Ireland

Rap did come from blacks, not from the Irish. And to consider rap as traditional Irish, is like seeing an Asian man dressed as a little green man.

why are you obsessed with rap? do i not get to listen to it because im Irish? And i know the difference between traditional and hip hop and i know that traditional is more inspiring as it was sung by great Irish rebels.

The Russians actually gave the Bodhran to the Irish, and theRussians actually stole it from the Chinese.

Ireland has no decent food worth mentioning. If it werent for all the Indians moving there, everybody'd starve.

Guiness has a specific gravity greater than pine oil. I may be wrong on this one but someone should do an experiment and report back.

Do you mean the potato femine?

What are ya on about Farmerman??? Ive had beautiful meals in Ireland,
both in the Ireland Rep and Northern Ireland and there's nothing wrong with Guinness! Obviously you are referring to the Stout and not the Draught? :wink:

Ill bet the restaurants were "foreign" cuisine.

I almost died on Gallway mussels. They apparently are, as a nation, reticent about "Environmental toxins"

CG, no, Im serious, I had an office in Cork until about 3 years ago. We used the office as a source for CAD drawing for my mapping. So Id be in Ireland a least 5 times a year for a week or two at a time. CHARMING country. They love to spin yarns that would make you laugh and cry. Well, all this talkin and drinkin, nobody taught anybody how to do anything but boil stuff.. Im abstemious so Ive only ever drunk Guiness in very tiny amounts. I believe I could learn to love it were I not watching my own "axis of oval". Guiness was, as I recall, dense enough to float a quartz crystal on the foam. Now, perhaps I was dealing more with nanostructure and surface rather than density, because , now that Im thinking quartz has a density of about 2.5 so guiness would really have to be dense and viscous. Forget that I said that part.

Im still quite turned off by the "Grobe du Payees"

nope I didnt eat anything like Indian or Chinese...
I had lovely meals in Kinsale etc, in and around Cork, as I am allergic to Mussels, I dont eat them so I cant say if they were dodgey or not, but I had crayfish in Killarney which was beautiful and salmon in Dingle which was cooked to perfection...maybe I just got lucky huh? I think the worst meal I had was in Belfast where I had Fish 'n' Chips and they were soggy and just yuk.
Guinness is an acquired taste and the stout is very thick and yeah one could probably stand a spoon in it...but I dont mind me pint of guinness every now and again!

FM, if you were in Cork, and you were drinkin' Guiness rather than Murphy's, you deserve any queaziness you suffered. What a Phillitine. Me Mammy's Mammy was a County Cork girl . . .

I've had wonderful fresh salmon and trout in Ireland, and i love a good egg mayonnaise . . . I also loved the concept of the salad sammich--sliced cukes, onions, tomatoes with watercress and lettuce . . . mmmmmmmmmm . . .

That sounds good to me, and also possibly awful - depends on the bread, the cukes, the onions, certainly on the tomatoes, hard to have poor watercress unless it croaks as it is pretty feisty, but lettuce also matters...

I like watercess soup myself, but that is neighther here nor there.

In the west of Ireland, where small streams proliferate, fresh watercress can be had very easily. Ireland is far enough north to get 20 hours of full daylight in mid-summer, and the west has an average annual rainfall in excess of 50 inches. Vegetables grow extremely well. The sammiches with which i was familiar were made with the dense sort of bread one associates with local bakeries (yeast bread, not soda bread) and the vegetables were always fresh. As did my grandmother, the deli i frequented first buttered the bread, then spread mayonnaise. It was very much like being home in many ways.

Last time I was in Ireland was 1978, visiting relatives and toddling about the place. My mother is from Celbridge, Co Kildare. From what my rels tell me the place has changed dramatically.

Ironically, 1978 is the last year in which i was there.

set and goodfielder, my encounters with what passed for food was at least in the "common era".
I didnt have all really bad meals,
1I became violently ill on one (the mussels)

2 I distinctly recall several (business type meals with my staffers who took me to some places in Cork and Dublin). in which the meals were just bad. We had salmon that was just like salmon we have over here (farm raised)

3 I cant recall most of the meals as anything but pedestrian and therefore not worth mentioning

4 I had a few really good Indian , or Japanes style meals that were quite good but, not anything I can recall

5 I had, as an entire category, almost consistently BAD breakfasts.

6 Lunches, often on the road, if taken in a pub, would be almost an afterthought. This occured often up near Kildare and over in Limerick.
7I had a splendid beef something meal once at a place in Dundalk. I was there visiting a site that contained unexploded ordinance and we had our geophysics equipt sent over to flag any UXOs . I remember the project more than the meal.

