Cockles and mussels, oh my!

In Dublin’s fair city
Where the girls are so pretty
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone
As she wheeled her wheelbarrow
Through streets broad and narrow
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”

So begins the folk song “Cockles and Mussels,” often referred to as “Molly Malone” — the choice is yours — made famous by the Irish folk group The Dubliners and celebrated by a famous statue in Dublin of Molly Malone pushing her cart with her blouse off one shoulder causing her ample breasts to become almost fully exposed. With usual Irish cheekiness, the statue is colloquially known as “The Tart with the Cart” or “The Trollop with the Scallop,” as one of the stories which grew from this song, written in the latter part of the 19th century by a Scotsman about a mythical 17th century Irish fishmonger, was that she sold fish during the day and was a prostitute by night.

I’m still not exactly sure why the Jurys Hotel Group commissioned a statue of a mythical fishmonger and possible prostitute with her boobs popping out for Dublin’s first millennium in 1988 other than the song had come to be an unofficial anthem for the city to some. Her legend had grown to such proportions in 1988 that the 13th of June was declared “Molly Malone Day” in Dublin because it was discovered in Dublin’s death records that a Molly Malone had died on that day in 1699. As has often been said of — how shall I say — “creative” Irish storytelling: why let truth get in the way of a good story?

As to the statue itself, when officials were asked about the appropriateness of her low-cut blouse and mostly exposed breasts, it was explained women regularly breast fed in public during the late 17th century, so having her breasts exposed was normal. I believe this statement qualifies as a world-class lame explanation and deserves a hand-over-the-mouth-bullshit-disguised-cough from the back of the classroom. My thought is Ms. Malone’s attire is best left unexplained and we should let the iconic statue speak for itself.

Molly Malone notwithstanding, cockles, mussels, and Irish seafood is why I decided to write this column/sometimes diatribe. Anyone who knows me, knows I love seafood and I love Ireland — put them together and I’m in heaven! I just returned from County Donegal, Ireland where my folks bought a cottage and surrounding acreage almost 50 years ago. At the time of my first visit, in 1973, I was a young chef on Cape Cod and looking forward to what seafood I would find while there. Our cottage is situated in the most northwest corner of Ireland, within eight miles of the nearest beach in a very rural part of Ireland — the outback of the outback, as we like to refer to it — or, as a man in Dublin who asked where we were headed and decided to share his assessment of County Donegal, “the asshole of nowhere.” We took his opinion graciously; however, I confess my assessment of the lout was the same as his assessment of my second home.

However you describe it, it provided almost no fresh seafood on that first visit, which somewhat puzzled me. To this day, in my wee corner of Donegal surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, fresh fish is difficult to find except when we visit Jack’s Fresh Fish van. We always visit Jack as he peddles his seafood while parked on the main street of Falcarragh during the town’s Friday market. His fish is always impeccably fresh and is sourced from docks in Ireland’s northwest, including the country’s largest seafood port at Killybegs, about an hour and a half southwest. It was from his van that I purchased cockles, the one and only time I’ve had the good fortune to dine on them, a number of years ago.

There are times some difficult-to-find foods take on mythic proportions for me, and cockles have achieved that level. I cooked them in a light saffron-infused, tomato-based stew, along with other seafood, for some friends and fell in loving lust with the sweet, fresh-from-the-ocean taste of the tender little nuggets. I’m sure I’ve built up my experience completely out of proportion, which could probably be explained by the craic (Irish for good times and great conversation, in this instance) that night. The craic was liberally lubricated by a great deal of wine and was experienced with particularly interesting friends long into the wee hours of the morning. With good reason, my memory of the cockles may be a bit skewed, but memories — like statues — are sometimes best left unexplained and simply enjoyed.

What I’ve been trying to understand for years is why it’s so difficult to find fresh seafood in my part of County Donegal, home of the largest seafood port in Ireland. The answers are, of course, almost as complicated as the cause of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Now, I won’t be writing a doctoral thesis on the subject any time soon, but armed with my personal experiences, some online research, and information from my Irish friends, I gained some insight.

Through my online research, I learned the catch from most of the commercial fishing trawlers out of Killybegs are fish from the open waters of the North Atlantic, such as herring, mackerel, and whiting, and are almost entirely exported. Naturally, other fish are brought into the port, but it’s the fish for export which really makes Killybegs Ireland’s largest seafood port. I should note, Ireland’s commercial fishing industry is going through a great deal of upheaval presently due to the fishing rights arrangements negotiated between the European Union and Great Britain as a result of Brexit, the effects of the pandemic, and the economic uncertainties both of those issues cause. All of those issues are major stories unto themselves.

