Gypsy Kitchens: Mincemeat Pie From Scratch

At the village market in Elgin, we asked a man if his mincemeat pies had meat in them.  "Yeah," he said.  "But it gets confusing this time of year.  Christmas mincemeat doesn't have meat.  Those would be mince pies."  We pointed out that his pies were labeled "mince pies," and yet he said they had meat in them. "Yeah," he said, and shrugged.  "It gets confusing around Christmas."
A woman at the Speyside Cooperage cafe gave us this piece of advice about mincemeat pies - "If it's got all sweet things around it, it's probably sweet.  If it has meat things around it, it's probably meat."
The intrigue doesn't stop there.  Most people make mincemeat pie with jarred filling - it's almost universally regarded as too difficult to make from scratch.  When we began looking into creating a recipe, it actually looked pretty simple.  Except... not really.  As it turns out, we're not fluent in English.  What are sultanas? What's suet?  Can we buy "mixed peel," or do we have to make it?  And, why are there vegetarian versions of meat-less mincemeat?
Here are the answers, and the surprisingly easy recipe for from-scratch mincemeat filling.

"Make the mincemeat a year before and keep it in a jar," is a common refrain.  Some sources even suggest that the key to a good mince pie is to let the apples ferment and bubble.  We made our mix the day before, and it was fine. In England, the pastries are Christmas treats and are usually topped by a star.  Since ours was for Thanksgiving, we thought about topping it with a turkey, but decided to keep it simple.
Our little Keswick rental cottage, in the beautiful lake district, was outfitted with an oven and range - we cooked all day, kept in by driving rain and a sense of tradition.  We dubbed our holiday "Thanksgiving in the Land of Oppressor" and made a feast that was half American and half motherland.  An appropriately sized pheasant, brussel sprouts, mashed potatoes, stuffing and gravy, kale and corn, candied carrots, traditional American stomachaches and traditional English mincemeat pie.

The filling is made up of apple (as a base), citrus peel (in three forms- dried, boiled and zested) and lots of raisins, currants, cranberries, candied ginger - candied pineapple would work too, basically anything dried and diceable.  To this, we add liquor and a bit of onion, nutmeg, cinnamon, clove and brown sugar.  The ingredients are great to munch on, add to stuffing, salads (and sip).  Except for one, which we'll get to.
For the citrus peel, boil a lemon (unwaxed if you can find it) in water for an hour, until it's soft and pungent.  A great kitchen pleasure is smelling the astringency and sourness of lemon vapor as it boils.  After an hour, cut it in half, remove all the seeds and finely mince it (peel and all) or put it into a blender.  Add to this pulpy slop a few tablespoons of fresh citrus zest.  We used clementines.  Also, about a quarter cup of mixed peel (which you can buy in a good supermarket in America), a half cup of raisins and a half cup of sultanas.  So, what exactly is a sultana?  A golden raisin.
From here, get creative - we used candied ginger, because we love it, and cranberries, because it was Thanksgiving.  Chop everything with a knife or blend it loosely with a blender and add in two medium, diced apples.  Saute lightly a few tablespoons of minced onion, then add the fruit and peel mixture to the pan along with a quarter cup of brown sugar, the three spices (1 tsp. each of cinnamon and nutmeg, half that of clove).  Cook until it's beginning to make some noise, then splash in a quarter cup of cheap cognac, brandy or whisky.  Reduce a bit and then add the suet.  And what is suet?

Suet, in America, is generally relegated to the bird feeder.  It's made up of the hard, high-smoke-point fat from around beef loins and organs.  Good quality butchers should be able to source or cut the stuff, but they may need a reminder of what, exactly, it is.  At the Booths supermarket - where the butchers seemed pretty competent - they referred me to this dried, shelf-ready version.  It comes in a cardboard box and looks a bit like white mouse pellets.
Essentially, suet is dried shortening, and it can be used in a variety of roles - a lot of people advocate it as a pastry aid, or as a butter-substitute for frying.  It's not particularly healthy, though - it used to be used most extensively for "tallow."  You know, to make candles and to waterproof boots.  It definitely sticks to one's arterial walls.
Nonetheless, we used a healthy dose of it, mixed right into the fruits and liquor.  It dissolves easily and smoothly, and gives an incredible richness to the mix.  That vegetarian version of mincemeat we mentioned earlier calls for frozen unsalted butter or harder-to-find "vegetarian suet," whatever that is.

Our pastry was a simple butter and flour mix, but use whatever recipe you're comfortable with.  Since the filling doesn't really have to be cooked, bake just until the crust is golden.  We set the oven at 375º fahrenheit and let the pie bake for about 45 minutes.
This filling is extremely citrusy, dark and nicely sweet.  It tastes nothing like most American pies - it's complex, savory and tasty, much in the tradition of chutney.  It goes as well with a sweet ice cream as it does a pungent blue cheese.  The best part is it smells intensely like the holidays.  Our kitchen aroma was of lemon, apple and spices.