Ive never tried Murphys , cause I was in my non drinking clothes and , since the Irish went on about fresh Guiness and how you drink it, I had to taste like a shot glass. All the while worrying that I would "backslide" .
They did have some of the really good non alcoholic Israeli beers, they were more like fizzy pancake syrups.Very sweet.

NOW, would I go back to Ireland, YOU BET, in a heartbeat. BUT NOT FOR ANY FOOD. Id pack a lunch .My wife and I were talking about driving the Wicklows and the NEphin Begs. I hardly (because of time constraints) ever got to spend much time seeing the land except around a few cities . Ive spent lots of time in my career travelling , but never had I spent any great amount of time seeing. Business travel (except for my Canadian work and African ) was always in, meet, out. Id have great memories of meeting with people and talking, but I rarely got times to just be alone and wander. Ireland tops my list to return and see more, second is Taiwan and China.
If I ever get back to Africa, it will be at the point of a gun.

Bad shellfish can make you violently ill anywhere. You have my sympathy, and i'll acknowledge that city restaurants i visited were usually pretty bad. But the smaller the city, the more likely that fresh ingredients would be used. The GBC (Galway Bakery Company) was a bakery and deli with a "sit-down" restaurant upstairs, wherein i had about the best commercially prepared trout i've ever eaten, along with good quality new potatoes and fresh vegetables. When i was there, in the 1970's, the smaller towns usually had one or two good places to eat. But keep in mind that then, as in our country in the 1950's, most people ate at home. The restaurant industry, such as it was, was to serve foreigners, busy office people, and drunks. The chippers handled that last category well enough, staying open past closing time. When i worked over there as a painter, we rarely had lunch, and i suspect it was a meal for which most Irish either made their own provision, or was one which they skipped. When i did have lunch while working, it was because my landlady made a bag of sandwiches. Most guys just brought a thermos of tea to the building site, and maybe a sandwich or two--usually, though, they had some tea and a smoke. We often worked from sun to sun, which meant having a large breakfast (and in small guest houses mine were always fresh and good), no or little lunch, and made up for it after work. In summer, you might put in a 16 or even 18 hour day. Given the amount of rain we had (54 consecutive days of measurable rainfall in the summer of 1978), we oftentimes could not work of a given day, so we "made hay while the sun shone," which for Irish farmers, is a very real expression. In winter, if you work anywhere which depends on sunlight, you'll be lucky to get 6 hours in in a day.

A friend of mine was a licensed salmon fisher. Then at least, salmon could not be taken in the ocean by the coastline, and people purchased very expensive life-time salmon fishing licenses for the lower portions of streams. Unlike the long American rivers, the short Irish streams and rivers are good places to take salmon, because they've just left the salt water and haven't begun to morph into the uglies yet. We ate fresh salmon steaks almost every Sunday during the holy hour, when the pubs closed for the afternoon. We supplemented that with fresh food bought at the butcher, the greengrocer and the bakery.

Much like America once was, when i lived there briefly, one did not have resort to supermarkets (they had them, but for the foreigners). You patronized the baker and greengrocer and butcher, you either knew the fishermen, or there was a local fish monger. The dairies delivered to your door. It simply was a different world. I don't account Irish "cuisine" as any kind of haute cuisine, but when done properly, as with almost anyone's food (the English excepted), it is quite good. One of the finest plain food meals i had was my landlady's "Irish stew," which was a flank roast cut into thick slices, lightly grilled and then baked in a heavy gravy with new potatoes and serve with fresh vegetables.

I ate quite well while there, and even found that the sandwiches offered in the small town pubs were of good quality. The only time i ate poorly was while in Limerick, Cork and Dublin.

I saw that earlier Set. I don't suppose you were anywhere near Sean Corscadden's Fine Guest House or Billy Byrne's Square Pub both in Kilcock summer of 1978 though :wink:

No, i was living in Sligo, workin' as a house painter.

I did run into some folks from Oz in Cork, though, in '77--actually at Blarney Castle. My maternal grandmother was a native of County Cork, so i went to Blarney to have my picture taken kissing the Blarney Stone to please her--she probably never appreciated what i went through, as i have a fear of heights. These jokers then attached themselves to me until i finally shook them in Cork. I suspect the motive was that i had lots of money and they had little--and i knew where to get lunch and they didn't. Don't they serve lunch in pubs in Oz?

I was there in the northern summer of 1978. It was a revisiting of childhood places. I remember as kid on holidays there the staple meal at lunch was a big saucepan of boiled potatoes (in their jackets) and a shared bowl of bacon, that was it. Oh and yes grandmother's soda bread. Summer holidays in Ireland. Very special to me and precious memories now.