Mr. Trinket was scheduled to fly from Shannon the next afternoon. I would take Joe to his train bound for Dublin, where he would spend a couple of nights, then head to London on business before returning to the States. The Queens of the Night were to make their exodus the following day. The night before that quick cascade of departures, I planned a memorable dinner to mark our group fare thee well to The Town. A special order was placed with the butcher’s shop, scarce but all-important “logs”—scarce save for around the Christmas holidays in The Town—were scrounged and saved and reveille calls placed for our mid-watch standers.
In the back of one of the cooking magazines to which I’d subscribed over the years I recalled reading a French country recipe for a whole roast leg of lamb, which seemed fitting for the old cottage’s equipment and former layout. What was now the living room, with its large open fireplace, had once been the kitchen of the building. “Kitchen” in this case was really meant to speak to the end of the open floor plan where the cooking would take place. The dividing walls that now stood on this floor, and I might even guess the upstairs, had been added by The Princess and her husband when they converted the old building into the holiday rental that it now was.
Bolted deeply into one side of the open grate was a large, swinging cast-iron arm, the kind one might imagine suspending a cauldron in an old paining. The hearth of the fireplace also extended well beyond what one would consider customary for a fireplace simply expected to provide heat. Once I looked at it in this frame of mind, this was without a doubt a “kitchen” fireplace. My plan was to use it for its original intention. Little did I know that it would give rise to such a legend that Joe’s boys still ask, when Your Man mentions that he’ll be seeing me, “You mean, the ‘leg of lamb in Ireland’ Trevis?”
When I ordered the joint from Mr. Sheehy and the lads, I had to explain not only what I wanted in the butchering of the leg, but also my intent so as to ensure their understanding of the cooking process.
“So, then …” said Ford, who was trying to understand my meaning, “you want the whole crube left on, bloody hoof and all?!” sliding further into a Scottish brogue with the question.
It wasn’t until a trip to the Internet café and a good, lengthy search to discover that a crube on a lamb is the equivalent of a trotter on a pig—the foot.
“Not the hoof unless that’s the only way you can make it work for me,” I responded. “I only need it attached as far as the ‘heel’ … the ….” I searched for the right word to make my chef’s intentions come across in butchery terms.
I dug back to the place in my mind where I’d stored mammalian anatomy of livestock for Meat Fabrication class in culinary school. No results. Though I dated our county’s 4-H queen while a junior in high school, I was not a boy from the farm. I couldn’t find the words to describe my need.
“I want to hang the leg,” I explained, “in front of the fire … to cook it. I need to run butcher’s twine between the Achilles tendon and the hock-end of the shank, so I need the attachment intact. Does that make any sense at all?”
Ford cocked his head the same way Sadie would later do when I dangled the great rear quarter of the animal in what she must have considered the middle of the room. It was then that, silent up until this point in the labored conversation, Finbar piped up from his task at the butcher’s block table behind the counter.
“Has the hearth a crane?” he asked while wiping his pink hands on a white side towel, thusly transferring the color from one to the other. “My ma used to roast mutton legs that way when I was a boy. She hung them from a hook on the crane and turned them every once in a while so as to cook ’em evenly. Is that what you’re lookin’ for?”
It was the first time since our first meeting in my many visits to the shop that Finbar had actually spoken to me.
“By ‘crane,’ do you mean the iron arm that swings in front?” I asked to confirm.
“Aye,” he responded, “has it got one of them? Is that what you’re going to be hanging it from?”
“Yes. But, I’m not going to use a hook. I read of using twine to loop through and then you just give it a spin,” I pantomimed, as if twisting the leg from the bottom, “and let it turn and then un-wind and re-wind until it needs spinning again.”
“You’ll not be burning any coal in the grate, now, will ye? Turf’ll be fine, like, but coal would ill-flavor the meat,” he warned.
I assured Your Man that I’d saved enough “logs” to fuel a blaze for several hours. Logs were really just split pieces of soft, round wood about ten inches long that could be purchased in sacks for Christmas fires. Never having executed this hazy memory of a recipe, I was far from sure of its success. Knowing that people have been cooking meat in front of fires for a considerable bit of time—and even into the past recent enough for Finbar to recall it—I was confident the result would be at least passable.
“I know just the one for ye,” Finbar assured me. “He’s a young wether hogget I’ve had my eye on for a while and he’d be the perfect bit of mutton for your plan.”
