by Annette Poro

Created on: June 10, 2008

The Auld Press
(Irish Nostalgia)

"You'd miss the auld press, all the same", my father remarked, straightening his arthritic back and looking very doubtfully at the new stained glass lamp which stood in the space where the inbuilt storage unit always known as "the press", (an Irish term for 'cupboard') used to be.

The press had stood beside the open fire, later replaced by the range, in our farmhouse kitchen since the house was built in 1935. My mother, heavily influenced by a good salesman in Harrington's Furniture Emporium, was the person responsible for this significant change.

The press ran from floor to ceiling and had three levels. I recalled it painted in various colours over the years of my childhood. Where the paint was chipped, you could see the layers of brown and green and cream and other colours that belonged to generations before my time. The centre doors were severely warped, probably due to the heat of the fire. As a result, they did not meet or close properly. From time to time, especially if we were expecting visitors, my mother became conscious of this problem and would struggle to pin the doors together while muttering, "That press is a Holy Show."

A plain lemon coloured set of delph was housed inside the warped doors for many years. We washed and dried it thousands of times using a tin basin on the table, and put the crockery back in the press, warm and shining, ready for the next meal. The press held a pile of big dinner plates, the glaze well worn from use. From these we ate homegrown boiled potatoes with accompaniments such as boiled bacon, chicken, and homegrown cabbage or turnip. We had Batchelors Marrowfat Peas on Sundays which were soaked overnight with a tablet in a green ceramic bowl, also stored in the press.

There were assorted mugs in the press, some large old ones with flowers on cracked glaze, which had belonged to our grand aunts and uncles years ago and these were brought out for drinking buttermilk "for the thirst" in the hot days of summer hay making. As a child, I particularly liked a mug from New York. It was a present to Granny, brought by Johnny Nash's son when he came back to see "the home place" up the road where now there was only a broken down cottage with a hole in the roof. Granny wept after Johnny Nash's son left to go back to New York. She talked the entire evening about "poor Johnny Nash", whom I never met, and repeatedly lifted and admired the mug from New York. It had a gold coloured picture of the Empire State

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