It's nice to eat the pie a little warm, before the suet begins to harden up again.  It's fine cold, though, and is even better the next day.  Ours went really well with a slice of local Stichelton blue cheese. Of course stilton would do the trick, as would a nice sharp cheddar.  As the English say, "A pie without the cheese is like a hug without the squeeze."  If you have the time, try making the filling a few days or a week ahead of time, so that the flavors have a chance to mingle.  Go ahead and make more than you think you'll need.  If we weren't vacating our rental two days later, we'd have put the extra in a jar and enjoyed it on cheese sandwiches, leftover pheasant and whatever else we had around.

Here's our recipe:

Thanksgiving Mincemeat Pie Filling
Ingredients:
- 2 medium baking apples, diced
- 1 lemon
- 1/2 cup raisins
- 1/2 cup golden raisins ("sultanas," to the British)
- 1/2 cup combined other dried fruits, such as cranberries, currants or candied ginger
- 1/3 cup beef suet
- 1/4 cup mixed peel
- 1/4 cup cheap, brown, hard liquor (cognac, brandy, whisky, dark rum...)
- 2 tablespoons citrus zest (clementine, orange, lemon...)
- a small amount of onion
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon nutmeg
- 1/2 teaspoon clove

Method:
- Boil the lemon in water for one hour, until peel is soft.  Cut in half, remove the seeds and mince the peel and flesh. Casually mince the raisins, sultanas and other dried fruit and chop the apples.
- Sautee the onion in a pan, then add all the fruit, spices, peel and a good splash of liquor.  Cook for some minutes, then add the brown sugar and cook over low heat, adding more and more liquor (to both the pan and your glass) until the apples have just begun to soften.  Mix in the suet and wait until it's melted.

The Barrel Builders

The life of a whisky cask is romantic.  It begins as a tall oak tree in the United States, a part of the great American landscape, in places like Tennessee.  The wood is steamed until malleable, bent, pieced together, fastened by big metal rings, made into a barrel.  Then, the likes of Jack Daniels or Jim Beam fill them with spirit.  The bourbon is aged, bottled and the barrels cast off. By law, bourbon barrels can only be used once. So, off across the Atlantic they go, to Scotland, where scotch companies re-use the perfectly good barrels gladly.  They can live on for up to 50 years of whisky aging. There's no bourbon-like rule that stipulates a single use. And then, when there's really no life left in them, they go off to the Scottish smoke houses as chips, ready to live on as the fragrant, worldly, smoky notes on salmon.  Perhaps the coolest stop in the lifespan of a whisky cask is right here, at Speyside Cooperage.

The Cooperage works almost exclusively in mending American bourbon barrels along with sherry casks from Madeira.  Whisky was traditionally made in old sherry casks from Spain, but when all of these once-used barrels became available from America, it was too good a thing to pass up.  So, this is where they're christened European, disassembled and put back together with additional pieces, so that they're a bit bigger.  They're checked for any damage, flame treated to give a new surface to the inside and tested for air tightness.  Most scotch whisky distilleries "marry" spirits that have been aged in bourbon casks with ones that have been aged in sherry casks.  The sherry casks may pass through the Cooperage from Madeira, needing the same repair and rejiggering as the bourbon barrels.  Other sherry casks are made from (American oak) scratch right in the cooperage.  Since it's become a little difficult to source old sherry casks from Spain - and that sherry note is a big part of the whisky recipe - distilleries have taken to filling barrels with sherry themselves, letting it sit in there for 2 odd years and then repurposing the casks for their own use.

The Cooperage used to get a great deal of business from beer breweries, but the switchover to stainless steel dealt a huge blow.  Even a lot of whisky is being distilled in stainless steel, and the oak only comes into play at the aging process.  The fear of this trade being lost has been potent since the 1940s.  In fact, the rule that bourbon barrels can only be used once was created simply to make sure that American coopers would always have a job.   It was a power play made by the Cooper's Union to recover from the blow dealt by Prohibition.  What's ironic is that this rule probably wound up hurting the American cooperage field in the long run.  The one-use rule protected the need for work that could be replaced by machines, but it took away any need for the work that only humans could handle.  Machines can spit out the barrels and only being used once, the barrels require no mending or refinishing or recycling.   The need for a cooper is cut out completely.

Scotland lost a fair share of jobs due to modernization, but as we were told "the machines can make casks, but they can't repair them" and since the flavor of whisky has so much to do with the life of the aging barrel. its seasoning, the human touch is necessary.  The coopers are still vital. There are fifteen men and 2 apprentices currently at Speyside Cooperage.   They get paid by the barrel, not the hour, rolling and hammering and inspecting, going over to a pile of discarded wood to see if maybe there's a piece that will fit their purposes perfectly.   It reminded me of building a stone wall, searching the quarry for that one sorta pointy sorta round piece that you need.  A jigsaw puzzle of your own design.

The coopers may be paid by the barrel, but their part of the team for life.  The two tour guides on hand when we visited Speyside Cooperage were both former coopers, though they wouldn't use the word 'former' themselves.  When we asked who was the longest running cooper still active in the place, they both named a man who was 75 years old.   He was now in the back office, but that didn't make him any less of an active cooper in their eyes.  The two guides were a study in contrasts.   One was older, shorter and more enthusiastic, the other younger, taller and more reserved.   The older was a hammer-wielding cooper for around 20 years.  Short and compact, he looked like he could fit right into one of the casks.  He pointed to a similarly sized man on the floor who'd been at it for over 25 years.   "He's just the right size for a cooper. Not too tall."   The younger tour guide stood over six feet and had to retire prematurely after his second shoulder operation.  The work is physically gruelling and having to bend over more only makes the strain worse.   Some modifications have been made in recent years. Earplugs, lighter hammers." They use 3 pound hammers now. We used 5."

