Mint sauce, like poetry, deserves a revival

Okay, folks – here is more about mint sauce, from our friends at Wikipedia. I am determined to place it on the table, as did Seamus Heaney's mum. With a bit of local lamb, or some new spring peas. Notice the line here about how this sort of sauce "became less common and mostly died out as Europe entered the Modern Era." (That's anything after the Middle Ages, apparently.)

I did have mint sauce at Sunday dinners in Ireland with Eithne and Fred Kiberd, parents of Declan, Damian, and Marguerite. Eithne, like Heaney's mother, would have known and been able to perpetuate the secrets of an older way of life, one that included an admiration for all that rife mint.

I just planted six kinds of mint a weekend before last, purchased at the beautiful expanded garden center at the East Bloomingfoods. Now I have a chokecherry bush waiting for a bit of digging. Here are 10 Essential Herbs to Grow.

This is what I love about Heaney: there is always both a poetic and a practical application to his lines, appealing to the eager part of the mind, as well as to the digger's hunched rump.

•••

Mint sauce is a sauce made from finely chopped mint leaves, soaked in vinegar, and a small amount of sugar. Occasionally, the juice from a squeezed lime is added. The sauce should have the consistency of double cream. In UK and Irish cuisine it is traditionally used as a complement to roast lamb (but usually not other roast meats) or, in some areas, mushy peas. Mint sauce can sometimes be used in recipes in place of fresh mint. For instance, it can be added to yoghurt to make a mint raita. "Sweet and sour" sources such as Mint sauce, and Cranberry sauce were common throughout Medieval Europe, (with the use of mint being more common in French and Italian cuisine of the period than that of the English ^[1]), however they became less common and mostly died out as Europe entered the Modern Era^{[2] [3]}.

References

1. ^ The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy by Odile Redon, Françoise Sabban, Silvano Serventi, translated by Edward Schneider, University of Chicago Press, 2000, ISBN 0226706850, 9780226706856, page 107
2. ^ http://www.practicallyedible.com/edible.nsf/pages/medieval!opendocument&startkey=medieval
3. ^ Cooking in Europe, 1250-1650 by Ken Albala, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006 ISBN 0313330964, 9780313330964, page 15

External links

• James Martins' "Real Mint Sauce" Recipe from BBC Food
• Jo' Pratt's "Mint Sauce" Recipe from BBC Food
• "Mint Sauce" Recipe from blueworldgardener.co.uk

This condiment-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

Seamus Heaney's 'Mint': snippets for the eager parts of the mind

On request, prompted by a question, the last poem Seamus Heaney read here on April 15th was "Mint," from The Spirit Level, reprinted below:

MINT

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the back yard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them by our disregard.

-- Seamus Heaney

 
Note how "defenceless" is spelled the British way, more easily suggesting a "fence" pun around the trope of liberation and letting go. This poem linked back to Heaney's first ("Digging") and to the topic of memory:  

My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Heaney's mother made sauce from the mint; he made a kind of music:

The given line, the phrase or cadence which haunts the ear and the eager parts of the mind, this is the tuning fork to which the whole music of the poem is orchestrated, that out of which the overall melodies are worked for or calculated. [from Heaney's essay "The Makings of a Music: Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats" in Preoccupations.]

Look how that poem moves from the small green beloved-yet-underestimated sauntering thing (every time the word "saunter" appears in Irish literature we have a vivid echo of Joyce, who "owns" that word) – like a mint plant sending out tenacious underground runners. It concludes with another "last thing": the disregarded/discarded "ones we turned against/ because we'd failed them by our disregard."

We turn against "the disregarded ones" and not the other way around, because of our failure to regard, to notice. It's a poem that ponders the enduring appeal of those "almost beyond notice" things (or "ones") we often neglect, that might nonetheless be ripe/rife for transformation .

A few fresh minted snippets of memory, reshaped and arranged – for the eager parts of the mind.

