The unique family recipe for chicken that's a guaranteed return to the warmth of a mother's presence... For Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1, listen to Leftovers by Conor Hanratty above.
My mother wasn't the greatest cook. She was a lovely baker, when she found time to make a soda bread or a fruit cake, but her culinary offerings weren’t terribly exciting. Like many Irish families at the time, we didn’t eat meat on Fridays, and somehow my parents happened upon an easy, quick recipe for a Friday dinner when they both got home from school. This involved mixing a can of tuna and a can of tomato soup, and serving the result on a bed of brown rice. Penance, indeed.
My mother had another tuna recipe, trotted out for special occasions, called Tuna Aurora. This involved more canned tuna, pineapple, and spaghetti. I think she’d found it in an Australian cookbook her students gave her as a Christmas present.
What my mother was REALLY good at was encouraging her students. She taught for most of her professional life at the same boarding school, close to our home in Rathfarnham in Dublin. She was deeply committed to her girls, and cared very much about their development. She really believed in them, and if I may borrow a line from Maeve Binchy, all her geese were swans.
When a former student was in a play, or doing stand-up, we’d go along. If one had a baby, she’d send a note. On the rare occasion that one of her girls died, she was deeply upset. She was invested in them, and so she felt their losses - and particularly their successes.
When the school closed, she couldn’t face the idea of working anywhere else, and from the leftovers of this teaching life she built a whole new career of teaching teachers...
Listen to more from Sunday Miscellany here.