Speyside Cooperage likes to say that each cask begins life as an acorn.   I think it's interesting enough to skip ahead and just imagine the tall, mighty trees a few steps later.   They live for 100 to 150 years old before being harvested for their wood.   Only at that old age do they possess the qualities necessary.  The coopers themselves tend to get better with age as well. It's a lifelong vocation, one that begins with an apprenticeship and ends with whatever service you can offer. Even if its showing a few tourists around.  The Speyside coopers are all local men, the apprentices local boys.  One cooper currently working here is from Hungary, but we were assured that he'd arrived with "all the proper paperwork" to vouch for his skills and experience as a cooper. And having been there for over a decade now, he's considered an honorary Scotsman.  The reeds they use to seal the top of the casks come from a local furniture maker.   The operation is as Scottish as scotch, a homegrown operation... even if the wood does come from America.

We stood in a viewing room, looking down on the operation.  Coopers measured, hammered, examined, disassembled, reassembled.  In another section of the huge space, workers cut wood to specifications, performed quality control processes.  The apprentices along the back wall toiled diligently at building new casks.   The Master Cooper watched over and tutored them.  Against the backlighting of a midafternoon soon, we could see one man after another walk out the big warehouse doors and come back, rolling a cask beside him.   A plume of smoke billowed out as if it were the top part of a chimney, hacked off, but with a last breath left in it.  The inside of the cask is torched, igniting easily because of all that residual alcohol, and a new surface is made.   You know a cask's life as a vessel is up when its refinished one too many times.  The wood gets too thin. It's time for it to move on to the next phase, to retire to some smokehouse.

Where There is Wool, There's a Way

Something about 'historic woolmill' conjured up images of women in bonnets behind big, pedaled looms, metal brushes, spinning wheels, wooden equipment tucked into the corner of a bedroom. Perhaps I've visited one too many folk museums. The smell of machine oil, the nuts and bolts and auto mechanic feel surprised me. The Knockando Wool Mill is the last one of its kind, the oldest working wool mill in Britain. The Victorian machinery and make-do architecture are relics of not one bygone era, but many. A whole period of time, spanning generations, during which communities had a central place, a District Mill, where they could go to process their fleece.

These district mills were really no different than a local gristmill or dairy cooperative where farmers could come with their wheat, corn or milk and leave with flour, butter and cheese.  The shepherds would come with fleece and leave with knitting yarn, blankets and tweeds.  The link between agriculture and food production is obvious and well-traced.  In Scotland, the link with textiles was just as important and widespread.  In fact, the well known clan tartans, the different plaids to represent different families, began simply as the pattern of each community's mill.  Everyone in town wore the same tartan because all their fleece was processed at the same place.  "Knockando tweed [was]...rather coarse and scratchy but lasted forever."  

The very first district mills provided shepherds' wives with the two things they didn't have at home.  Enough water to waulk and wash the wool and enough space to dry it out.  Town records from the late 1700s list Knockando Wool Mill as "Waulk Mill," making its purpose obvious. 
Everything else was done at home - which is where my visions of looms in the bedrooms come from.  However, when machinery was designed that took care of the carding process - the combing of wool to open it up, essentially the same thing as teasing your hair - women welcomed it into their lives.  This task had traditionally fallen to the children and was a tedious and thankless job.

So Waulk Mill got a carding machine.  The same one that's still there today.  Knockando mill grew to fit whatever need the community had.  At different points in the early and mid 1800s,  documents list the mill as a wool dyeing place, a spinning operation.  More machines followed, all second hand, and attachments to the mill were built, ramshackle, to shelter them.   There was the Platt Mule, which could spin 250 threads at a time.  Built in 1872 and still going strong it's the oldest machine of its kind still in use in the United Kingdom.  Each generational owner put their mark on the place and once a machine was purchased, it was never replaced.  Only repaired.

The two behemoth Dobcross looms, dated 1896 and 1899, are also the oldest working ones of their kind.  We peaked at them through a doorway, this sculptural mass of everything that is masculine and feminine jumbled together to symbolize "work."  Visiting the mill was great because we were allowed to just poke around, go into different buildings, keep a safe difference delineated by ropes and read about what we were looking at on a provided laminated info sheet.  They were just two of the additions made by Duncan Smith, who took charge of the mill in 1863 and made advancements and changes for a good 40 years.  He extended buildings or sometimes just erected a roof in order to make space for a new machine, resulting in the meandering factory layout that's there today.

