The Spring 2024 issue of Food & Dining Magazine is now available in all the familiar places: Louisville area eateries and food shops, newsstands and online.
It’s been a while since I wrote about St. Patrick’s Day entirely from scratch. That’s because my past efforts have always been ripe for quick and easy remixing, thus sparing me the need to squeeze my brain yet again.
In my line of work reruns are absolutely essential, and don’t allow anyone to tell you differently. But maybe it’s time for a (slight) change of pace. Consequently, let’s restart at the beginning, and work our way toward the inevitable greatest hits playlist.
As the DNA evidence suggests, some of me is Irish. The rest of me is English, German and even a bit Swedish, which is probably a legacy of wild Viking oats being sowed amid the British Isles. Of course, my passport is oblivious, plainly asserting that I’m 100% American, but then again, unless one’s heritage is Native American, we Americans all came from somewhere else – voluntarily or otherwise.
It seems we’re all born on the 4th of July, unless it’s time for a “heritage” holiday: Kwanzaa, Chinese New Year, Cinco de Mayo, Oktoberfest, Burns Night – or St. Patrick’s Day. Then we’re eager to share in the experience of past arrivals to our collective aerie of a nation-state, even while clamoring loudly about whatever contemporary immigration situation is currently prompting the most distemper on social media (and in the process, accomplishing nothing in terms of resolving it).
If I’m to be honest, it never made very much sense to me that I’d choose to honor the Irish experience in America (or the Uruguayan, Eritrean or Indonesian) without learning something about the country in question. I readily concede that serious-mindedness is an innate, personalized response, because for me “fun” tends to be neither frivolous nor spontaneous, and certainly not Disneyesque.
Rather, my fun is reality-based, and this brings me to an absurdly tinted St. Patrick’s Day topic that first arose during my college daze, when it was suggested by my friends at the time that we should visit one of the local bars for the express purpose of consuming golden-colored forgettable light lager beer dosed with blue food coloring, thus rendering it green.
I was baffled then, and my reaction is much the same now, 40-odd years later: If you claim to like beer, even wretched...Read more
