CELEBRATING THE POTATO
Patrick Skene Catling reports on
the festivities just concluded at the birthplace of Ireland's national vegetable
Youghal DUBLIN HAS its horse show, Wexford its opera season, and Mullingar its Interna- tional Westmeath Bachelors' Competition, but no Irish annual event is more pro- foundly rooted in tradition than the Walter Raleigh Potato Festival of Youghal.
Sir Walter Raleigh is the presiding genius of the Historic Walled Port of Olde Youghal, as the town's committee of Tourism Development call the place. Youghal, pronounced yawl, means yew wood. It is situated half-way along the south coast. John Huston used it to recre- ate New Bedford, the New England whal- ing port, for his 1954 film of Moby Dick. But now the western end of Youghal is all modernity: the video games, the seaside ozone scented with hot fat, deep-frying chips. Of course, chips. The townspeople here believe that Raleigh planted Ireland's first potato and smoked Ireland's first tobacco, both from Virginia, in his garden at Youghal.
Mrs Shirley Murray, whose family has lived in Myrtle Grove, a pre-Elizabethan house in the oldest part of the town, for the past hundred years or so, has documents proving it was Raleigh's residence while he was the mayor of Youghal and proprietor of 40,000 acres in Munster.
A weather-vane on the roof of the gate- house depicts Raleigh performing his most celebrated act of chivalry, laying down his cloak upon a puddle before Queen Eliza- beth. He named the American settlement of Virginia in her honour and was her favourite courtier until he rashly courted one of her ladies-in-waiting. In Youghal, one gossips about the 16th century as if it were yesterday.
Another legend, relished here, is that Raleigh, having planted the first potato, was sitting under his yew trees, smoking a pipe, when a loyal servant, thinking that Raleigh was on fire, emptied a bucket of water over his head. Mrs Murray showed me the walled corner of the garden where he is said to have raised the first Irish potato crop, and the four giant yews beneath which, it is said, he was doused. (Perhaps that ostensible misunderstanding was the beginning of the campaign against smoking.) Alannah Hopkin, in her recently pub- lished guidebook Inside Cork (Collins Press, Cork), says she wonders whether there are any plans to organise a Youghal Tobacco Festival. Yes, there are. I have just made some. Manufacturers of cigarettes, hurt by loudening abuse, surely will be generous sponsors. My programme, under the logo of a cross-legged Ameri- can-Indian chief smoking a peace-pipe, will offer prizes for the biggest smoke-ring, the longest cigar-ash, the most accurate chewing-tobacco-spitting at an olden brass spittoon, the last survivor of a chain-smok- ing marathon and the festival's youngest inhaler. Passively smoking embryos will not be eligible. Films will be shown of some of the great smokers of Hollywood, such as the late Humphrey Bogart and the late John Wayne.
In the meantime, Youghal reveres Raleigh as the bringer of potatoes. Rein- carnated in the person of Clifford Winser, a grey-bearded 48-year-old coach-builder who blew in from Carlisle 20 years ago, Raleigh is locally ubiquitous at fiesta time. Winser dressed up last week in an Eliza- bethan floppy hat, ruff, cloak, doublet and hose to attend all the festival's principal activities: its formal inauguration by a brass band and Michael Ahern, TD, the Minister for Science and Technology; a potato-peeling contest, which was won by three women representing Youghal Golf Club, who peeled 38 pounds of Golden Wonder potatoes in seven minutes; a three-hour concert in St Mary's Collegiate Church, a Protestant church which was built by Anglo-Normans c. 1250 on an older foundation (and the burial place of Richard Boyle, the first Earl of Cork, and Claud Cockburn, among others); and, finally, the Gala Festival. Banquet and Ball, at which Winser, in his most fetching costume (blue velveteen and white stock- ings), proposed the toast to President Mary Robinson. A busy week in Youghal.
All the 5,800 townspeople know Winser/Raleigh well. The local children, even when they entertain doubts about Father Christmas, believe in Raleigh. Wherever Winser goes, in ancient or mod- ern dress, children greet him with cries of `Hi, Wally!' Nobody pays him to imperson- ate Raleigh. Since he volunteered to do so, seven festivals ago, he has sacrificed all his holidays for his avocation. Unlike the poetically amorous, swashbuckling adven- `One of the last living members of the Flat Earth Society, sir.' turer he represents, Winser lives quietly with his father and neither drinks nor smokes. But he is an enthusiastic eater of potatoes. 'I prefer roast. I do' all our cook- ing, so I always roast plenty of them. I like the extra ones cold.'
This Republic produces half a million tons of the world's most important veg- etable a year, yet imports 50,000 tons, mostly from Cyprus and Holland, because the public is impatient to eat new potatoes before the Irish ones are available. Annual per capita consumption of potatoes here is about 240 pounds. Since nutritionists have pointed out that potatoes are rich in carbo- hydrates, vitamin C and minerals, and are not fattening, consumption has been increasing.
David Fitzgibbon, the chef at Aherne's, Youghal's premier restaurant, graduated from Robert Carrier's course in nouvelle cuisine, but has abandoned that discredited mode of exquisite niggardliness and revert- ed to Irish culinary generosity. In recogni- tion of the Walter Raleigh Potato Festival, he concocted a recipe for potatoes and smoked salmon au gratin.
But for all this Paddy Linehan, Youghal's longest serving town councillor, and not unaware of the value of public relations, draws the line at Sir Walter Raleigh.
`Raleigh?' he said on the opening day of the festival. 'We have two things to thank him for — lung cancer and the Famine.'
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