Between the two world wars, all the other district mills in Scotland vanished.  Somehow, Knockando survived and local farmers were bringing fleece here all the way until the 1960s.  Duncan Stewart was in charge by this point.  He switched over from water power to electricity and welcomed three young men from England who were interested in the old ways of doing things.  One of them was Hugh Jones, who wound up taking over for a retiring Stewart.  With no previous experience at all, he became a master and is still the head weaver at Knockando today.  The problem was that he had no customers and, as only one man with not even familial support, he struggled to maintain it all.  That's where the historic societies stepped in, the private donors and a BBC television show called "Restoration," which gave the cause an audience.

The mill's machines are undergoing some repairs right now, so we didn't see them in action.  Instead, we the got the nuts and bolts at rest, in repose. For the moment.  The smell of oil, bolts on the floor, tools, gloves.  Cardboard boxes filled with odds and ends, scribbled notes peppered the rooms.  Places like this are rare, survivors that are recognized as such at exactly the right time.  Like endangered species, the world comes to their rescue (hopefully).  Prince Charles (with Camilla, of course) came to the re-opening of Knockando Woolen Mill just over a month ago.  His Royal Highness restarted the water wheel, now fit with plaques naming some of the biggest donors.   It signaled that this mill, which has been processing wool since 1784, was back in business. 

Tipsy Tours of Speyside

Under pagoda-shaped cupolas all along the River Spey, goose-necked stills steam and gurgle.  This is whisky country at its most densely congested - a full half of Scotland's distilleries are found in the Speyside region.  Driving along the roads is like taking a quick tour of a bar shelf: there's Balvenie, here's Glenfiddich, now we're passing Glenlivet and Johnnie Walker.
We took tours at three distilleries over two days, ambling through forests of copper stills and dank, cask-filled cellars.  Our first was Glenfiddich, where the countryside around was full of shaggy Highlander cows.  Glen Grant, the second tour, was nestled by a little stream with autumn-brown gardens.  At Cardhu, on the day we left the region, the small clutch of stone buildings basically made up the entirety of Kockando village.

Of the three distilleries we toured, the Glenfiddich plant was by far the biggest and most commercial.  We were shown a sweeping, highly-stylized video about the founder of the company and the heather-filled highlands around the town (lots of slow-motion, rain effects and mist).  The video was more mythology than nuts and bolts, and made the process seem like alchemy more than industry.
The truth is, whisky is kind of a benevolent magic for the towns along the River Spey.  In the Cardhu tasting room we were shown a photograph of the distillery's founders.  The elderly, craggy-faced husband and wife wore muddy, peasant clothes and worn boots.  "They were arrested two or three times before they finally got a liquor license," we were told.  Distilling was that kind of game in the 1800's, one for half-outlaws in the highlands with little money and small operations.  Today, it's the realm of globalized giants.  Not only is whiskey from here shipped and revered all over the world, but the world comes tramping back to Aberlour and Dufftown to take a look.  Alcohol tourism is a major boon for the area, and the Speyside distilleries are big local employers.

The magical process is really pretty simple, even if it's carried out on a large scale - it's both romantic and mechanical.  "Malted" barley - which is grain that's been allowed to begin sprouting and then dried out - is put into huge wash tanks (called "mash tuns") and soaked in hot water.  Sugar is released from the grain and seeps into the water, which is then pumped into a big fermentation tank, where yeast is added.  Less image-conscious distilleries use stainless steel, but all three plants we visited had wooden tanks, which were almost thirty feet tall (what you can see in the picture is just the very top).  Some of these mammoth things were as old as fifty years; their wood was black and soft with age.
The sugary liquid is left in the tanks for a day or two while it ferments. When it's done, it's basically a strong beer, at about eight percent alcohol.  This frothy liquid is sucked through tubes and spat out into the stills, where the actual distillation process begins.

The deep luster of copper isn't all for show.  The metal helps remove impurities in the liquor, and it transfers heat well… but the dull, orangish gleam is also regally impressive, especially when it's executed at this scale.
The stills are heated from below and (I'm oversimplifying) the alcohol inside evaporates and goes up the neck into a cooling coil, where it becomes liquid again.  Because alcohol becomes a vapor at a lower temperature than water, more alcohol is removed from the "mash" than other liquids, which stay in the bottom of the still.  After the first distillation, the alcohol content of the putative whisky is about thirty five percent.  A second run-through, in a "spirit still" raises that number to about sixty five or seventy percent.  It's clear, strong, undrinkable stuff.  A few years sitting in a barrel mellows the taste, adds color and reduces the strength.

Down in a corner at one end of each distillery was a locked, brass and glass case, about the size of a coffin.  Inside, visible behind the glass, hot, clear liquid splashed and flowed from copper tubes. Beakers and hydrometers filled, emptied, bobbed and gave readouts. These were the most fascinating things, like relics of some fancy, 19th century laboratory - and we weren't allowed to photograph them.
"Nothing secret," our tour guide at Cardhu told us.  "But we can't take any chances with electronics."  They were worried, as all the distilleries are, about an explosion.  The hot liquid flowing through the locked box was new, very-high-proof liquor, and the air was thick with the scent of alcohol.  After a few minutes near the box, we began to feel slightly tipsy.  Any little spark ("faulty wiring" was what they worried about) could blow up the entire town.