Upon protesting that it was lamb I was after and neither hog nor mutton, I got a quick lesson in the proper terminology of sheep meat. In Ireland, or this shop in Kerry at least, “lamb” is only lamb until the New Year’s Eve. On January first it technically becomes “mutton,” but is usually (and culinarily) referred to as “hogget.” In many other parts of the lamb-eating world, it might be sold as lamb until it reaches one year of age and has no permanent teeth. After it reaches a year but has no more than two incisors, the meat can be called “hogget” until that third tooth comes in, whereupon it is called “mutton.” The word “mutton” doesn’t actually reflect the animal’s age in months but the age it acquires more adult teeth. For all intents and purposes, the term “hogget” is an older lamb that is still mild of flavor but stronger than a spring lamb, while “mutton” is reserved for the meat of older, more strongly flavored sheep.
“We’ll have him brought to slaughter in the morning, but it’ll take a good few days to get you a proper-hung leg,” Finbar said, beginning as if making a note to himself before finishing the thought directly to me.
Knowing that one particular lamb, out wandering the fields at the very moment, was to be offed for my specific meal lent a heft to my planned preparation. I had expected to just get whatever meat the lads had in the case. If the milk-toothed wether was to give his life for my fireside experiment, I was committed to doing the animal honor in his preparation. It was still a little bit odd.
Turning to Ford, Your Man directed the plan like a boatswain to an able seaman.
“Cut it between cannon bone and pastern, but do it from the front so you don’t nick the tendon. Pierce a hole behind the hock so he can thread the twine.” And then, to me, he said, “Have ye twine?”
Without waiting for my answer, he was back to Ford.
“Give him a wee hank of twine too.” As an afterthought for which I would be quite grateful, upon carving the roast, he added, “And take out the hip all the way to the aitch bone and tie it back in so Your Man”—it was the first time I’d been called “Your Man” and it made me smile—“gets the flavor, but it’ll make it easier to carve. It’s how Ma did it.”
And with that, Finbar was back at the butcher block. I felt it was something of a breakthrough with Your Man. He’d always seemed the most skeptical of this tourist trying to fit in. His hearty, “Slan, Trevis” as I walked out of the shop along with a smiling thumbs-up through the window signaled a new level of acceptance.
With the weight of an animal’s life on my shoulders as I tried to ensure the success of the dish, I spent the next few days refining my plan. First, I allowed the usually well-cleaned fireplace to build a good bed of ashes. With a well-fatted leg from a hand-chosen wether hanging in front of the fire, I expected a good amount of drippings from the process. Fresh herbs were difficult to find that time of year, but the green grocer was able to order bunches of thyme, sage, rosemary, oregano, and savory to go with the readily available parsley. I wouldn’t use much herbage on the roast itself; I wanted only to accent the flavors intrinsic in the local meat, not mask them. Most of the remaining sprigs of the fragrant plants I tied and fashioned into a basting brush of sorts for the roasting.
On the morning of January 6th, I unwrapped the leg, fresh from the shop, on the countertop and rubbed it with a good bit of salt and black pepper and a couple of spoonfuls of the herbs—minced, but not too fine. I then patted it with some good olive oil and pressed in a few cloves of peeled and sliced garlic. More garlic, salt, and whole peppercorns went into a small pot with about a cup of the olive oil. It was into this pot that I placed my herb brush.
The roast was left to marinate and come up to room temperature for most of the day until we were ready for the culinary experiment.
Next came the fire. First my reserved ash was raked from under the grate between the andirons. There was enough for a four-inch thick bed to absorb the anticipated molten drippings. Chef Joe and I stacked pieces of round wood, picket fence style, around the ash bed. The pile reminded me of the parade grounds of Fort Michilimackinac, at the northern tip of my home state’s lower peninsula, that we used to visit annually in my childhood. Not unlike the Fort’s imposing pinewood ramparts, the purpose of the barricade was to discourage attack. Rather than warding off marauding troops, however, it was the furry female of the house our rampart was intended to deter.
Ford had, indeed, pricked a perfect-sized hole in the exact place I had foreseen the twine being threaded. I fed the line through a few times to make a four-cord loop about six inches long and tied it off in smart, sailorly fashion for the vertical rotisserie.
