Articles of Mastication

Pandy, Please

Here I am singing and playing a sean-nós rendition of Eamonn A’ Chnuic. I recorded it especially for you today. And here’s a transcription of the song. The second English translation is the accurate one. “Ned of the Hill” was Edmund O’Ryan, a roving outlaw of 18th-century Ireland.

Edmond O’Ryan, the hero of [a] Gaelic song, was born in Kilnamanagh, Co. Tipperary, before the wars of 1690. After the defeat of James II, whom he supported, he was outlawed and had his estates confiscated. After a roving life full of romantic adventure, he was buried in the Church of Doon, Loch Gur, Co. Limerick. The song, in describing the outlaw driven by pain and beating on the closed door of his beloved, symbolized the lonely cause of Ireland. (Notes Clancy Bros, ‘The Rising of the Moon’)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

Since cooking and eating corned beef, cabbage and potatoes somehow makes the matriarchs in my family feel as if we’re right back in Galway whence sprung my bloodline, a metric ton of the stuff has been changing hands on my mother’s side for an entire week. There’s a long tradition among Irish-Americans of getting completely drunk for St. Patrick’s Day - as if that, too, proves how Irish you are - but I will celebrate by grinding up the cured and boiled beef brisket foisted on me, then frying up some corned beef hash. And I’ll probably grind up some potatoes for pandy as well. As you can see above, I like my pandy extra creamy and smooth, with plenty of butter mixed in and melted atop. Pandy is essentially just mashed potatoes, but if you read my Thanksgiving post, you have an idea about the distinction between it and normal mashed potatoes. The definition of ‘pandy’ according to A Dictionary of Hiberno-English is here:

pandy, peaindí

// 1. n. v. a blow on hand given as a punishment; to strike, chastise < E dial. < L pande (palmam), hold out (your hand). ‘I got pandied for cogging (q.v. cog)’; Synge, Playboy, Act 3, FDA 2, 643: “Pegeen: ‘That’s it, now the world will see him pandied”, Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 61: “‘Yes, sir, but Father Dolan said he will come in again tomorrow to pandy me for it’”.

2. n. dish of potatoes mashed with milk, butter, salt, and pepper < Ir. peaindí. ‘Give some pandy to the child will you to shut him up’; O’Brien, A Pagan Place, 123: “. . .you started to scoop the potatoes out of their skins and mash them. You made pandy for dogs”.