“You would have definitely have survived the Famine” said
the mater, a couple of weeks ago as I came in to the cottage all soggy and damp
in my great smelly wax jacket (at least two sizes too big) brandishing with
pride several wild carrots, that I’d picked up on my walk around the bog near
Derryfad, Co. Mayo, Ireland.
I’d like to think that I could have had a good go at
surviving the Irish equivalent of the Holodomor with my foraging skills, but
one cannot underestimate the raw, lasting damage An Gorta Mor caused to the
country, particularly in the West where we stay every year. I always knew it was bad - I'm no ignoramus in terms of the Famine. My granny always
had stories passed down from her grandparents of people bleeding cows to make
cake and whole families dying of the fever and the cottages being burned and pulled down
to stop it spreading.
Left: a photo of my great great grandmother in her Cumann na mBan uniform, who fought in the civil war and visited women prisoners at Kilmainham Gaol. It is easy to see how her parents and grandparents' stories of the famine inspired her to fight for Irish freedom.
Above: an Irish tenant eviction during the Famine
There are famine walls all up the side of the mountains,
pointless building works to keep people occupied and many people died in the
mountains in the Doolough Tragedy when they were refused outdoor relief in
1849.
One million died and one million emigrated - its all sobering stuff. And to be quite honest, if the summers
in the late 1840s were anything like this one, there would not be a great deal
to find in the wild either. And foraging this summer in Ireland has in an entirely different way, to granny's stories, folk songs, history books and famine walls, brought home the grim reality of this human tragedy.
We’ve had a very cold and wet summer in Ireland. The IrishTimes declared that it was one of the coldest July’s on record and personally
mentioned my nearest town, Claremorris as having its coldest July since 1965
(an average of 13.1 degrees – WTF) and the third coldest since records began.
And boy, did it feel like it too. I was eternally in jumpers and several pairs
of socks, it rained nearly every day (there were two nice days right at the end
of my fortnight there) and the days were so dark it was like eternal dusk. The
minute it stopped raining (forget sunshine!) I would grab the dog lead, the
smelly wax jacket and some plastic bags and wander up the little country roads
near our house to see what I could find in and around the rolling sludgy green
fields and the bogs.
To be quite frank, the bad summer that had been had, showed
in terms of the availability of foragable materials. There were plenty of docks
and nettles (there always are) but where there should have been sloes starting
to go purple, they were hard and green; where the blackberries should have been
ripening, they were also small, hard and green; where the haws should have been
starting to blush red as we move into the Irish Autumn, they were… you guessed
it… small, hard and green.
I did have some small successes, however. I found a
number of little wild raspberries in the hedgerows near Knockbrack, though they
were extremely small and not well formed.
I also found lots of peppermint down
by the bog and took a few small cuttings to plant back up at the house.
My biggest success though, was definitely the wild carrots. Queen
Anne’s Lace is the official name for the plant. The name comes from the fact
that it resembles lace and legend has it that Queen Anne pricked her finger
whilst making lace and the spot of blood that fell, is why the plant has a
small pink/red flower in the centre of the umbel.
It can resemble other
poisonous relatives such as hemlock and hogweed so there are some easy things
that can help you identify it:
- White umbel with a small pink/red flower in the centre
- A hairy green stem (not smooth, spotted purple like hemlock)
- Fern like leaves like carrot
- Leaves when crushed smell like carrot
- Its flowers fold in on themselves to resemble nests in the Autumn (hence the nickname, Bird Nest plant)
It’s a biennial plant so the roots, being the plants storage
system, can grow quite hard and woody. The roots I collected were creamy yellow
and quite hard. When broken, they smell intensely of carrot. They can’t be
eaten in a conventional sense I don’t get the impression from reading online but
rather use the intense flavoured root for flavouring in cakes etc. I’ve dried
mine for later use on this. Nonetheless, during my reading, I came across
several different recipes for Queen Anne’s Lace Flower Jelly and was determined
to make some.
A recipe for Queen Anne’s Lace Jelly
(Recipe from here)
- 5 cups of caster sugar
- 2 cups of Queen Anne’s Lace Flowers
- 1 packet of vegetarian jelly powder
- 4 ½ tbsp. of lemon juice
- 5 cups of water
- Boil the water and steep the cleaned flower heads in it for fifteen minutes until it has brewed into a marron coloured tea.
- Boil the tea with ¼ cup of sugar and the jelly powder
- Scoop out any top sludge
- Once boiled add the remainder of the sugar and bring to the boil. Keep boiling for one minute
- Add the lemon juice (it will turn the maroon tea bright luminous pink)
- Take off the heat and put mixture into sterilised jars to set
It proved to be a successful endeavour and produced a sweet
floral jelly, which was a bit like rose water in taste. I enjoyed mine on
toast, my father enjoyed his with bacon (but doesn’t recommend it with sausages).
I swapped a jar of it with my neighbours, Norma and Pat Jennings,
for some gooseberries. Yes, I know my whole last post was about how you cannot
find gooseberries for love nor money any more. And now, I know why – they’re
all hiding out in the Jennings’ back garden in the West of Ireland. Poor Norma
has made about 60 jars of jam with hers and several pies. Still, it was good
fun on the last day (which was incidentally sunny! Finally!) shucking the
gooseberries out the front with my mother and Emer so my mother could have a go
at making jam after we’d left.
So, to conclude, had I lived in the summer of 1846, I would
have managed some nettles and dock leaves, woody wild carrots, some peppermint
for garnish, a handful of raspberries, some green haws, green blackberries and
green sloes. It leaves me once again wondering how awful human beings can be to
one another and yet another reason, why I feel the teaching of history in
schools is so important – so that we can learn lessons from history. After all,
there is still so much food inequality in the world today. We produce enough
food to feed ten billion people, yet 770,000,000 people are undernourished. And
this is inherently wrong. Not that, you readers need telling, but it is a
sobering thought, nonetheless.
As Mahatma Gandhi once said: "How can men feel
themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings?”
How indeed?
Above: Famine memorial in Dublin
Above (2): my cousin looks into the Famine Pot in Milltown - this 90 gallon pot was used for soup in the Workhouse during the famine
