Sir, - Unfortunately Kevin Myers is operating in something of an information vacuum in his evaluation of the Irish cheese situation (An Irishman's Diary, March 25th). His statement that traditions in Irish cheese "simply aren't there" is inaccurate. They're there, all right, but unfortunately mostly forgotten for reasons I leave to historians to tease out.
However, if he'll open a copy of Kuno Meyer's translation of The Vision of MacConglainne, he'll find numerous references to native Irish cheeses, some of them mentioned by name - like maethal, a big round pressed cheese similar to modern Gouda (elsewhere in the literature someone is described as having "a rear end that looked like a couple of half-maethals rubbing together"): tath, a cooked pressed sour-curd cheese, apparently something like mozzarella; gruth, a "cottage" cheese; and milsean, a mascarpone-like cream/curd cheese.
Mulchan, a hard skim milk cheese, was the last of the group mentioned in the Vision to be made in Ireland in modern times - it was last manufactured in Waterford in 1824, when an English writer ran across it and anglicised its name to "Mullahawn". And Queen Maeve herself is reputed to have snuffed it after a good hard lump of tanach, an ancient Irish grating cheese, was slung at her by her nephew Furbaide and caught her right between the eyes. At this period "cais" seems to have been the name, not of cheeses in general, but of one specific kind: no one is sure which.
Nor, as Mr Myers seems to think, were these cheeses necessarily sourced from "Mediterranean influences". In fact, the process sometimes went the other way around. The Munster cheese one now finds in continental Europe is not named after any monastic establishment there, as might seem likely from the name, but after the province. Irish monks away on missionary business on the Continent in the first millennium AD left more there than the poem "Pangur Ban" (the original of which is written in the margin of a manuscript found in St Gallen in Switzerland). They got homesick for their local cheeses, and cloned them there. One of them in particular was successful among the locals, and spread. As a result, you can now buy a pretty fair Munster in Italy (though whether it's as good as the original is difficult to tell).
If the new generation of Irish cheese-makers have begun their work over the last couple of decades by cloning European cheeses, we all have to start somewhere. But soon enough someone is bound to turn his attention to finding out enough additional information on the making of mulchan and tath and their kin to resurrect them. Irish food historians, rise up now and inform your public more fully, so that once more we will have maethal to joke about, and can find a peaceful use for tanach! Probably something to do with pasta. - Yours, etc., Diane Duane,
Grangecon, Dunlavin, Co Wicklow.