Gubbeen House, Schull

Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Gubbeen House, Schull, Co. Cork, Ireland

April Fools’ Day passed while we spent the day on trains, trams, the bus (the driver showed no mercy on these winding and bumpy roads down here in Cork), and a car on our journey from Bangor down to Schull. We arrived in Schull at 8 pm and were met immediately by Giana Ferguson, smiling a warm welcome for us. She drove us back to the farm and led us to the little trailer house at the edge of one of the cow pastures where we will be staying while we’re here, and then took us back to the warm kitchen in the big house for roast chicken and potatoes with peas, and some wine. Reed was amazingly still awake enough to eat some too, and we splashed some wine in his water to try to help him get settled down enough to sleep.

The countryside is ablossom with gorse, which they call by a different name down here. It was dark when we arrived at the farm, so the first impressions had to wait until morning.

The birds woke me shortly before Reed came in to wake me up for good, and it wasn’t long afterwards, as I was standing at the sink helping get Reed his breakfast, that the black and white cows started going by on their way up to the pasture. They went by in twos and threes for a long time while Reed counted them: 114! They had been milked and were on their way up to graze for the day. We had our cereal with their milk from the day before, fresh out of the huge stainless steel tank outside the dairy where the cheese is made.

Giana gave us a quick tour of the whole place – the scale of the cheesemaking here is on a much more commercial level than at Les Fromentaux. There are 5 or 6 employees in the dairy and huge vats for the curd, hundreds of cheese molds, and humongous sterilizer for the molds, which is the most awful of backbreaking work if you have to do it by hand. Afterwards she showed us the chicken set-up, Clovis’ herb gardens, greenhouses, and orchard, and Fingal’s charcuterie operation, where he makes sausages, chorizo, salamis, ham, bacon, pates, and other pork delights, with recipes he’s developed with his chef friends, and encouraged by Darina Allen of Ballymaloe, who gave him his first pig and said, here, won’t you try making me some salami? Fingal, too, has several employees, all friendly and handsome young Irish lads.

Lunch was a lemony chicken rice soup that Giana made, like avgolemono (delicious!), fresh bread, with Giana and Tom’s son Fingal’s ham, Gubbeen cheese, hard boiled eggs, cherry tomatoes, salad, Ballymaloe relish (“Grown up ketchup” Tom called it), leftover roast chicken, and apple juice. We sat at the big wooden kitchen table with Giana, Tom, Fingal, Clovis (the daughter), Rosie (practically a daughter), Missy the jack russell terrier, eating this wholesome delicious and simple meal off assorted mismatched and chipped crockery.

Reed spent the day chasing around in the woods and gardens and by the creek with Missy: seven year old boy bliss.