With a good base of hot turf smoldering, Joe, who I’d put in charge of all things fire this day, began to add wood. While the heat from turf and coal was far more intense and steady, the flames from the parched coppice lit the room with bright yellow light more incandescent than the deep red radiance of our typical fuel. The first load of dry softwood quickly burned down to chunky embers, so Your Man threw on a few more pieces, along with tufts of heather from the hedgerow, and I hung the leg of mutton.
We set the pot of steeped oil on one of the upturned logs nearest the fire to warm and more deeply infuse the brew.
Every two or three minutes, either Joe or I would get up from the wing-backed chairs we’d moved closer to the hearth than their normal standing places to anoint the leg with a blessing of the flavored oil and give it a spin. I had pulled the long brier pipe, which had until this night gone un-lit, and filled it with a fragrant Irish whiskey-soaked Cavendish tobacco. The room became thick with a scent spectrum of warmth. The spicy pine fire, smoldering with lacy heather, released fat-soluble phenolics from our-meal-to-come while the smoke from my pipe’s bowl added tones of vanilla from the wood that tempered the distiller’s spirits.
No wake-up call was required for our vampires. The open staircase acted as an internal chimney, and their room was the first at the top of the flight. It wasn’t fifteen minutes into the roasting that we heard stirring from above our heads. Within the hour they were a third of the way through their shower rotation with our hearthside tableau acting as on-deck circle.
The internal temperature of our meat was taking far less time to reach the desired 130°F than I had anticipated. The thick stones of the fireplace had first absorbed and then radiated steady heat to augment the direct energy of our fire. To slow the process I simply swung the hinged crane—as I had recently understood it to be called—a few inches away from the fire. Even so, the greater than seven-pound joint was nearing completion in just over two hours and before the last of the girls was finished in the shower.
Like the agneau de pré-salé of Mont-St-Michel Bay in Normandy, France has a unique flavor and texture based on its salt marsh diet, so too does the lamb that Mr. Sheehy sources have a characteristic all its own. Fragrant heather and wild herbs grow on the vast and savage hillsides where many shepherds herd their flocks for free summertime grazing. These plants root in the acidic soil and struggle their way through rock and weather to bloom in the short season. The strongly flavored herbs counter the sweet, rich grasses of the spring and summer pastures where the lambs are born and weaned.
Sweet balances sour and light counters dark. The rich and the lean of these sheep’s diet touches all of the flavor senses—sweet, salt, sour, and bitter and it is magnificence. At different times since my diagnosis, I have lost two of those important building blocks of flavor. Once, for about a month, I lost the ability to taste salt.
The flavors of simple, working-class, street food from around the world are some of a chef’s great joys. More “innovative” dishes than you’d think are based on these wonderful flavors. I was once having a bowl of such highly flavored but humble origin—Vietnamese noodle soup called pho (pronounced “fuh” in English)—when I noted something terribly wrong in my mouth. This normally highly flavored dish was coming across as flat and lacking. I lunch at this particular spot frequently and know the owner personally as well as professionally, so I was sure the dish had not changed. By the end of the day I had forgotten about the soup for other MS reasons, as old symptoms began to wash over me.
I had to nap four times that day and could hardly un-bed myself the next morn. The second day progressed with profound fatigue and the “loopiness” I’d first been made aware of at my diagnosis and experienced around disease progression. I knew that something “MS-y” was happening, and I didn’t have the energy to eat, so I didn’t think much about the prior day’s lunch experience.
Once that phase passed, however, I noted that something was seriously wrong with this chef’s palate.
While we taste all over our tongue, cheeks, and the back of our throat, there are concentrations of certain tastes in certain areas of the mouth. I noted that things were heightened in some areas and absent in others. A big “flavor hole” appeared in the center of my tongue, where salt receptors are concentrated. I wasn’t, I came to understand, tasting salt.
When trying to describe this symptom, some have said to me, “Well, that wouldn’t be too bad. I don’t like salt.”
It’s not just the taste of salt that goes missing when this happens to me; it becomes a spectrum of disorder. Chicken, for instance, doesn’t taste like “chicken.” Chicken tastes like a particular blend and combination of those four senses of sweet, salt, sour, and bitter. We know that combination as chicken.
I should have retorted to those downplaying my loss, “You can’t see the color blue? No biggie, you don’t like blue anyway.”
But blue isn’t just the color blue. It’s half of green and it’s half of purple. Without blue, green is just yellow. Without salt, every flavor is wrong. The same, unfortunately, also happens to my receptors of the taste of sweet periodically and for varying lengths of time.
