Sir, - For years connoisseurs of the peculiar in speech turned to Albert Reynolds to feed their guilty pleasures. John McKenna, your food and restaurant critic, performs a parallel function in written prose. My all-time favourite came in a rhapsody on Irish food in which he dilated on the delight of eating "Irish salmon with a dolorous vanilla sauce". The context made it plain he considered dolorous a high commendation.
He has almost equalled his own record in his restaurant column of February 27th which contains some darkly gleaming gems. "Venerable kidneys" was very fine: no doubt the lamb who supplied them was the archdeacon of the flock. Or stay! Could he merely have been an extremely old lamb, a whiskered veteran? Or had the kidneys lain around so long that "venerable" was a less libellous version of stale or rotten?
Mr McKenna had not exhausted his resources of Babu English, for a few lines later he pens (immortally, in my opinion) a sentence including the phrase "and wanting the sharp enervating flavours which the rosti pancake supplied".
Tosh carried to this high degree deserves as much praise as has been lavished on Humpty Dumpty for his brisk dealing with the English language: "When I use a word it means what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
Yet I do wonder what Mr McKenna meant. - Yours, etc., Helen Lucy Burke,
Glasnevin, Dublin 11.