Was it for this that all that blood was shed…?

Romantic Ireland is dead and gone/It’s with O’Leary in the grave

Ah, well. Happy Paddy’s Day everyone!

 

There are baby-eels on the table? It must be Christmas!

Some of the people I love the most are in Ireland; and, in Ireland, there are more people I love than anywhere else in the world. Soon I will have spent as much time there than in Spain and yet I wonder if our childhood is our real motherland, in which case, I will always be Spanish, from Madrid; I will always be from the nowhere-land of concrete yards and tower blocks. No four green fields for me, windswept vistas of waves crashing against the sea, broken stones peppering narrow roads, dark mahogany and breath shot with stout glimpsed behind the frosted glass of old pubs. And in the kitchen: no scones browning in the oven in the dim opalescent northern light, no bland coleslaw or rubber cheddar, no rhubarb smeared on a plate, no cup of tea and a Mikado biscuit.

My land is made of food and to it I return every Christmas: suckling lamb roasts in the oven in a terracotta dish –Romans were browning rabbits here in something similar millennia ago; the deepest lilac shot through with blue of steamed purple cabbage as a Christmas Eve benediction; the treasure trove that is seafood salad in this river-less sea-less city –Castilians went crazy looking for the sea and sent Columbus sailing in search of brine and pearls; and the almond and honey of turrón which brings all Spaniards together in their stubborn refusal to fully abandon tradition in the kitchen: a sweet that is both Moorish and medieval, unchanged since it smeared the lips of Arabs in Al-Andalus.

And only a Spaniard can understand how a dish that looks right out of a scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, angulas or baby-eels, can be served as a delicacy at a Christmas table.