North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

An Mám Salann

I vaguely remember an Irish short story from my secondary school days, though I cannot remember who wrote it. It was called An Mám Salann (the handful of salt). The story was about a big family, who were hungrily waiting for the big pot of bubbling porridge to cook so that they could tuck in. The mother of the story did the cooking but the rest of the family always complained that there wasn't enough salt in the porridge (though not enough to actually do the cooking for her). So while Mother wasn't looking, Father took another big handful of salt and stirred it into the porridge. Off he went, happy that he would finally have a bowl of porridge to his liking. A little while later, Number One son also sneaked a handful of salt into the pot. Now, as I remember it, there were dozens of children and they all did the same. So when they finally sat down to their breakfast, they were nearly poisoned by the bowls of porridge-flavoured salt.

The moral was clear even to us, culchies to a boy and wallowing in a classroom clouded with sullen testosterone that could only be an all-boys Christian Brothers Irish class, circa 1981 - this family were only a few paw-shuffles up the evolutionary ladder from the bears in the Goldilocks story.

Fast forward a few years, and your truly had not so much been elevated to the halls of academia as thrown from the passing van of further education into the Dickensian scenario that was college rented accommodation on Childers Rd., Limerick City. It was my first year of college in the NIHE and the challenges posed by the course material paled in comparison to the challenge of not starving or freezing to death.

The heating situation was occasionally remedied by nocturnal sorties to the adjacent building sites to steal planks. This meant braving the attentions of the guard dog, whose bark couldn't be described as worse than its bite, since it didn't bark at all - the cunning beast just sneaked up and introduced itself by biting. Of course, we had no way of breaking up the planks (much hopping up and down on the planks served only to amuse our neighbours who, without exception, scared the hell out of us). So we would just light one end of the plank and slowly feed it into the fire over the course of an evening. [This is just one of the many way that students burn down houses]

On the cooking front, what I lacked in skill, I also lacked in enthusiasm. However, necessity and poverty turned out to be the half-sisters of invention, so out came the saucepan and a big bag of Odlum Progress Oats ( I never knew what exactly was progressive about them).The first day, I cooked up a big pot of porridge for myself and my room-mate, and doled it out in two bowls. I took one mouthful and promptly spat it out. As did my room-mate.
"Who feckin poisoned the porridge with salt?", I spluttered.
"Salt? Who puts sugar in porridge?", came the reply.
And there you have it. The two of us had been surreptitiously adding handfuls of sugar and salt to the porridge in turn. Not only did we have no breakfast, but we had both proved ourselves to be as dumb as the dumbest characters in Irish literature [apart from Peig and her spawn, of course]. And that's when the no seasoning rule became law on Childers Rd.

Did you know that this is National Porridge Week ? No? Me neither.

Happy gruel.

Posted by Monasette at November 6, 2004 10:51 PM