SO winter is finally here. There was a rim of white over the Dublin mountains on Monday morning, and grey crusts of half-melted snow in Phoenix Park. The leaves were abandoning their long tenancy on the trees and were fleeing in their thousands across the acres.
Soon those trees will be black and bare and all memory of summer and warm sun will be gone. It will seem mysterious, and quite impossible that months ago we could walk bare-skinned in the open air and dive into seas which did not shrivel us half to death within moments.
Why is memory so poor? In the glorious heights of summer, a descent into winter is unimaginable. One cannot remember cold or uncomfortable mud, and certainly cannot understand the delicious discomforts of winter, which seems like some terrible fate which is so awful that your memory cannot conjure it from the recesses of your brain. Yet, walking in the park on Monday - a cold wet wind skinning my cheeks, chill seeping through my coat, mud beneath my boots and fallen leaves scampering around the place like dead brown butterflies - the prospect of winter cheered me enormously.
There is a certain grim pleasure to be got from tramping over acres of sullen cold clay while sleet shoos others to the shelter of their doors. There is an odd glory about grey skies, a blanket of low-flying fleece making menaces with snow and rain. There is a curious thrill about that harsh wind which comes in from Siberia via the desolate bights and banks of the North Sea and which has sent children in Norway scuttling homewards, but which now you are snarling defiance at. There is a perverse delight in seeing the touch of death spread over the landscape until there is barely any sign of plant growth at all.
Signs of Renewal
But, in fact, there is even now. The buds of spring are already there on some trees. Some daffodils and crocus shoots are peering through the wet, heavy North Dublin clay of my garden. The cycle of life is already renewing, nearly seven weeks before the shortest day of the year. Winter at it worst in this climate, provided you have a roof over your shoulder, food in your belly and somewhere warm to sleep, is not too, bad, and for much of the time it can be quite delicious.
The most irritating feature of winter-time is the short day. How do Icelanders draw sustenance from the few minutes of grey gloom which each 24 hours at around noon interrupt the permanent Arctic night through December and January? What makes the short days and the long nights all the more irksome is that the official winter clock lasts three months after the shortest day, but begins only two months before it. Logically, it should end two months after the shortest day, but it doesn't, and we are denied the joy of the longer evenings simply because. the British do it that way.
Why? Why should Donegal get up and go to bed at times determined by the British Astronomer Royal? That is what it comes down to and the moment the British announce that they are going to change their clocks, we will do so also - but, in a spirit of the purest independence, Erin go Brath agus Ui Domhnail Abu and so on.
That aside, we are in for the wintry comforts of the hearth and the wind-blown joys of beach and hillside, with soup and hot chocolate and scones and fruitcake and pints of steaming tea at home. We are not just in the season of chills and pelting rain and wet black trees against a stormy sky; this is the season of baking. Some 70 per cent of the baking of an entire year occurs between now and Christmas, and it is in this area that some of the real genius of traditional Irish cuisine is to be found.
Wintry Pleasures
I was reminded of this by the arrival of Georgina Campbell's The Best of Irish Breads and Baking, published by Wolfhound with a little bit of assistance from Shamrock and even the sight of the Shamrock logo over sultanas and raisans and dried fruit sends a small shudder of wintry pleasure, the secret pulses of childhood suddenly revived.
Do the words barm brack or ginger cake or fruit scone not cause a frisson of nostalgic delight? The great Christmas treats of turkey or ham or plum pudding have not the verbal power of the product of the humble winter bakery. Why? Perhaps because baking is a relatively simply process which requires skill, but not genius, and it requires ingredients and techniques available to most of us.
We know these are the foods of our grandmothers and our great-grandmothers, the secret lure of Irish women over the generations. It is a reminder of roots, identities, a common past of common flour and common butter upon a common baking, board.
Georgina's cookbook has, of course, the great recipes of Ireland and some of the local secret varieties - such as the of how to make Hunter's ginger cake, from that great country house hotel, a ginger, cake which skilfully resists that temptation to burn to which traditional ginger cake is shamefully addicted.
Drop scones, griddle scones, oatmeal pancakes, soda bread, flapjacks - almost a race memory from our genes is evoked by the recitation of these names. But, at some time in the past 30 years, Irish women ceased to pass on the secrets of what generations of Irish women had learned and cherished, almost as if it were shameful to triumph in the kitchen. It is, of course, nothing of the sort nor is skill of any kind a mark of servitude.
Kitchen Secrets
Supermarkets or the corner bakery cannot provide a substitute for home-baked food, to which Georgina's book gives so many secrets, in addition to telling you of local dishes, such as the Dingle pie, a pasty-like dish of mutton or lamb. And there is, thank heaven, a recipe for one of the great treats of Western civilisation - beefsteak and kidney pie with suet crust. No concessions to the health lobby here, but loads to the happiness lobby - and happiness is the surest way to health.
Merely to browse through Georgina's book is to be reminded why winter is such a satisfactory season and, why summer, for the moment, is unimaginable and unneeded.