Seamus Heaney at Indiana University

Seamus Heaney visited Indiana University on April 15th, with conversation and poetry. "Famous Seamus!" It was a wonderful occasion – a packed hall in the Fine Arts Auditorium, a hushed awe, excited buzz. His tender wry voice, enduring words, verbs and verbiness ("all verb"), stocky nouns, the arch of a life story in which themes are elaborated and refined, dug up, returned to the ground of poetry over time. He talked about that.

The rhyme in time: the same words repeated, loaded, downloaded, delivered to new ears. The familiar cadence of his voice. His wit, humility. The aging process doing its work on an enduring specimen. White hair now. A right hardy specimen of a man.

Sweetness. He gave me a little wave as he got in the black car and was driven off after the reading. I've seen him a few other times in my lucky life, in Ireland and Minnesota, though that's all quite a long time ago now. And the next time? I hope there is one, somehow.

Heaney began, as he often does, with the poem he says was his first, "Digging." This video catches him reciting that poem in various moments over the years. (Thanks to Jenny for passing it along. Image courtesy of Indiana University.)

Declan Kiberd Appreciation Society

In honor of (yesterday's) St. Patrick's Day, I want to lift a jar to Declan Kiberd, Irish literary scholar extraordinaire. Kiberd is the author of definitive books on Irish literature, including Synge and the Irish Language, Men and Feminism, Inventing Ireland, Irish Classics and The Irish Writer and the World. (He's also annotated and written the introduction to the Modern Classics edition of James Joyce's Ulysses.) He has all the drama, pathos, contestatory intrigues, and language-in-several-languages of nearly every Irish writer in his head, and can recite text and verse from hundreds of sources, in the grand Celtic story-telling tradition. He's a meticulous, respectful critic, able to locate writers in their historical moment and its aftermath. Beyond that (as it says on the Declan Kiberd Appreciation Society facebook page) he's an "all-round solid man." (I know he would get a chuckle out of that – if he read facebook!)

I first met Declan in the summer of 1984, when I attended the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo. I arrived there after a 6-week International Semiotic and Structural Studies Institute Summer School in Toronto (that's another story), listening to lectures by thinkers as diverse as Howard Gardner, Paul Ricouer, Fred Jameson, and Jacques Derrida. Suddenly I was in Sligo, staying at a modest b&b near the sea (the only guest of an elderly couple), sitting alone at an opening lecture on the topic of "Anglo-Irish Attitudes" (later to become an influential Field Day pamphlet). Declan Kiberd was on stage, speaking at a podium with such passion and fervor that he simply released his notes to the floor when finished with a page – they floated down around him, to be gathered up at the end to the sound of resounding applause.

I looked to my left to say something in amazement to the small red-haired woman who happened to sit beside me; she giggled and said "Oh yes, he's my brother, he can get very worked up on the topic! He's mad, quite mad!" We stole Declan away afterwards for a quiet fish and chips lunch, where I learned that his 2nd daughter, Amy, had just recently been born in Dublin; he was missing his wife Beth, daughter Lucy, and the baby. He warned me to "Pace yourself!" during the Yeats Summer School, which does, indeed, become very intense. (Imagine a seminar with poetry critic Helen Vendler, followed by drinks at a crowded pub, and then céilidh dancing and ballad singing, with Seamus Heaney in company, at the St. Columbanus Club into the wee hours: it was amazing good craic!)

We became friends and there is much more to say, except that it's been far too long since I've seen the Kiberds. The entire Kiberd family is remarkable, and when I taught in Ireland in 1987, Declan's parents, sister Marguerite, and brother Damien were the anchors of my experience. (Declan, Beth and the girls were in Santa Barbara that year, alas, importing Irish literature to the land of sports cars and surf boards.)

No email for Declan Kiberd, something I do find appropriate, for some reason. I can see his distinctive handwriting in green ink on long yellow ledger papers, swiftly preparing book after book. With love and admiration in the aftermath of St. Patrick's Day, I want to join all of the others in the Declan Kiberd Appreciation Society (electronic and no) whose lives and minds have been touched by the brilliance, kindness, humor, and passionate generosity of this exceptional man. Here's a shout!