We had lunch at Lunya yesterday, me and the two girls, out shopping for Mother’s Day. Once we had sat down a small pot of dirty pink sauce was put on the table with some mini bread sticks. We were invited to tuck in as we ordered our drinks.

Speaking to Peter he said it was a type of hummus made with piquillo peppers. He desribed how the peppers were roasted and then peeled by hand and then squeezed into their small glass jars. No oil was added and they kept themselves in their own natural oils with the help of a pinch of salt.

I bought a jar so I could make some of the hummus myself. As always it was very easy. A tin of drained chick peas went into the magimix with a small chopped onion, some garlic, a small dried red chilli and a good pinch of ground coriander and cumin. I then added half a dozen of the peppers and the juice and  zest of a lemon. That was all mashed to a pulp and spooned out.

We will have it later before we start on our late lunch

There is a challenge in cooking for the family sometimes and sometimes a temptation to go for the lowest denominator which can then be had with great gobs of tomato ketchup. There are a number of different mouths to feed; two red blooded eaters, one vegetarian (who will eat fish) and two who really just want to eat chips. There is a temptation to end up cooking two or three different meals in an attempt to keep everyone happy.

This evening I was determined to do just the one meal for everyone. It would have to be fish and I figured on some sort of stew (courtesy of Moro) with a sauce that could be soaked up by rice.

A fish stew with sauce required some stock to be made and Wards provided a particularly disgruntled looking hake head that was perfect for the jopb. It was so big that I was half minded to roast it and then sit down quietly by myself to pick out the small nuggets of meat. As it as it got stuffed into a pan that was too small with the rest of the fish ends and made into a delicious stock.

The rest of the stew was a building up of flavours. Cooking a copped onion in olive oil until it started to give of its sweetness, adding some chopped fennel and letting that cook down and then garlic and two bay leaves and allowing that to cook until there was a sticky pale mess at the bottom of the pan.  The stock was then added and brought to a very slow simmer whilst rice was cooked.

The rice had been standing in water for half an hour or so before being poured into a pan of boiling water. There was only a few minutes before it was done, drained and rinsed with more boiling water. Butter was put in the bottom of the pan with seeds from a cardamon  and the rice poured lightly on top. A wrong end of a wooden spoon as used to make some holes. Rather than a tea towel I put a double layer of kitchen paper over the top to absorb the steam under the lid.

As the rice was settling I added the fish to the stew. Monkfish first, left for ten minutes then finely sliced quid and then shelled prawns.

It was more oir less a success. he chip eaters did not eat much of the fish but the said the sauce was great and mopped up the rice just right.

The man drank at his pint slowly and allowed the black liquid to float around his mouth before swallowing.

‘It’s a bad afternoon’ he said to me ‘You are here for your two weeks what do you do when its wet like this.’

I thought back to the walk we had done the previous afternoon children in waterproofs

‘What was it you called your young girl there? Was it Cora? You said you saw the name where? There is a stone in the old graveyard in Kilcrohane with it on. But you know the name is stuck to the bottom and there’s been people come in here and asked on it puzzled. There’s no date and they think that maybe it was a dog or some poor child that never got born. Its such a pretty name there and I think that they’re sorry there’s not enough attached to it. But feck it its only the name of a lump of ground now!’

‘You know where the Black Gate is and the hills behind that. Well there’s a lake there stuck down in the middle of the hills and its a peaceful place in the summer with its lillies and green grass and from there you can see the full sweep of the bay and the sea. You step back from there into the hills and there’s another old road that follows and folds down from the top ridge. You walk far enough along those old roads there will be a rough pile of old stone where a house used to stand and somewhere up there one of those old piles of stones is Cora.’

“We call it a townland but all it is really is the scratching together of some land to farm on and two or three buildings to lie down in. There’s not much of it left now apart from that pile of stones and a different shade to the grass but there were a few people who lived there a hundred years back.’

‘You’ll remember the man I told you about last week, the Welsh man who got swept across the bay from the shipwreck by the Mizen he lived there for a while and he gave the place its name. Being Welsh he had a repuatation for singing and there were times he’d make a bit of money stood in the corner of a pub singing Welsh hymns. The music of it was different to what they were used to and he was quite an attraction and if people knew he would be singing they would travel some distance to see him.’

