Original Recipe

 

I never post photos of meals, but bear with me.

There are KFC franchises all over Ireland, but you won’t find anyone posting photographs of the meal, unless making a report to public health.

Fried chicken at independent restaurants is generally excellent. Last year I heard a story on the Blindboy podcast that might explain why.


When “Colonel Sanders” sold his franchise business in the US, he held on to the business in Canada, and the worldwide franchise rights. An Irish businessman named Pat Grace met up with The Colonel and held the franchise for Kentucky Fried Chicken in Ireland. After the Colonel died, lawyers got involved, and Grace was forbidden to use the name “Kentucky Fried Chicken” or claim any relationship to the original recipe.

So for many years, Grace continued selling excellent fried chicken spiced to perfection. When the family closed the restaurants, they continued selling the spices, marketed as Graces Perfect Blend. Many chicken shops in Ireland use it, such as the legendary, “The Forks in the Bag You Gowl,” Chicken Hut in Limerick.

And yes, you can order kilos of the mix and make your own, as evidenced by the photo above. That chicken leg brought back a lost corner of childhood. 

If you don’t want to order it from Graces, you can make your own. Here’s a Canadian chef reverse engineering the recipe, telling the Pat Grace story. 

To be clear, the company says that it is NOT the original recipe, and they would know. 

The Voice Ella Young

I’ve written before about Ella Young, and I remain captivated.  (Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately) 

Here’s something I put together to convey why.

In the 1920s, Ella Young, a fifty-something Irish poet, folklorist, and revolutionary, is living in newly independent Ireland. The new republic offers little to women like herself, indifferent to husbands and priests. Seeking solace and direction, Ella visits a holy well in Kildare. There she recalls her girlhood dream of California: deserts and giant trees. She vows to visit them someday. The next week she receives a letter from America inviting her on a speaking tour, telling Irish folk tales to children.

Her tour is popular, but it is not children who sit at her feet and listen, it’s their parents: Irish immigrants hungering for connection to their culture and ancestors. Ella restores to them stories of struggling heroes, half-forgotten place names, and ancestral landscapes.

When her speaking tour ends, Ella takes the train west, as far west as she can. There she meets the deserts and the redwoods. She never returns to Ireland. Instead, she lives a peripatetic life among the artists and poets, beatniks and weirdos of California.

Through the thirties, forties, and fifties, she adapts her Irish mystical tradition, teaching that the world contains creatures wiser than ourselves, and that nature is sacred and deserves our protection. These are familiar notions now, but not so then.

By the end of her long life, she had partied with bishops, chanted rituals at Shasta, debated with vegans, rode horses with millionaires, picnicked with laureates, and hunted fairies at Lobos. Dressed in purple robes, she delivered lectures at Berkeley. For years.

No one who met her ever forgot her. She restored their connection with the sacred nature, everyone’s rightful inheritance. Ella left us one recording, a conversation on KPFA about how to talk to a mountain. No one on the radio had ever claimed that the earth was a living goddess. Ella Young is the ancestor of every passionate tree-sitter, neopagan witch, and grubby permaculturalist.

You’ve never heard of her. But once you hear her story, you’ll never forget her.

While I was in Santa Cruz in November, I sent away to Pacifica Radio for a CD of that recording. Elsa Gidlow tells the story of how this recording was made in her autobiography, I Come With My Songs. (I don’t have that book with me, so I can’t share it here.)

When I got back to Ireland, I realized that we don’t have CD players anymore! Then I remembered our twelve-year-old car does. I recorded the half-hour interview off the car speakers with my phone. Here is a link to a poor quality mp3 of “Kinship with the Earth.”If you want to order the real thing, or other historic recordings from KPFA, they have a huge catalog.

In the interview, she talks about her relationship to mountains, and introduces the incredulous interviewer to the practice of engaging in conversation with mountains. Living in Santa Cruz as long as I did, I’m familiar with living with a mountain on the horizon, Loma Prieta. Donegal is blessed with a chain of mountains, including the one I’m looking at right this minute, Muckish.

Muckish, image and substance.

Winter seas

 

I always thought people who went swimming in a near-freezing sea were cracked, but then I tried it.

That’s me and the Dunfanaghy Dippers last week off Portnablaugh. There’s an exhilarating thrill and addiction to it. The water isn’t that much colder than the Monterey Bay. When our skin turns red, we call it “The Wild Atlantic Tan.” 

Today, there was too much winter so no one swam. 

Last week I also learned that early spring is the beginning of seaweed foraging season. 

The Irish have a long tradition of using seaweed for food, medicine, and fertilizer. Naturally, there are many words related to seaweeds.

