He was Financial Editor of this newspaper, he was a successful restaurateur in London, he was Chairman of the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, and perhaps had many other roles; he is Hugh O'Neill, Lord Rathcavan, smiling tenatively from the pages of Country Life magazine for May 28th. He wears an apron and is holding a crab in his hand. A crab, for he figures in an article on good food in the North entitled Ulster is Your Oyster. It credits our friend with playing a huge part in raising the standard of gastronomy in his native Province. He looks back a few years to a time when "we were at the bottom of the gastronomic table and we had to do something about it. We had to get people to use local food which in turn led to fresh produce."
And then the article goes on to name some of the local successes. We are led through a list of wild boar, deer, goat kids and, in some ways by contrast, to McCartney's sausages. You have to go to Moira, County Down to get these. They are sold only from the shop but you have a choice of forty (repeat forty) varieties. All made to a secret recipe that has been handed down for one hundred years. And for authenticity, a sign in the window reads: `Meat used by us this week .. .' and then gives the name of the farm and the number of the individual beast. Baking has long been an art in the North and Ditty's of Castledawson employs a workforce of nearly 80. Ditty's fruit cake, we are told, can be bought in Sainsbury's throughout Britain, but soda bread has to be eaten on the day of its baking, they say.
Main revelation in this article perhaps, was that "the biggest supplier of oysters in the UK operates from a waterside building on an island in Strangford Lough on the east coast. Cuan Sea Fisheries was one of the first commercial producers of Pacific oysters and now sell about four million a year. They are, says Jasper Parsons, "the sole supplier to the big supermarkets."
All this upsurge goes under the name The Taste of Ulster and, writes Rupert Uloth: `'The hope is that the image of Northern Ireland will no longer be soldiers on the streets and fortified police stations but fresh food produced from small farms, largely untainted by modern agricultural methods. Pigs might fly, say the critics. But if you eat a McCartney's sausage you may well believe that if comes from a porcine angel."