Some other Christmas

In late 1989 I travelled to a small Town in County Tipperary called Cahir, My remit was to sort out the restaurant of a small Hotel, which historically was a hunting lodge from the days that English Aristocracy could afford such luxuries. The first thing that struck me was the darkness, it was early December, it was bloody cold and the hotel was very much hidden in the woodland. However It soon became apparent as to why it was a hunting lodge; the place was teeming with wildlife and for the first time in my career, I had to turn people away from the back door of the kitchen with the freshest ingredients I have ever seen. One chap turned up with a fifteen-pound Wild Salmon that was still alive in a bag over his shoulder and when he dropped it into my huge Belfast sink it flapped around like Id never seen.

“It never ceases to amaze me, but no matter where I travel in the world, I always seem to end up meeting a ’Malt’.”

Another man turned up at almost midnight offering me two, whole venison and a bag of partridge, it was never ending, every day…. every evening. Then one cold evening there was a knock at the kitchen door and their stood a man of small stature and in his unmistakeably Maltese accent he offered me two wild boars.  Not something id been offered before, the price was right … it was a novel ingredient … and this man intrigued me. So I invited him in offered him a hot drink, which he politely declined… but he cheekily made a beeline for my cooking brandy!

He was from Mosta, his name was Albert and for obvious reasons I’m not going to give you his last name but he claimed to know my family which didn’t actually surprise me as ‘Mariani’ is quite an unusual name. (I believe there is only one family in Malta with the name) and they are spread all over the island!

I took an instant liking to him and after a few brandies, purely to keep the cold out you understand he started to tell me about his smallholding and that he could get me almost any wild food I wanted?

“It was only two months  previous that I had been working down Beauchamp place in Knightsbridge in Anthony Worrall Thompsons Restaurant and the nearest I came to mud was the compost that came packed around my Jersey Royals! “

Well … when someone makes you an offer like that in deepest darkest, remote Ireland and your only purpose in life is to add quality and value to a restaurant; you would be a fool to turn it down. He called again two days later with a bag of the finest Hare’s I’d seen in a long time. There must have been twenty of them and after preparing them all I briefly considered opening a fur shop!… well for about five minutes.

I paid Albert and as it was almost midnight he helped himself to my brandy. It was during this latest soirée into my ‘Four Star’ that he invited me around to his smallholding. Apparently it was in the next valley but the tarmac didn’t venture that way and we would have to walk after the muddy track finished.

It was only two months  previous that I had been working down Beauchamp place in Knightsbridge in Anthony Worrall Thompsons Restaurant and the nearest I came to mud was the compost that came packed around my Jersey Royals!  However; Albert promised me a ‘Hussie’ or if you’re an Englishman, a Capon? Now there’s an interesting beast? My grandfather used to keep them as I’m told did every Maltese family that had more than ‘two point five’ square feet of scratching land.

In England the physical castration of a bird was long ago deemed inhumane, for a while they ventured into the world of chemical castration but if they had proved that antibiotics can be passed through the food chain, I wasn’t taking any bloody chances with chemicals that could do that to you!

There was something about its succulent sweet tasting meat that set it apart from other poultry.

So the offer was one I couldn’t pass up. As it often is on a Sunday afternoon in middle earth Ireland, it was raining, I had the day off, the kitchen was organised to work without me and I felt confident enough to leave it in a Sous Chefs capable hands.

As most woodsman did and as Albert promised we walked until the beaten track finished and the dank dark woodland began to close in. A mist began to descend as the wood became thicker and the smell of musty woodland started to cling to my clothes, but after about half an hour we came to a clearing with a small wooden house that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a ‘Grimms’ fairy tale, there were no other signs of life, well human life anyway, there were plenty of birds and boxes that he used to dry things like sausages, ham and fish.

Albert it would seem was a true gastronaut, he gave me a brief tour of his outside larder, where there were venison and wild boar sausages, dried ‘Duck Ham’, two venison carcasses and a number of wild fowl hanging in their feather, he also had a large cold smoker in which he was smoking some haddock he’d traded with his neighbour who was a trawler man.

We soon settled before the warm open fire, where Albert proved just as generous with his own Poitín as he was with my cooking brandy. His wife would be home in a couple of hours (In Ireland that’s three to four) and he’d promised her a festive feast.So after about 4 Poitín’s we decided on using the haddock he’d been smoking and make some fresh Soda Bread to go with it.

This we did, he had the whey and all the necessary farinaceous ingredients so in about 15 minutes I knocked up some traditional treacle soda bread, which couldn’t be bettered to go with his smoked haddock, sliced very thinly served raw with some lemon, dill and lashings of butter.

So there we were in the deepest, darkest middle earth Ireland, dark, damp and very wet, surrounded with the most un mediterranean like ingredients possible, but the one thing that was certain was that Maltese hospitality was served well.