I AM glad to hear that blahs are still made and eaten in Waterford city, and the sight of proud Waterford men and women extolling their delicacy to RTE's Clare McKeon on Moveable Feast recently reminded me of those days when my own town boasted four small bakeries whose blahs were delicious.
Clare swallowed the Waterford line about blahs being exclusive to Waterford. They may be nowadays, but, as I say, they was once made in Ross and in some of the towns of Kilkenny.
Where did it originate, this soft, spongy, delicious little flat cake of bread? France, said a Waterfordman to Clare, trying to put an exotic coating on it. A traditional Irish delicacy, I'd say, the word blah coming from the Irish bleathach. O Donaill's dictionary glosses this as an oatmeal cake.
"I don't recollect you ever being in need of a blackman in your young days acting the maggot around Ross," writes a lady from my home town who signed her letter "Guess Who?" She went on to say that she will leave a drop of whiskey for me in Jimmy Hanrahan's if I can tell the nation what a blackman meant in our part of the world in days gone by. "I bet you have no idea," she says.
Indeed I have, and I'm glad to tell my friend, whoever she is, that the word is still remembered, if not still used, between Clonroche and Enniscorthy. It meant a go between in matters amorous; a fellow who'd introduce you to a girl, and assure her, like, that you were fairly harmless, before you got around to asking her the serious question of how her granny was for slack. Patrick Kennedy had it in Evenings in the Duffrey a century and more ago: "Started Mick on a courting expedition, giving him for a blackman a lively fidget of a farmer."
In Scotland one of their words for a go between is a blackleg. In Ulster the term is, or was, blackfoot. Carleton has this in Farilorougha the Miser: "You want to make me a go between, a blackfoot."
Why black man, leg or foot? Now I'd buy anybody who could tell me that a Christmas drink.