The glass boxes are locked by the British government - the distilleries are only allowed to open them if something breaks inside.  "Every shipment of grain we get is recorded," the Cardhu guide told us.  "The government knows exactly how much whiskey we should get at the other end." They can't even taste their product until they've paid the tax.  When I asked the tour guide at Glen Grant about how the distillers knew things were going okay, he told us that it was all computerized.  "There are instruments inside the pipes," he said.  "We get feedback from those, and then we make a few decisions."
Really, there are few decisions to be made - the whole process almost runs itself.  At Cardhu we were told that it's possible for one person to run the entire distillery by themselves, at full capacity, for a whole shift.  That includes every part of the process, from the raw grain to the barrel-ready liquor.  "We're open twenty four hours, every day," she said.  "Even Christmas.  Even the royal wedding!"

At Glen Grant, in the village of Rothes, we took a tour with a group of Welshmen as the evening grew dark.   From room to room, warehouse to storehouse, the smell in the air changed.  In the beginning, the odor was of barley and autumn fields.  By the fermenting tanks and mash tuns, it was deeply sweet, a cross between a bakery and rotting apples.  In by the stills, the air was almost palpably thick with sharp, fiery liquor.  In the aging buildings it was rotting wood, old sherry and damp earth. Even though Glen Grant's a big business (and part of the giant Campari multi-national), it was a reminder of how pleasing the alcohol process can be.
And then there's the tasting.  Every tour included a dram or three, even Glenfiddich's, which is free.  Speyside whiskies are generally light, clean and have very little peat - much easier to drink than the smoke and brimstone stuff of Islay.

Something about distillery tours… they're all the same.  We came to expect everything about the routine, from the jokes about fermented grain waste being fed to cattle ("we have very happy cows in Scotland") to the familiar refrain about the evaporated alcohol that escapes from whisky casks ("we call that 'the angel's share'").  The mash tuns were the same, as were the fermentation tanks, and the stills differed mostly in arrangement.  The tastings had diffrerent styles, but it was the same general idea - swirl, taste, add water, taste again, agree that it was very tasty, say thanks and leave. Essentially, if you've been to one you've been to them all.  Which is to say, definitely go on a tour.  Just don't go to all of them. And don't try to do too many in one day, at least without a designated driver.

Edinburgh in the Rain

What is it about the rain that makes a European city feel more otherworldly?  I think that maybe it has something to do with drainage.  In America, all the water just runs off down well planned gutters and into grates and we never see it; in Europe, it sticks around while it finds its way through the old streets and out some old rainspout.  Maybe it's wet cobblestones, or dripping stone walls, or damp moss on an obscure monument.  In southern Europe, I associate rain with sitting under cafe awnings - people sit looking out, watching the drops splatter on dust.  Eastern Europe in the rain makes me think of splashing Ladas and loose paving stones that squish when you step on them.
In Edinburgh, the rain actually felt very natural.  It's part of the atmosphere.  Here we are in a rainy place.  It was rainy for Sir Walter Scott and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  It was rainy for Mary, the Queen, and Sir Sean Connery.  If we came to Edinburgh and didn't find it rainy, we might have been a bit disappointed.

In the airport, a woman was returning to Scotland looking like a modern Robin Hood - green leggings, a feather in her cap, tartan vest.  If you looked for Scotland in the food, it would be a tough search (tandoori and Thai are more popular than haggis, neeps and tatties), but the façades brood and the people are as brogue-tongued and ruddy-cheeked as you could hope for.  Some men even wear kilts, free of irony or pretension.

In the rain, it became a city of nooks and hideaways, especially the convoluted old town.  People hid under arches and bridges to smoke their cigarettes or talk quietly with a friend.  Tucked-away pubs beckoned down the alleyways.  It was all very secretive, wet and grey. 

Steep streets, keg deliveries, stately houses and bars full of concert posters.  It's a black-and-white, dark early, northern nights kind of city.  At five o'clock, the sky was approaching black and the bars were beginning to fill.

We played Scottish-version Trivial Pursuit at the Thistle Street Bar one night, just the two of us ("Who scored a career best 188 against Australia on 8 February 1975?").  The young bartenders were excited for us to try different microbrews, and to talk about foreign beer.  They had Red Stripe on tap alongside "real ales." Drops peppered the windowpanes and we had to sprint home in a downpour.

Edinburgh only has about 450,000 people, but it feels much more substantial.  The medieval city was squeezed within a city wall, so everything was built up into five and six story tenements that were pretty unusual for their day. The buildings are connected by shoulder-width "closes" and courtyards, and by high bridges that reach out and across narrow valleys. It's a very up and down place.  Everyone knows about Edinburgh castle - the mainstay, sure-thing icon of the city - but it's not the only rocky spire in town.  Walking around, one suddenly finds that the sidewalk looks out over rooftops and that traffic is some forty feet below.  There are gothic steeples and underground chambers (infested during the plague) that alternate between soaring and plunging.  It's what we like to call a city in three-dimensions, where navigation occurs on several planes.

The last evening we were there, the sun broke out for a bit.  Suddenly, the remaining autumn leaves were brilliantly yellow, hats were cast off and the city felt triumphantly regal.  Not much later, it was dark.  The November moon rises mid-afternoon in Edinburgh.  It's pitch-black by five or five thirty.  It feels like a last hilltop bastion on the edge of the real north.  For the Scots, Edinburgh is the holding wall against England to the south, but for us it feels like a gateway to wilder, rainier, mistier terrain further up.

