NOW THAT the legal spat over who can produce it locally has been sorted out, surely it's time Ireland sought international protection for one of its great culinary treasures, the spice burger. At the very least, we should be trying to add it to the appallingly short list of Irish foods that enjoy Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) or Protected Geographical Identification (PGI) status under EU law, writes FRANK MCNALLY
There are only a handful of these at present – a miserable four, in fact – flying the flag for what we dare to call “Ireland the Food Island”. Compare this with the vast serried ranks of listed French products (238) and the even greater force of the Italians (315) and you see how much ground we have lost.
Our representation is pathetically reminiscent of those four jets that used to comprise the offensive potential of the Air Corps, before even they were retired. Yet whatever about our air presence, at least our presence in the protected food market has a realistic chance of expansion. So let’s hit our continental rivals with the spice burger – frozen for maximum damage – and see what happens. All right, I have no idea whether it would qualify. To clear the highest bar of EU protection – PDO status – a product must be produced, processed, or prepared exclusively in the relevant geographic area, to which it must owe some of its character.
The classic example is Roquefort cheese: made entirely from the milk of three local breeds of sheep and matured in caves near the eponymous French town, where it is infected with the spores of a specific fungus (Penicillium roqueforti).
It’s a moot point whether the “terroir” of the spice burger – originally the back of Maurice Walsh’s butcher shop in Glasnevin, and more recently a unit of Poppintree Industrial Estate – contributes to the product’s unique taste.
But since the exact combination of its “delicious blend of Irish beef, onions, cereals, herbs, and spices coated with traditional outer crumb” is a carefully guarded secret, there must be at least the basis for an argument by a good lawyer. Surely the pungent air of Dublin’s Northside, said to be have such a formative influence on humans, could be cited as a factor?
I BET MOST people would struggle to name even one of the Irish products currently enjoying designated status. Any ideas? Sorry, time’s up. The quartet comprises Imokilly Regato – which I used to think was a sailing festival in West Cork, but is actually a cheese; Clare Island Salmon; Timoleague Brown Pudding; and Connemara Hill Lamb.
The first is particularly interesting in that, although the whole point of PDO and PGI designation is to protect regional products against outside imitators, “regato” is an Italian cheese-type.
Like cheddar, however, it is deemed generic and so beyond the ownership of any region. Whereas the Imokilly version is unique. According to the EU agriculture website, the rennet used is based on “traditional coagulating materials for pre-medieval Irish cheeses described in research published in 1948”.
Clearly, age is vital to a product’s regional authenticity. And although the spice burger has notched up an impressive half-century already, it would certainly help its credibility if those 1950s origins could be pushed further back somehow.
Were I the company’s marketing manager I might now be commissioning research into the possibility that a similar recipe has been used in and around Dublin’s Tolka river valley since Norman times; or that artifacts found in a dig near Drumcondra last year were the petrified remains of spice burgers buried by local monks fleeing the Vikings.
The other prong of my expansion strategy would be to open a number of upmarket retail outlets offering fancier versions of the product for tourists.
The one in Grafton Street might even have a brass plaque in the pavement outside with a quotation from Ulysses: “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. But most of all he liked spice burgers, with their delicious blend of Irish beef, onions, cereals, herbs and spices, coated with traditional outer crumb . . .”
Some licence must surely be allowed: especially when we recall the injustice done to another uniquely Hibernian product invented around the same time as the spice burger – Irish coffee. This has since gone around the world, but completely unprotected and therefore open to abuse and exploitation. Order it in a bar in Spain or Greece, for example, and the barman will as likely use Scotch or Japanese, or some local gut-rot, instead of Irish whiskey.
Of course, the weakness of our claim to the drink’s exclusive ownership was Ireland’s lack of an indigenous coffee plant.
Even so, if we had been far-sighted enough in the 1950s, we could have formed a strategic partnership with Brazil and applied for joint custody of the patent. Now it’s too late.
I note from news reports that the spice burger’s popularity has “never really expanded beyond Ireland”.
So far so good. But clearly, the existence of such a masterpiece cannot be kept from the world forever. That’s why we need to protect it now, before the inevitable happens and the French and Italians get their greedy hands on it.