Here’s a list from @TheIrishFor (link)

1. Feamainn - the general term for seaweed.

2. Cadamán - seaweed found on the upper part of the beach.

3. Barrchonlach - seaweed found on the upper part of the beach, also,

4. Bodóg - a tuft of seaweed. This also can mean a heifer.

5. Cáithleach - light seaweed (but can also mean phlegm).

6. Lóch - light seaweed or chaff.

7. Ceilp - that variety that is called ‘kelp’ in English.

8. Lústrach - withered seaweed. This can also mean obsequious.

9. Múrach - brittle seaweed or fine clay.

10. Carraigín - that variety that is called carrageen moss in English.

11. Rúscán - a variety of seaweed. This can also mean a strip of bark.

12. Raibh - floating seaweed.

13. Scotach - tufted seaweed.

14. Soipíneach - this is the Irish word for nest but can also mean a heap of seaweed.

15. Sraoilleach - scrappy, raggy growth.

16. Racálach - cast-up seaweed.

17. Turscar - also, cast-up seaweed.

18. Féar Muir - literally, sea grass.

19. Fear gliomach - long ribbons of it.

20. Duileasc - dulse in English.

21. Rapán - another name for dulse.

22. Creathnach - yet another name for dulse… which also means terrifying.

23. Leathach - a kind of broad seaweed. Leathach also means two-parted.

24. Dúlamán - another name for it made popular by Clannad. Thanks to @TheLuckyHand for that one.

25. Fuip - means a whip or a tangly variety of seaweed. Adorably, fuipín is the word for a puffin chick.

Like many traditions that faded in the 1970s, there’s been a reclamation. Above, my friend collects peppered dilisk, the truffle of the sea. You clip it off so it continues to grow and can eat it right off the rock, which I did. Delish. Another thing I would have thought was cracked. Here’s an Irish Times article about Ireland and its sea vegetables.

The seaweed that looks like black garbage bags is the one I collected the most of. My friend called it something that sounded like “slah-oke” but you can hear the three dialects of “sleabhac” at this site. Most Americans would know it by its Japanese name, nori.

The word sleabhac (nori, laver, sloke) also refers to the resilient mix of tough dermal bone and keratinized cells that form the inside of an animal horn, the part that gives a horn its strength. Because of the potency of seaweed, the word can also refer to a mysterious otherworldly being. It’s used in the phrase meaning, “May the devil take him.” Expressions meaning “let him go to the devil”, or “he can go to blazes”, literally translates as “let him have the seaweed”. To “offer my two-cents worth” is literally “put my oar into the seaweed.” The quarrelling over seaweed rights was just as fractious as encroachment on a turf patch and is reflected in the proverb meaning, “I’m okay, let the guy have the seaweed.” (link)

This is “rack.” Which is used in the bath.

It only took a few hours in the food dryer to preserve what I had collected. I don’t eat much of it, so this should last me the year. But I’ll go back to that beach and collect a few hot bath’s worth of rack. A tonic for my Atlantic tan.

Winter solstice sun 

A Visit to Yosemite

I use this blog to tell stories to my friends about life in Ireland, but I spent the month of November in Santa Cruz and wanted to a California story. 

My mom died in May of 2020—of old age, not covid. She died in the same hospice she had worked in, in the bed she choose for its view of the garden. Despite covid regulations, the hospice allowed my dad and two sisters to sit with her in her last days. The best kind of death. 

Like most families that year, mine delayed her memorial. Flights resumed and I was able to fly home for it. My three sisters and I arrived anxious. Our memories of family gatherings are not unalloyed, but that’s nothing special either. When I was back in Ireland, what I most remembered about the funeral was how we have lived long enough to heal ourselves. 

The Awesome Power of Glacial Exfoliation

In their sixth decade, 

Four girls gather at their mother’s funeral. 

Reconciling in a Clovis trailer park, 

Not one cries openly. 

Each sister prays for compassion.

Each sister strains to be seen.

Each sister hungers for cultivation. 

Each sister lacks what she lost.

Each sister sinks as the accolades approach.

“Your mother was a saint.”

“All the nurses looked to her.”

“Your mother cared for my father.” 

“She was so generous.”

In secret the sisters say: 

She was a lovely person. 

I wish I had known her.

After the funeral meal, cousins find their footing

In the scree of occult disclosures.

A gossip game of chutes and ladders.

Sex and shame, up and down the family tree.

In their sixth decade, 

Four women arrange for the photo. 

They smile and summit the peaks of their hearts 

Deep like mountains where torrents of 

Truths eroded devotion and anything not a mountain.

The next day the sisters visit Yosemite.

Leaving dad in the double-wide 

Alone with his whiskey and rosary. 

In the pioneer graveyard near the waterfall

The youngest sister cries out. 

Some trouble with her contact lens.

If she can’t fix it, she’ll be blind the rest of the day. 

Her eyes are dry. 

The oldest sets her face to the wind

Coming off the cascade. 

Her rheumy eyes large and scary

Like mom’s.  

The youngest holds her contact lens 

Like a fey goblet on her fingertip. 

She touches it to the eldest’s cheek.

Once, twice, thrice, and again. 

It fills with tears. 

She makes a practiced gesture toward her eye.

The sisters resume their ramble

Clear-sighted, high-hearted.