It’s not that I care all that much for sweets, but flavors are balanced by one another. If a food doesn’t have a balance (and that’s not to say equal amounts) of sweet, salt, sour and bitter, we ask the eternal question, “Does this need something?”
Think of bread or oatmeal when you forget to add that pinch of salt—yuck! Toothpaste becomes shockingly sweet, pasta tastes like its namesake—paste, and coffee is nothing but aftertaste. Potatoes taste of dirt, lovely, young salads taste green and bitter like a rotting leaf off an old tree. Wine is a sour, bitter mess and beer, sans that sweet, malty grain flavor, is just a stingingly hoppy, astringent abomination.
The next time you see a color that would be changed by taking blue out of it, you may understand a little bit of the hell this symptom can be. How would that gray, midday sky look with white clouds and yellow trees in your yard? How about a sea black as night with bright yellow seaweed shimmering in the sun? Perhaps a bunch of grapes as bright red as sour cherries in July? Or, wine the color of blood?
You would feel like your whole world was changing. That’s what happens to me. The way I taste is not just a function of making my meals palatable, it is a definer of who I am. If Chef Trevis can’t taste, it can feel like there isn’t really a Chef Trevis anymore.
My sense of taste has waxed and waned in the years since that first shocking experience, giving way to the knowledge that this neuro pathway is damaged and may one day abandon me without return. It is perhaps for that reason that I try to take conscious note of flavors both common and extraordinary. I have come to appreciate the nuances—the remarkable joys—of the simply sweet and the subtle sapor, for they will as likely end as the warm Indian summer afternoons of October. I have dined on foods great and simple, profound and homey. Ireland has taught me the extraordinary joy of ingenuous foods more than any experience in my professional life.
Cheap plates and mismatched flatware alongside water glasses and coffee mugs befitting the array of plonk the local supermarket availed adorned our kitchen table. Potatoes roasted in the last of my duck fat and carrots mashed with butter, cream, and thyme played humble accompaniment to the headlining joint. The penny brown of our tournée-cut Kerr’s Pink spuds, creamy ochre of crushed carrots and garnet slices of the late weather brought autumnal color to the mid-winter feast.
Had this unsophisticated supper been the last I was ever able to taste, the bounty from hills and fields of west Kerry would have offered the kindest of memories to accompany my bald palate. So too would have been the happy sound of Sadie at her first bone barely audible above the moans of satisfaction punctuated with laughter at the delicious absurdity of this food in this place with these people.
* * *
The pub where our septet decided to spend our final evening together was not The Neighbor’s pub. Rather, we decided on a more touristy establishment that offered music nightly as opposed to The Neighbor’s place, where musical entertainment was more of a whimsical happening than by design. The place had the country village pub look that the newfangled “Irish” pubs that have sprung up around the globe have tried to emulate, at least in the décor.
“Antiques and old shit,” as Da calls it, were strewn, hung, tacked, tucked, and generally displayed all about the place. There was nary a place where something could be stuck that something wasn’t, from old bottles and handbills to farm implements and sports hardware. If the building couldn’t support itself as a pub, curio shop was a viable second option. The surprising density of the crowd, however, put to rest any worry of its sustainability as purveyors of the drink.
Though it was a Friday night, our collective had assumed aloud over slices of the most incredible (and with my new-found knowledge of the distinction, first) leg of mutton any of us had ever had the good fortune to devour, that the Christmas holiday season and its accompanying visitors would have made for a relatively quiet night out. What we didn’t notice, and would not notice for a little while longer, was that the vast and overwhelming gender in the pub this night was female. They were older than I was accustomed to seeing in this place but were mostly, with few exceptions, women.
In the rural parts of the country the old tradition of “Women’s Christmas” is still observed on the Feast of Epiphany, and The Town is about as rural a town as you’re going to find, particularly when it comes to adhering to traditions. Nollaig na mBan, as Women’s Night is known in the Irish language, is one such tradition that may be dead or dying in some of the more cosmopolitan parts of the island. No one, however, had ever accused The Town or its women of being of the “more cosmopolitan” set. In parts such as these, women are afforded a much-needed rest and night on the town after catering to the holiday needs of family and friends.
The ladies of The Town had taken off their holiday hostess’ aprons and donned party attire for a well-earned night on the town while the men of the family stayed at home to look after the brood. Judging by the joviality of the crowd and our difficulty finding a table to accommodate our number, many of The Town’s women thought the tourist pub was the perfect setting for their end-of-Christmas do.
