This sort of thing?

Desserts to Die For/ Et Mourir de Plaisir: Hachette Cuisine/Murdoch Books 2014

Hi everyone, and thank you so much to all my new followers, subscribers and encouragers. Here’s a first bash at the type of post I’d like to do “around” my books. They have emerged from and driven my life for twenty five years, and at the grand age of 60, I think the time is ripe to revisit them. There are recipes to come, and French house etc. chitchat.Tx

In 2013, the winter before I moved from Paris to the Languedoc, an Irish friend texted me and in a few seconds, sent me straight back to Horseshoe Farm, Co. Antrim, where I’d grown up.

I was nine.  Or ten. I’m not sure. I could see myself wandering back from Sunday school just before Christmas, under flinty fast clouds, my brothers gone ahead of me, my homework done, my parents content in the kitchen, a roast beef ready in an hour or so and an afternoon’s daydreaming ahead. At the ‘Top Place’, the fields at the back of our farmyard, where often I made a detour and wrecked my Sunday shoes on the way home after Children’s Service, the land was rougher than the large stretches around the house. There were badgers’ setts, hares and rabbits, a fairy ring of forbidding black trees and, across the one lane road, a pagan betrothal stone (once someone at Bible school had whispered, « fertility stone» and made some kind of gesture with his index finger and I didn’t know what he meant or why he giggled) the Holestone, or Lovestone, set high upon a rugged, gorse-circled, stone mound, defiantly upright over the tidy Presbyterian patchwork on all sides.  It always felt warm to touch, almost alive, that stone. At waist height was a perfectly round, carved hole, large enough for a girl’s hand to pass through and grasp her beloved’s on the other side.

The Holestone

“ Trish,” said my friend, “I was drinking with this mad writer guy in Killybegs. He lives in the hills above Ardara. We got talking about food and your TV show and he said you grew up in the same place. He went all misty-eyed and said he’d kissed you once in your church hall when he was sixteen. Said you dressed like a Sloane and something about not being good enough for you. » 

I didn’t remember the boy, but I remembered the stolen kiss. After some frenzied sleuthing, it turned out his name was Mark Hamilton and that he had kissed me at the RUC Blue Lamp  disco in Kilbride Presbyterian church hall when I was fourteen.

Our teenage social life revolved around the church, as going to Belfast, where my school was and my friends lived, was at best too awkward and often too dangerous. The RUC’s discos, an attempt to depict themselves as a ‘normal’ community police force, came with their own security and parents felt more reassured.  Although my mother’s greatest fear was not of sectarian violence but of one of the local farmer boys marrying me, or worse, and my being forced to stay and live my life in Doagh. Mark was not good enough for my mother. 

In my teens, the discos could have been run by the British Army itself, for all I cared. ‘Cool’ was not a priority, not even a possibility.  All we wanted was a dark room and the Undertones turned up loud and to lose ourselves in both. Apparently, I was dancing with my eyes closed when Mark kissed me and I had kissed him back until the creepy church elder, who was always lurking at these evenings, separated us. Thirty-five years after growing up a few fields away from each other, without ever speaking, we started writing to each other, and in his correspondance was so much of what I had blanked out from my childhood.

Easter 2014, I rented a cottage for a fortnight in Ardara village, packed the dog, half my kitchen and kilos of couverture chocolate into the car and drove through France and Ireland to Donegal. I was to test recipes for my new, ultra-decadent, non PC, baking cookbook, “Et Mourir de Plaisir”/“Desserts to Die For”, before embarking on my Irish cookbook in the summer. (Optimistically, I had called it ‘Home’.)

For Mark, being Northern Irish and Protestant and deciding to live in rather bohemian Ardara, seemed to be perceived more a joining of rebel forces than a re-occupation, as sometimes it would for me later in west Cork. The Ardara Ireland was completely new to me – exotic and romantic through its characters, with a sort of pure, retro beauty yet enough rough edges to save it from postcard twee. It was the Ireland the French always imagined me in when I told them I was Irish and left out the ‘Northern’, which I did these days. I knew their vision of it was stronger than my practically non-existent memory. I was always quite happy to be part of the near-fantasy and now I was in it.

Beautiful Ardara

All I had ever seen of the desirable Ireland were patches of Co. Antrim in the seventies and eighties, when, even if my parents had wished to, it was so hard to move around because of the conflict. We would daytrip to unspoiled Ballycastle, Bushmills, Cushendun and Cushendall and drive through their spectacular North Antrim hinterlands. But instead of sweeping away as far as the eye could see - as they did in Donegal and, later, in west Cork – they always ended too soon in vast caravan parks or pinched in, overclean villages with swathes of concrete, small-windowed Orange halls, pebbledashed bungalows and red, white and blue curbstones.  Around Antrim, even the sea felt hemmed in. Edged with flat Scotland, right there, stoutly in sight, and not with an invisible American dream, thousands of miles and adventures away.

Mark attracted and annoyed me in equal measures. He was extremely good-looking, fit, tall and rugged with (lots of) wavy pepper and salt hair, clear blue eyes, slightly stooped shoulders and hang-dog air about him. He had never been married, had no known children and after years running a news agency in Kenya and having his heart broken by a wildlife researcher - a sort of cross between Lara Croft and Jane Goodall - had returned to Ardara to mend his wounds and leave the rat race.

« What are you doing here ? » Mark peered at me over his coffee and Irish Times. (His accent was still strongly North Antrim.) I was making three sorts of bread and butter pudding – plain, chocolate and caramel and whiskey and marmalade -  to test on the residents of Ardara sheltered housing. He’d come down from the log cabin he’d built himself to give me a hand with the lifting.

« Bread and butter puddings. Do you think they’ll like them ok ? I’d better not kill them. »

« No, I mean, what are you doing here ? Surely it’s easier to cook all this in France ? »

« I’m going back to my roots. It’s a nostalgic book. Comfort food from my childhood. All about the white pan and yellow salty butter. »

« Well going back to your roots is good I guess, as long as they aren’t in Northern Ireland. » he had a visceral hatred of the place, and he knew I wasn’t rushing to visit Co. Antrim either.

« Look » I turned to face him, feeling found-out, and the hand whisk spattered custard over everything. « I’m isolated out there. I don’t know anyone, the house is cold, the kids are away. I could fall down the stairs and Jack could eat most of me before anyone would notice. » I turned back to the baking before my voice choked. How hard it is to admit you’re  lonely.

« Sounds to me like you don’t know how to be with yourself. » He sat back, snapped open the paper and started reading.

« Oh give over with the psycho babble. » I said, half to myself, as he was right.

We had become friends, as, despite our easy way with each other and my incessant romantic remodeling of this unsuitable man before we’d met again, it had been immediately obvious, in those crucial first thirty seconds of re-meeting, that we were simply not each other’s types. (You must always heed them, those seconds. They will change a life and destroy it.)  But still, I was enjoying baking in the cute cottage, the butter, cream and chocolate overload, the sharing of it all with strangers. And just as Mark spent his summer days guiding visitors to Dylan Thomas’ remote cottage in the mountains behind Port, he was a guide to me. Gently bringing me back into the Ireland I’d imagined but never known.

Caramelised bacon chocolate ganache brownie from “Desserts to Die For.”

Black Bush and Marmalade Bread and Butter Pudding from “Desserts to Die For.”