I should probably start with how much seafood the Irish consume in relation to other countries in the region. As far as yearly per-capita seafood consumption, Ireland consumes in at 23 kg compared to 51 kg for Norway, 42 kg for Spain, 33 kg for France, and 30 kg for Italy. Of the countries in the region with significant coastlines, Iceland blows everyone away at 92 kg and Great Britain, somewhat quizzically, trails the pack at 19 kg. Many factors contribute to each country’s relative seafood consumption, but for the Republic of Ireland, a major reason is its history as part of the United Kingdom prior to 1922.

Briefly, beginning in 1695, ruling Protestant England stripped Catholic Ireland of religious freedoms and nearly all of their holdings, including land, through a series of oppressive Irish Penal Laws, in an attempt to force Irish Catholics to accept the Protestant Church of Ireland, which may as well have been the Church of England. The Penal Laws effectively outlawed the Catholic clergy and banned Catholics from voting, holding office, owning land, establishing schools, possessing arms, marrying Protestants, and, somewhat bizarrely, owning a horse valued at more than £5. The Penal Laws were mostly removed by the late 18th century, but England continued to harshly rule Ireland until there was some easing when the Irish Free State was established in 1922. The Free State eventually became independent of the British Commonwealth in 1932, before becoming the Republic of Ireland in 1949 even while Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom to this day.

None of the Penal Laws explicitly banned the Irish from fishing. However, since Irish Catholics couldn’t own property or engage in trade or commerce during those years, folks who lived on the coast and could afford it were left to mainly use their traditional row boats, called currachs, to do any fishing off the rocky and perilous west coast.

When the potato blight hit the hardest, between 1845–1852, resulting in The Great Hunger during which an estimated two million Irish died from starvation-related causes and two million others emigrated, the English continued to import grain and meat from Ireland, at times in record numbers. Mainly due to the Penal Laws, Ireland was a poor country, particularly in the west, and were being almost entirely ignored by those in power in England, some think purposefully. It’s been asked why the Irish didn’t fish their way out of starvation, as Ireland is an island, after all. The simple answer is the scale of Irish commercial fishing necessary to make any significant impact on the millions of mouths to feed was essentially nonexistent.

Eventually, a small Irish commercial fishing fleet began to materialize after Ireland began to cut ties with England in 1922. However, the English still ruled until 1932 and effectively suppressed the growth of Irish commercial fishing by placing on them severe restrictions, such as banning Irish commercial fishing boats from fishing while any English commercial fishing boats were operating off the coast of Ireland.

After 1932, an independent Ireland struggled economically for decades and was largely an agrarian society until the 1960s. Building a commercial fishing infrastructure, including the ships, ports, and processing facilities necessary to establish competitive commercial fishing, was a long and heavy lift until the 1970s when rapid industrialization of the industry began to occur.

On my first visit to Donegal, in 1973, Ireland — especially its west coast — was still struggling economically. In the beautiful little glen in which my cottage sits, there were very few young adults, because there was very little work. Most people didn’t have cars, almost no one had a telephone, and electricity had only become common in the glen in the last decade. In conversations with my friends and neighbors, who are my contemporaries and grew up in the area, I was told that, while they were growing up, meat was usually eaten only once a week, on Sundays, and seafood was something only eaten on Fridays, if it was available or affordable at all.

The four miles or so to the nearest bay from my cottage is a long way to travel to muck about with the uncertainties of fishing when one didn’t have a car. My immediate neighbors generally had very little to do with the ocean. I know I’ve spent more time on the breathtakingly beautiful sandy beaches in the area than my closest friends in the glen. In fact, those beaches are often nearly deserted when we visit them.

For those living closer to the ocean, it was a somewhat different story. One of my close friends who grew up on the bay in Gortahork, our closest town, told me of going out with his dad and uncle when he was a kid and spearing flounder at low tide with a pitchfork. They also collected shellfish, including raking for cockles! However, they were mainly dependent on their land, the animals they kept, and what they could buy from local stores. He told me living close to the bay was not considered prime real estate at the time, as the better farmland was further up the glen.

All the factors I outlined contributed to locals incorporating little seafood into their diet, even though it’s only a 15-minute drive to the nearest beach. Ireland, of course, is a very different and economically vital country now. It’s also a country where excellent cuisine can be found, including in “the outback of the outback.” Classics such as fish and chips and seafood chowder still dominate restaurant/pub menus as seafood choices and I love them, but I’ve noticed the menus also are becoming more and more adventurous. We recently ate at Teac Coll, a local spot located on a bluff overlooking magnificent Magheroarty Beach, where I had some gorgeous local briny oysters on the half shell followed by very fresh, expertly sauteed sea bass with capers and parsley. Now, if they had only added cockles…