At the Edge of the Ocean

It's easy to forget that the meeting of land and water isn't always gradual - that a coast isn't just beaches and harbors, docked boats and storehouse-lined bays.  You forget that the ocean is the most vast wilderness there is and that the people living on the edge of it feel governed by its every whim.  Even in the most remote mountain regions, you have a sense of the peak, of the beginning and the end.  But that's just not the case with the ocean.  We'd driven the Copper Coast with a setting sun in our eyes and no place to pull over.  We'd stayed in coastal Dungarvan, but tucked inland at Kilcannon House.  The Bay of Galway was a calmed pocket of coast without even the audible lapping of water.  So, our cliff walk in Ardmore was our first real encounter with the wild and woolly Irish coast.  Below this stone ruin, far down where seafoam marked the water level against the cliff, was the bent crane of a 1987 shipwreck.  A few minutes back, we'd found a notebook tacked to the outside of a simple wooden structure.  A whale watching station and logbook.  Five days ago, someone scribbled a report.  One minke whale spotted. 

With all the green, it's easy to forget about the blue.  But the blue is at the heart of the Irish identity, I think. "I feel for Greece," a fellow boarder in Kinsale named Michael told us.  "They're like us.  Most of its an island. And we're ancient civilizations, us and Greece.  We have our own pace.  We can't expect to be Germany with all its neighbors and its modernity."  He was talking, of course, about the economics and EU membership.  And though I understood his point about Greece, I immediately thought of Iceland - - and its No Thanks, EU! billboards.  For an island that has survived, by the skin of its teeth at times, self-sufficiency is key.  It's the exact thing that gets compromised when joining a coalition.  All of a sudden that precarious setting in the wild Atlantic doesn't just reap benefits for those willing to live on the brink of it.  Its bounty is available to trawlers just passing through.  Men spoke of the coastline like an alma mater, like other men talk about their college football team that's gone to hell.  Because as close as all Irishmen live to the Atlantic, there's also a huge number of them that have lived on the water itself.

"I miss the people.  The ones that take to the sea because they don't fit in anywhere else."  Pat Ormond was described as "the best sailor ever to come out of Dungarvan" to us by the town historian.  (A true historian, not just a guy with that nickname at the pub).  This was the first summer Pat hadn't spent on the water.  Money's dried up for a lot of the people who usually hire him out for the season.  So, he was around with the guests at Kilcannon House.  A lifelong transient among travelers.  We felt a kinship - often likening our own strange existence these past two years to living on a floating island, a deserted one with just Merlin and me.  Pat equipped us with hand drawn maps of the coastline in County Waterford and West Cork.  There were two rocks off the coast of Baltimore named Adam and Eve ("avoid Adam and hug Eve"), all the harbors were drawn in and the public restrooms on the dock, but no clear road to get there. "Oh, I've left those out haven't I?  I'm always looking at it from the sea!"

To borrow a term from Merlin, Ireland is "the breakwater of Europe," an island stationed in the thick of the Atlantic, after miles of unobstructed free rein.  The coast represents every obstacle and opportunity, and the dramatic shift between the two that life (and history) so often is.  Stories of the coast included boatloads of Irishmen setting off for America, pioneers of a sort, setting an Irish satellite in a far off land that still holds a deep connection.  News of hurricane Sandy played at a pub in Clonakilty, the waitress offered her condolences.  "If that'd been us, we'd just be gone.  8 million people in New York, there are only 6 in Ireland!  A storm like that would just swallow us whole."  The town had serious flooding earlier this year, more than once there was 2 feet of water in the pub's main room.  Storefronts had signs that said they'd be "closed indefinitely" due to the flooding.  Buildings still had sandbags at the base of their front doors. 

Clonakilty's claim to fame is its blood pudding, the best in Ireland, but what locals will tell you about first is the old carpet factory.  It supplied the Titanic, of course.  Titanic tourism is actually a thing.  For the Irish, death is just a part of a conversation.  You may describe what your grandmother looked like, they'll tell you how and when she died.  I can only think the coast has something to do with it (and the Roman Catholic beliefs about afterlife).  It doesn't really matter that the ocean took the Titanic, it left the land a majestic work of craftsmanship.  So, why not brag about a connection? A love leaving on a boat or leaving your love on land is the subject of 'lament' ballads.  The crown jewels of Irish sightseeing are on the coast. "You going to Kerry then?" Everyone asked when we said we were driving along the coast  Well, no, not this time...  Not going to County Kerry was a little like not having the dessert a restaurant is famous for because you're too full from the appetizer, entree, cheese and drinks that you enjoyed so immensely.  We have no regrets.

