by Fiona Mcgrath

Created on: March 10, 2009

The first St Patrick's Day parade was not held in Ireland at all but in fact in the new home of many Irish people, New York City in the 18th century. Traditionally the festival in Ireland was a religious one, a holy day of obligation which meant mass was an essential start to the day with an early service for people so that they could fulfil their religious duty before they went to work. Growing up in rural Co Down my father and his sister lived in what was known as a ceili house, in other words a house where the craic was! To speak in plain English, theirs was a house where friends and neighbours would gather to talk, tell stories, sing and recite poems, smoke incessantly, drink stout, play cards and most importantly to eat the food that the women in the house prepared almost continuously. Those women were my grandmother, her mother and my aunt and the food was prepared over the open fire in the living room and in a tiny scullery that to this day you could barely swing a cat.

St Patrick's Day was treated no differently to any other day except for mass and the wearing of the shamrock which as well as being worn was posted off to relatives "out foreign" in other words those who had emigrated to America, Scotland or England. In my father's childhood home, visitors on each and every day of the week would have sat down at the table where great piles of soda, wheaten and treacle bread would have been heaped high, fresh off the griddle and steaming. A griddle is a round flat plate of iron with an iron handle and this originally was hung over the fire but with the luxury of a modern kitchen it was relocated to the stove. This would have been accompanied with large pots of endlessly boiling tea and hard boiled eggs fresh from the chickens outside.

My mother's family also lived in a house where the door never stopped. Up until the last few years before my grandmother's age took its toll her house would have smelt of freshly baked bread every morning. It will be an enduring memory of mine of going into her kitchen to find her tapping and flipping her perfectly formed triangular farls of bread as they fattened on the griddle. One year my grandmother was bought a new griddle because she had used hers for so many years that a bump had begun to rise up in the middle. However, she very discreetly give this new griddle away and later informed me rather sheepishly yet adamantly that she certainly did not want a replacement for her "wee humpy griddle". She knew exactly how to

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