgate will offer this weary traveller respite.

Perhaps I’ll have to tiptoe into the ghost of The Green Room and order at the counter, and watch the spectres of the bar staff keel over in shock when I offer them euro notes or a Revolut card instead of 25 old pennies.

Whatever they charge me, it’ll be worth it.