THE youngest sent me a shopping list recently. It included 'salad cream'. Excuse me? Ours is a mayo house (not in football of course)! What was this?
But then I got it and I gave it a sniff. And suddenly I remembered.
It was like Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors were back on the telly. The pop of the balls on their rackets. The grunts as they lunged in the rallies. The gasps of the Wimbledon Centre Court crowd. And the ingredients for dinner waiting for a quick assembly.
New potatoes, their black/brown thin jackets of skin scrubbed, already boiled in salty water and steaming on the cooker. The few weeks we had them were glorious and each one was treated like a nugget of gold from the ground.
A ham, freshly cooked, cooling on a plate, covered with a clean tea towel. Summer hams were unglazed, but that simplicity – salty, pink and dripping in their own juices – was a treat that quenched the heat of the long days, as well as the jug of Mi-Wadi orange on the table.
SUMMER TREAT: The ham was unglazed in the warm months
Summer tomatoes still attached to their pungent, musky, sour stalks. In 1970s Dublin tomatoes were not a year-round thing. They came in with the warmer season and disappeared in the autumn. They were hand-chosen from a stall in Camden Street and put in a little brown bag, having been weighed on a scales with the smaller round weights. Costing pennies, they were delicate, and needed to be placed with care at the top of the trolley bag.
Beside them the bunch of scallions, still dirty on the outside, having been pulled up from a North County Dublin farm that week. But that just made the peeling into their white, eye-watering bulbs all the more satisfying. They were sliced into little disks, which became little rings. The green rings and the white rings that made your nose and tongue tingle before you even took a bite, drawing you to the dinner that was coming.
Slices of homemade brown bread piled up on the cutting board with another tea towel over them. The type of bread that dried up your tongue with the baking soda, that was slathered with cold butter, more like a dessert as you dived into the soft, still-warm flesh and sucked on the crispy crusts.
The assembly of the plates was deliberate. Three new potatoes for the children. Four for the adults. Butter on top, melting over them. And a good sprinkle of salt. On the opposite side went the ham. One good slice for the children, two for the adults. When mammy wasn’t looking I would pour some of the juice from the plate it had rested on over the ham on my plate.
Then the lettuce. Crunchy, fresh, round lettuce. Torn into pieces, its simple green leaves tied all of the ingredients together, and held the slices of tomato and scallions. Three slices of crunchy cucumber nearly finished it off, but not quite. There was still the tablespoon of salad cream. The unique, vinegary, sweet concoction brought it all together. It married the buttery spuds. It made the veggies sing. It gave the ham the glaze it begged for. It was essential and irreplaceable.
Like those summer days, when we quietly enjoyed every part of the salad plate, and wished to be nowhere else in the world.