‘Some ten years or so after he came there was a group of American tourists who took a house here in Ahakista for a while. They were smart writers from New York and they had spent some time in London and one of then knew one of the big families in Bantry and they had the house down there opposite the pier and they let them stay for the summer.’

‘One of the writers, he was a big man back at home, Stephen Crane, he wrote The Red Badge of Courage and he came with his wfie Cora. There was talk that she was not really his wife and that she kept a brothel at home and that to leave her first husband she allowed herself to be swept off to sea from his boat. Well they saw the Welshman sing a few times and Cora and the Welshman had something in common, that time in the water under a black sky and thinking they’ll never be home again and the fish and the crabs waiting underneath. They would talk after he’d finish his singing and there be days they went walking together in the hills.’

‘The writer, Stephen Crane, he worried for her after a while and they went away after a few weeks and the Welshman he went to brooding back in the hills and they said there was a different cut to his voice after she’d gone and after a while he took to calling the house that he lived in Cora and so the name stuck to the place. There were never more than three houses there so over the years there’d only be twelve or so people who could say they lived in Cora but when they died they were buried by Kilcrohane and Cora was the name that went on their grave to mark where they came from.’

In 1897 Stephen Crane, the American writer of The Red Badge Of Courage spent three weeks in Ahakista staying with his fellow writer Harold Frederic. Frederic had been lent a house in the village. Crane had been living in London and given the somewhat tumultuous life he was living the time he spent on the Sheep’s Head may have afforded him some peace. He wrote whilst he was there and gathered material for his “Irish Notes” which includes something on mackerel.

The brook curved down over the rocks, innocent and white, until it faced a little strand of smooth gravel and flat stones. It turned then to the left, and thereafter its guilty current was tinged with the pink of diluted blood. Boulders standing neck-deep in the water were rimmed with red; they wore bloody collars whose tops marked the supreme instant of some tragic movement of the stream. In the pale green shallows of the bay’s edge, the outward flow from the criminal little brook was as eloquently marked as if a long crimson carpet had been laid upon the waters. The scene of the carnage was the strand of smooth gravel and flat stones, and the fruit of the carnage was cleaned mackerel.

The donkey with his cart-load of gleaming fish, and escorted by the whooping and laughing boys, galloped along the quay and up a street of the village until he was turned off at the gravelly strand, at the point where the colour of the brook was changing. Here twenty people of both sexes and all ages were preparing the fish for market. The mackerel, beautiful as fire-etched salvers, first were passed to a long table, around which worked as many women as could have elbow room. Each one could clean a fish with two motions of the knife. Then the washers, men who stood over the troughs filled with running water from the brook, soused the fish until the outlet became a sinister element that in an instant changed the brook from a happy thing of gorse and heather of the hills to an evil stream, sullen and reddened. After being washed, the fish were carried to a group of girls with knives, who made the cuts that enabled each fish to flatten out in the manner known of the breakfast table. And after the girls came the men and boys, who rubbed each fish thoroughly with great handfuls of coarse salt, which was whiter than snow, and shone in the daylight from a multitude of gleaming points, diamond-like. Last came the packers, drilled in the art of getting neither too few nor too many mackerel into a barrel, sprinkling constantly prodigal layers of brilliant salt. There were many intermediate corps of boys and girls carrying fish from point to point, and sometimes building them in stacks convenient to the hands of the more important labourers.

On the top of the pier the figure of the melancholy old man was portrayed upon the polished water. He was still dangling his line hopelessly. He gazed down into the misty water. Once he stirred and murmured: “Bad luck to thim.” Otherwise he seemed to remain motionless for hours. One by one the fishing-boats floated away. The brook changed its colour, and in the dusk showed a tumble of pearly white among the rocks.

A cold night wind, sweeping transversely across the pier, awakened perhaps the rheumatism in the old man’s bones. He arose and, mumbling and grumbling, began to wind his line. The waves were lashing the stones. He moved off towards the intense darkness of the village streets.