Beautiful Affair. Mike Hanrahan

egg, buttermilk and dried fruit. Mix gently and transfer to the prepared skillet or tin.

      7 Bake for 1 hour, then remove from the tin, turn it upside down on a wire rack and cover with a damp cloth.

      MUM AND HER ORANGE BIRTHDAY CAKE

      January is when the Seville oranges come in, with many households creating their own distinct marmalades. My aunt Peggy’s won hands down in our family, and she often added some lime to her marmalade. For many years my mum celebrated her birthday on 5 January, until the year she got her first passport for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to America to celebrate my brother Kieran’s marriage to Mayo woman Pat Baines. Up to that point she had never needed her birth certificate, so when it arrived in the post, she was shocked to discover that she was in fact born on 6 January. I think we had two celebrations that year, and we’re all still a little confused when the date comes around.

      For one of her birthdays, I made a three-tier orange cake, complete with orange butter icing and strips of sweetened orange zest scattered over the top. I insisted on icing it at home in Dublin before a three-hour journey to Clare. I placed the cake in a tall, sturdy-looking box, wedged into the back seat of the car with my bag and a denim jacket. When I arrived in Ennis I glanced over my shoulder to see the cake box keeled over, and melted icing drifting slowly like lava onto the seat and all over my lovely denim jacket. Mercifully, my sister Jean arrived with the repair kit and we somehow managed to rebuild and camouflage the damage just in time.

      Flourless orange cake

      Makes one 26cm cake

      200g caster sugar

      100g brown sugar

      6 medium free-range eggs

      2 oranges, boiled for 1 hour until soft (save the cooking water, quarter and remove pips, do not peel!)

      250g ground almonds

      1½ tsp baking powder

       For the syrup:

      150g caster sugar

      Reserved cooking water (see above)

      1 Preheat the oven to 170°C/150°C fan/gas 3.

      2 Put the sugars and eggs into a food processor, or use a bowl with a hand-held blender, and slowly blitz to a smooth paste.

      3 Add the orange pieces and blitz.

      4 Add the almonds and baking powder, and blitz again.

      5 Pour into a 26cm cake tin lined with baking parchment and bake for 1 hour and 20 minutes. Check with a skewer to ensure it’s cooked in the middle (the skewer will come out clean).

      6 Meanwhile make the syrup. Stir to dissolve the caster sugar in the cooking water and boil for approximately 20 minutes.

      7 Pour the syrup over the cooling cake while still in the tin. Allow to soak in and cool before turning it out onto a plate.

       For a cake with more moisture:

      Zest and juice a third orange and add to the cooking water with the 150g of sugar. Boil for 20 minutes or so, until you have a syrup, and drizzle this on top sparingly (save some of the boiled zest for decoration). Simply dry the zest on kitchen paper and sprinkle on top once the cake has cooled.

      THE SCULLERY AND THE STAGE

      Our kitchen, the scullery, was a tiny room barely ten by eight feet that housed a sink, table top and stock cupboards. All hot food was cooked on the range in the living room. After a few years Mum somehow added a hob into that tiny spot. Historically, the scullery was a room in the depths of the great mansions that was used for washing dishes and the landlord’s dirty clothes. My mum somehow managed to feed a small nation from that room. A curtain divided the scullery from a living room, the hub of many Hanrahan activities. There we drank early-morning milky egg whips, and ate breakfast, lunch and tea around a large adjustable table. Saturday dining was flexible but Sunday was the full show, a roast followed by a dessert of homemade jelly with ripple ice cream or Mum’s delicious trifle.

      In the evenings after tea, a light meal, we had a group huddle around the Philips valve radio, which soon gave way to the Bush television. That room also hosted the All-Star Hanrahan Family Revue, a concert performance for visiting relatives and friends, with each of us lined up for curtain call to perform our party piece. We all played an instrument or danced, so every available space in the house was taken for practice for our many musical endeavours. Mam and Dad were very much associated with Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, an organisation founded in the 1950s to preserve Irish culture and music. They attended local meetings and assisted at all local fleadhs, with my mother and her friends making hundreds of sandwiches, and Dad along with his mates preparing and cleaning halls and rooms for performance or competition. I sang and played tin whistle with my brothers Joe, Kieran, Ger and a couple of other neighbours in the St Michael’s Céilí Band, performing at charity and village variety concerts. My sisters Gay and Jean along with other neighbours provided the dancing spectacle. Once a week we had music lessons with the great Frank Custy at the national school in Toonagh, where I won my first and only Fleadh Cheoil medal for singing the ballad ‘Kevin Barry’. I must have been only eleven or twelve. One summer, the carnival came to town and we all entered the talent contest. One by one they went to the podium, belting out reels, jigs and hornpipes at a very high standard. I went up and blurted out a rickety version of ‘Lily the Pink’ and took the crown – well, a shilling, but it was as good as any crown to me. My very talented brothers and friends were not at all amused.

      PRAY FOR US

      The living room was also a central room of prayer under the watchful eyes of the Sacred Heart, the child of Prague, the mother of Perpetual Succour and the Lord himself staring down from his crucifix. Every night we knelt to recite the longest Rosary in the history of the Catholic Church, with Hail Mary, Holy Mary, Hail Mary, Holy Mary, followed by the Glory Be into a litany of add-ons that included Prayers for the Faithful, blessings for the departed, those suffering sickness or hospitalised, relatives starting new jobs, sitting exams or heading off to foreign shores. We counted down the various mysteries on our fingers, keeping our eyes tightly shut to avoid any sibling contact for fear of the giggles and Dad’s severe reprimand. The Angelus bells were respected twice a day, everything stopped as we recited a special Angelus prayer, and we always did the First Friday, a devotion that required you to attend Mass and receive Communion on nine consecutive First Fridays of the month. Miss one, and you had to start it all over again. Rewards included a ticket to eternal life, a peaceful home, comfort in affliction, mercy and a guarantee of grace, glory and sanctity in death. It was a heavenly-brownie-point feast day. I served as an altar boy for the Franciscan Friary and the Poor Clares, an enclosed monastery of beautifully serene, pious and, frankly, adorable nuns. They lived their lives behind mesh walls tending their little farm and they showered us with their love, smiles and, after every Christmas and Easter midnight Mass, with sweets and chocolate. My favourite religious service was evening benediction with its Latin prayers, beautiful hymns and the swinging of the thurible with its sweet scent of incense and charcoal.

      PORK CHOPS AND A CUPPA

      Beneath the Sacred Heart of Jesus was our Stanley range, which was constantly on the go to produce the most amazing stews, roasts and Mum’s famous pork chops. I loved her pork chops. After a slow pan-fry, she added sliced onions and a cup of leaf tea and allowed them to simmer for a while. It was a recipe passed down from her own mother, who maintained that it added flavour, keeping the pork moist while creating its own very distinct gravy. It was succulent, tasty and legendary. I always thought it was a family dish, and when I suggested Mum’s method recently in reply to a recipe query on Twitter, the reaction was overwhelming. Turns out there’s an ancient tradition of tea-brining, with a definite historic link to Ireland and Scotland.

      DAD