Kinsale would evoke dreamy emotion in everyone.   "Oh, you'll have to stop in at the Tap Bar," a man at the Ardmore craft shop told us.  Pat personally recommended The Spaniard pub, which wound up being one of our favorites of the trip.  A yellowed newspaper hung over the cash register shouted the news that the Lusitania had sunk only 11 miles offshore.  Their own claim to fame.  The bartender was an instant friend.  "Say hello to..." was a common addendum to a pub recommendation.  We wondered, often, how people choose their pub in Ireland.  The selection and prices are almost always the same - and in towns with more than one (and as many as ten) the regulars are loyal.  But we think it's about whose tending the bar more than the bar itself, what friend you can visit, whose ear you can bend.  On the coast this is especially important.  This is your time back on land to give confession or have a laugh; to flirt or learn or be silent with an old friend. 

But the dreamy sigh that would sound at the word "Kinsale" was almost always attached to one thing.  A quick facebook message from an Irish coworker of my father's had "Kinsale - the Irish Riviera - great chefs." Other people were more specific.  "You have to go to Fishy Fishy" - man in Ardmore.  "Now you're making me want to take the drive to Fishy Fishy!" - woman in Dungarvan.  "Of course, there's Fishy Fishy." - Pat.  The food scene in Kinsale is renowned and the mother of it all is Fishy Fishy, a seafood restaurant that's an institution in Ireland.  Their Surf & Turf is scallops and blood sausage.  Their daily specials outnumber the printed 'menu.  The monkfish and parsnip puree was an indelicate bulk of flavor, a sense of pub under the supervision of great chefs.  My sea bass came as a pile of three crispy skinned fillets, set atop a mound of mashed carrots and topped with fried leeks.  You have to go to Fishy Fishy.  And The Spaniard, while you're at it.

The Full Irish

This is what an Irishman eats in the morning.  A "full Irish breakfast." Variation may occur in the number of components, but usually not in the style.  Of all the full-Irishes we saw, this one was the most complete. Two eggs, cakes of potato "mash," sauteed mushrooms, sausage, fried ham, toast, cooked tomatoes, baked beans and black pudding.  Sometimes there may be white pudding too, or perhaps some pan-cooked kidney. Contrary to popular belief, an Irish breakfast is not just a pint of Guinness.
We found this hearty specimen at The Courtyard Bar in Clonakilty, where, like many places, they serve breakfast all day.  Clonakilty is famous for its black pudding - which is spiced blood sausage fried in a pan. It's delicious.

At Dublin's Heuston train station, on our first morning in Ireland, the ticket lady was apologetic.  "Train's not for two hours," she said, looking us up and down.  We were foggy-headed and grubby from a long journey.  "Why don't you go get yourselves something warm to eat," she said.
The station restaurant (called Galway Hooker) had all the worn, wood-panneled appeal of any pub in the country - tatty couches, framed oil paintings, the smell of cooking eggs and singed toast.  There were men drinking, and families with bags arrayed around them like the sides of a nest.  A man stood behind a high counter with steam rising around him.  He stirred beans, cracked eggs, flipped ham, served customers and took a little time to sip his cup of tea.  Each breakfast component was priced individually - so much for an egg, this many cents for black pudding.  A blank-faced girl rang us up.  She was utterly bored by the beer and bacon.

Breakfast on the island doesn't have to be heavy and meaty.  There were plenty of "mini-Irish" offerings, which might include one egg, toast and some bacon. Some people had yogurt and granola. We even spotted a few pancakes here and there.  In Galway, at the comfy Ard Bia at Nimmo's, a relaxed crowd sipped cappuccinos and browsed their table of baked goods.

If there's a really Irish breakfast food, though, it's got to be porridge.  On a wet November morning, with fog over the fields and frost on the windows, its a great dish to sit down to.  Our favorite version was made for us by Gertie Ormond, at Kilcannon House.  Simmered in milk, the oats were topped with brown sugar, whipped cream and a shot of Irish whiskey.  "I like booze in my food," Gertie told us, with no attempt at humor.  It was delicious, but it made me want to get back in bed.
It was important to our hostess that we apply the toppings in the right order - first the coarse sugar, then the whiskey to "caramelize" the sugar, then the whipped cream to melt down over it all.

Gertie's breakfast didn't begin or end with the porridge - it was a three course, stuff-til-bursting, early morning extravaganza.  She greeted us, when we came downstairs from our room, with a quivering plate of freshly-made panna cotta, which she served with four different stewed fruits: prunes from the garden, pears cooked with saffron, poached apples and late-summer rhubarb, sweetened and spiced with ginger.  There was also fresh melon and scones, of course, and a foursome of handmade preserves (gooseberry, blackberry, etc...).  After the porridge, we were given a choice of eggs - on a menu, no less - from the "chuck-chucks" in the barnyard.  The first morning we had an herb-filled omelette, the second day we were given a chive scramble.  It was a meal designed to prepare us for the day - we certainly didn't need lunch.

Much simpler and quicker, the ubiquitous Irish oven goods usually sufficed.  Scones (like the rhubarb ones above, at The Bake House in Cashel, where old men ate beans on toast), crumbles, pies, cookies, barm brack, brown bread, cakes... walk a few steps in any town in Ireland and you'll come across the smell of something baking.  It's hard to resist the baking-soda lightness of a raisiny soda bread, or the sugar decadence of a hot berry crisp.

