So I’m reading my 4-year-old son and his friend “The King of Ireland’s Son,” a fairy tale written by Brendan Behan, and a lot of eating goes on in it.
The King of Ireland’s son is seeking the source of mysterious heavenly music that’s wafting through the land, and on his way he encounters three progressively older Old Men. All of whom feed him.
At the first Old Man’s house they have “rashers and eggs with black pudding and white pudding and a Cork drisheen, three Hafner’s sausages each, the best of homemade wholemeal bread, all washed down with lashings of strong tea.”
At the house of the Old Old Man (the Old Man’s father), the prince is treated to “bowls of stirabout, followed by huge plates of best Limerick ham with spring cabbage and lovely potatoes that were like balls of flour melting in your mouth, and with all this they drank three pints each of the freshest buttermilk.”
Dinner with the Old Old Old Man (you can guess) consists of “two great bowls of yellow buck porridge each and after that they had four crubeens apiece with fresh soda bread and homemade butter and they had three pints of the creamiest porter to go with it all.”
Now that I have everyone’s tastebuds a-tingle, here’s my questions:
What’s a “Cork drisheen” ?
What are “Hafner’s sausages” ? Just a brand-name, like “Hillshire Farms Kielbasa” ?
Drisheen: A type of blood pudding made only in Cork, prepared with a mixture of sheep & beef blood. I’d go into the exacts of how it’s made, but it sounds rather disgusting. It’s basically like an Irish version of Black Pudding.
Hafner’s sausages: looks like a brand-name, I’m not finding anything on it that would make it particularly special.
stirabout: from what I’ve found, it seems to be just another name for porridge (we’d call it oatmeal here).
yellow buck porridge: sounds like this would be an equivalent of polenta.
crubeens: pig’s trotters. yummy.
(with thanks to The Oxford Companion to Food for help on this one)
Manhattan -If you weren’t a moderator, I’d come over there and show you where a crubeen could be shoved. Even the great Anthony Worrell-Thompson has admitted that Cloankilty Black pudding is better than anything that the English can produce. And what is better than Good Black pudding
Dopers please note that that was a rhetorical question.
Drisheen: Like black pudding but has a lot more cereal in it.
Hafners: Were purveyors of fine pork products including their own “secret recipie” sausages
Stirabout: Is a bit like thin porridge (oatmeal, salt and water)
Yellow buck porrige: Is(I think porridge made from maize)
Crubeens: Are Pigs trotters which have been boiled with a lot of salt and were then fried or roasted. My father tells me that he used to buy them, wrapped in newspaper, on the way home from a dance - an early form of MacNuggets. Theis saltiness can only be killed by lashings of Guinness. I have seen them and they look disgusting but they are considered to be a great delicacy.
Is anyone else struck by the bizarreness of the anacronisms in this story? (Incidentally, one place where you can find the story “The King of Ireland’s Son” is in Jane Yolen’s Favorite Folktales from around the World".) At first this story appears to be set in the vaguely pseudo-medieval world of the typical fairy tale, but notice how much of the food didn’t even reach Ireland until a couple of centuries ago. Potatoes and corn (assuming that’s what yellow buck porridge is made from) weren’t available in Ireland until the 17th century. Porter and tea weren’t available until the 18th century. Hafner’s sausages presumably weren’t available until the late 19th century.
No Source, but Hafners have been around for a very long time, a family owned business, since the early 1800’s.
perhaps he was telling the story with words that children of the day would associate. Of course, if you told a child that Brian boru stopped to refresh himself with Sunny Delight, the kid would probably laugh at you.
I was struck by the GENERAL bizarreness of the story, and attributed it to Behan’s puckish Gaelic sense of humor…
The “heavenly music” turns out to be the work of the King of Greece’s daughter, whom the King of Ireland’s son must rescue from the evil giant by playing six rounds of Hide or Go Seek. At one point, the prince hides in a horse’s ass. The magic stallion seems more preoccupied with getting his dinner on time than concerned with helping the prince and princess. After the giant is defeated, the two young 'uns get married, which I suppose leads to the strong relations enjoyed today by Greece and Ireland.
Eve: Crubeen chowder for lunch today. I’ll bring the tureen up to your office. Invite Maureen.