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By MICHELE MAY faMduMck N«*i Staff Writer
There are at least 600 pubs in Dublin, but not one of them will be open on St. Patrick’s Day. The Irish hold somber celebrations in church on that day.
All the blather and blarney which has grown up around the day is a purely American invention. (Dr. Declan Burke of Culpeper told us so.) Sort of like saying “Top ’0 the momin’ ” which one customarily hears in the streets of New York. In the states it’s a great time for marching in parades, drinking green beer and sporting shamrocks.
The real St. Patrick (who was born in Scotland some 600 years ago under the name of Maewyn) was only familiar with the shamrocks part of it. He used them to explain the Trinity when he brought Christianity to the Druids. If he seemed to participate in a parade, it was simply because he needed a drummer to precede him everywhere to drive away the snakes.
His taste in beer, if any, has not been passed down through the ages. We do know that Guiness’s brewery had not yet been established.
The Irish taste in food is well documented in the nation’s great literature, however. The characters are forever eating oatmeal and potatoes, bacon and cabbage. The best menu involves tea, a boiled egg and a good hearthbread. And there might be a bit of trout, lobster or salmon for fishermen west of the Shannon.
One of Sean O’Faolin’s 1 characters enters the story “The Silence of the Valley5, with a “stinking saucepan full pf fowls’ guts”. Fortunately these are not for supper. They are for fishing eels to roast for dessert after dinner “when the resinous fir-stumps on the great flat hearth flamed up—”
A character in another story “Shades of the Prison House" endorses simpler fare. “ ‘A hake-o’-fish’d-bebetther,” growled Dadda. “Hake-o’-fish-andaloado’spuds!”
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