At Lemon Leaf Cafe, in Kinsale, we had the inevitable full-vegetarian-Irish: peppered potatoes, mushroom, tomato and spinach, but, curiously, no beans.  It was also the only breakfast we had with tea, which is really more Irish than coffee (despite "Irish coffee").  People here drink more tea per capita, they say, than anybody else on earth, and they certainly like their brew strong.  After a few cups, we were more caffeinated than we should have been.  I had to have a raspberry tart to calm myself down.

Things Irish People Like

Butcher Shops.  Just about every town has one.  In villages like Golden, where shuttered businesses are casualties of the recession, the butcher shop is still up and running.  Sure, people shop at the supermarket and you'll see bags from Durres Stores or Supervalu in the hands of butcher shop customers, but some things you save for the people you really trust.  The local butchers.

Green.  While driving around, even on major highways, we just kept gawking at how much it all looked like the Ireland of our imagination.  A rainbow here, a double rainbow there, cows and horses in the mist and the brightest green you've ever seen absolutely everywhere.  The color occurs so often in the natural landscape of Ireland, you'd think they'd be sort of tired of it.  Nope.  It's a little like St. Patrick's Day every day.  The mailboxes are green, windowboxes, doors, houses are all different shades of it.  It's a favorite in clothing.  It's a national emblem.

Turf Fires.  At the back of every pub, there's a fire burning and if you have the luck of being welcomed into an Irish home, there's probably one going in the sitting room.  You won't smell coal or hear the cracking and snapping of wood, the flame will smolder steadily and smokelessly for hours.  Because they're burning turf.  Turf bricks look like solid chunks of earth - which is essentially what they are, but with certain scientific properties that make them efficient forms of energy.  Fossil fuel.  They smell subtle and lovely and are so much a part of Ireland that this exists (You know how you can watch the yule log on tv in America?  Well, it's a turf fire dvd - with complimentary turf incense!)  Ireland is actually the world's second largest user of turf fuel, after Finland, and around one sixth of their electricity comes from turf-burning power plants.

Guinness. This seems like a cop-out, I know, but it's still worth noting.  We figured Europe's 4th biggest beer consuming country would be more like the top 3 (Czech Republic, Germany and Austria) in that there'd be lots of local brews to try.  But microbreweries in Ireland really don't stand a chance against the loyalty to Guinness.  It's the best-selling alcoholic drink in the country.  It's the most popular beer by far and, in most places, the only Irish one on tap.  While we stuck with Smithwicks (an Irish red ale) and Bulmer's (an Irish hard apple cider), everyone around us drank Guinness.  Oddly, the other beers on tap were usually Carlsberg, Budweiser, Heineken and Coors Light.  It's like they're actively trying to make Guinness taste even better by comparison.

Vegetable Soup.  This isn't to say that Irish people like vegetable soup more than, say, steak & kidney pie or Irish breakfast.  It's that they like a very specific soup, called "vegetable soup."  In my experience, describing a soup as "vegetable" can mean any number of things.  Tomato based, cream-based, pureed, chunky, brothy.  In Ireland, vegetable soup is an orange puree, a mix of carrot, onion, potato - maybe some squash, maybe some celery or peas.  Spices may vary, but the overall taste and look is the same.  It's always delicious, always served with a slice of brown bread and some intensely good Irish butter, and always available.

Preserving Storefronts.  There must have been a time when walking down a street in Ireland was like flipping through the local phone book.  The old facades on pharmacy's, general stores, pubs and grocers spell out a family name. You didn't name your saddle shop "Horse's Friend" or anything like that.  You named it "Connolly's" if that was your name.  These storefronts are now like old family albums in many villages, towns and even cities.  No matter what's inside the space, the name is kept the same.  It may have begun life as R. A. Merry & Co. Ltd, but now it's a great gastro pub simply referred to as "Merry's."  Pat and Gertie Ormond's cafe is now a restaurant with different owners, but is still called Ormonds.  Their contribution to the town and place in local history remembered.

Honorable Mentions

Discussing Politics.  Of course, this is basically the only country we've visited where we can understand all the conversation going on around us.  But even context clues would have brought me to this conclusion.  It's rare to see more newspapers in hands than magazines, and not tabloid newspapers either.  The real factual stuff.  Pub interaction often involves an older (and drunker) man 'schooling' a younger (and soberer) man, who listens politely and very respectfully disagrees.  Specifics about EU policy, trade agreements, parliamentary salaries are all widely known and energetically discussed.  "Who are you voting for?" we were asked in the run-up to the election.  It's not a "personal" question here. (Should it be anywhere?)  It's a topic of discussion.  And boy were they informed about American politics.  Which brings me to...

The Irish-American Connection.  Sadly, we were just about the first American couple most Irish people had met without a smidgeon of Irish between us.  (Even President Obama has a distant Irish cousin. I know this and that his name is Henry Healy, because he was the talk of the pub). But, we're still American, which made us kin anyway.  "There are 70 million Irish descendants in America," one man said proudly, acknowledging that the wealth of Irish in America has made the scope of Irish culture in the world larger than its geographic size would suggest.   At a pub, a young man asked for the tv channel to be switched from soccer to US election coverage.  They take what happens in America personally.  We're family.