After a lap around the cavernous four rooms of the establishment, we found empty chairs at a table peopled by a gaggle of personable women of mixed age. Room was made, but only for the women of our group. We three lads were chased off like roosters from the chicks and sent to ferry a round for our women. Abiding men that we were, we also offered a round to the first tenants of the table. After delivering all the glasses we could carry in one and a third trips, Mr. Trinket, Joe, and I made for the all but empty stools at one of the four bars in the building to watch the show.
And what a show it was … most of which we were sworn to keep to ourselves by an oath of secrecy. We were “allowed” by the ladies of Women’s Christmas to stay because of two important factors: 1) we were tourists, not residents and therefore not aware of the sororitial gathering we had interrupted, and likely more important, 2) we continued to purchase, if not deliver, rounds when it came around to our call.
When it came to Hester’s round, she came to me looking quite perplexed and in need of assistance.
Knowing that I, because of my disabilities, have inhabited a world that can teeter on the edge of political correctness, she needed advice as to the proper way to order the drink she wanted. She had been schooled in a South Boston pub she’d visited years earlier as to the inappropriateness of requesting a “Black & Tan” in Irish pubs. The drink she referred to is a half pint of light ale topped with half pint of stout. During her apparently scarring dressing down, she learned of the Irish Royal Constabulary Auxiliary Force and their horrific reign over the country from 1920 to1921.
The Black and Tans (Dúchrónaigh in Irish) were tagged with the name owing to the color of the improvised uniforms of the former World War I veterans recruited for the task of wiping out the Irish Republican Army. It is said that they looked the color of Kerry Beagles when they first arrived and the name stuck. While the hardened and recently unemployed veterans were commissioned to police the IRA, “policing” wasn’t their training or often the outcome. They terrorized the civilian population as much as, if not more than, their Republican targets and often in retaliation for IRA actions that the eventual victims had nothing to do with.
The sacking, looting, and burning to the ground of villages suspected of harboring fugitives touched very close to The Town and I was grateful for Hester’s discreet concern.
I had no idea what the proper name for the drink might be in Ireland, never having had the desire to dilute a pint of black myself. I motioned to Your Man behind the bar and tried to order the pint as tactfully as I could.
“Your One here would like a pint of half Harp Lager and half Guinness,” I nearly whispered as one might if ordering a drink called a “Cracker” in a north Florida bar.
“One Black & Tan then, is it?” replied the publican.
“Right … one,” was all I could say, but Hester, who had been living for years with the fear of offending someone in ordering a damned pint of beer, wouldn’t let it be.
“I thought it was offensive to call it that here,” she said with a wave of her arm to encompass the entirety of the country with her theatrical gesticulation.
Your man behind the bar took a moment from searching for the special spoon that can be balanced on the side of the glass in order to “float” the darker stout on top of the lighter beer.
“Look,” said Your Man, “if we got ourselves in a bunch every time some Yank came in here and said something offensive, we’d spend more time out in the street than behind the bar.” He had a good point. “Most of yous don’t even know who the hell the Black and Tans were, let alone the shit they did. But they didn’t do it to me and my family, and most of the business in this place comes from Americans anyway. You’re a pretty woman. If you’d like to chat about history with me after my shift, I’m all in for it.” Hester nearly sparkled at the idea. “We’re not going to judge ye for being insensitive; and I thank ye for trying. But I will judge you for the felony ye are committin’ against that porter,” he said, simultaneously pointing to the glass behind him and validating my very point as to the atrocity being carried out upon Arthur Guinness’ finest.
In the years that followed, I have kept the barman’s thoughts in mind as I write for and speak to members of the MS community. There is such a thing as being overly sensitive when talking about this, or other conditions like mine. I’d never use the most offensive of the debilitated lexicon, of course, but I’m not going to tiptoe around on eggshells to make sure we offend no one, either. Some have gone as far as admonishing me for saying that I “live with MS.”
“It makes it sound like that’s all you do—live with the disease!” one reader once commented.
Assuredly, I never meant for my standard line of introduction at events to mean any more than “I have it, it can’t be cured, and I’m getting on with my life.” Whenever someone calls me on my relative insensitivity when it comes to disability language, I think back on Your Man and what he said. It brings things into focus … and it makes me want a pint.
Sadie Awaits her First Bone