The stew had been on my mind since Monday. Not a specific stew – just the idea of it, the way November eventually insists on it. By Wednesday the weather had settled into that particular Kerry soft that isn’t really rain at all, just air with opinions, and I’d got the carrots and the potatoes in Castlegregory on the way back from somewhere. The lamb I’d had in the freezer since September, from Tom. I knew I was going to do it; I just needed the afternoon.
I started with the onions.
Donal rang at half two, which is the time he rings when he hasn’t anything specific to say, which is often. He was in his kitchen in Cork. I could hear the radio faintly, some talk programme.
‘What are you up to,’ he said. Not really a question with Donal, more an opening bid.
‘Making stew,’ I said. ‘Lamb.’
There was a small pause. ‘Are you browning the meat first?’
I looked at the lamb sitting on the board. ‘I’m on the onions still.’
‘You want to get a good colour on the meat,’ he said. ‘That’s the whole thing, really.’
I’ve been making stew since 1989. I told him this.
‘I know,’ he said, ‘I’m only saying.’
He said it in the way he always says things – not pushy, just present. Donal spent a winter years ago reading cookery books the way other people read novels, and he’s never quite recovered from it. He knows about deglazing. He has opinions about stock. Since he moved to Cork he’s been sending me recipes in the post, handwritten on the back of whatever’s to hand, shopping lists sometimes, once a gas bill. I have them in a pile on the windowsill. The letters from Kenmare are in the press where I moved them, still unstamped.
I got the cast iron pot going on the range and put a bit of oil in it while he was telling me about the weather in Cork – mild, apparently, which I received without comment. The onions went in first, chopped rough, not the paper-thin slices Donal would have done. I cook onions until they’re soft and a little golden around the edges, and I don’t rush it, and this takes longer than recipes say. While they were going I cut the carrots into chunks – big ones, I told him, because I like to find them in the bowl rather than hunt for them.
‘You could add a parsnip,’ he said.
‘I don’t have a parsnip.’
‘That’s a pity.’
It wasn’t a pity. I don’t like parsnip in stew. I didn’t say this because we’d been through it before and it doesn’t go anywhere.
The lamb went in after the onions had had their time, in pieces roughly the size of a large egg – shoulder, mostly, which is what you want, not the leg. You want fat running through it, you want something that will go soft over a few hours. I browned it in batches, which Donal had recommended and which I’d been intending to do anyway, and it got a good colour on it, dark at the edges. That smell. The whole kitchen changed.
‘Are you putting Guinness in it?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘You could.’
‘I know I could,’ I said.
I do sometimes put a small amount of stout in – maybe half a can – but I didn’t have any and I wasn’t driving to the village for it. I put in stock instead, the real thing that I make from a chicken carcass and keep in the freezer in yoghurt containers, which Donal approves of, so he said nothing. Then the carrots, then the potatoes, then a few sprigs of thyme from the pot on the windowsill that has somehow survived to November. A bay leaf. Salt. Pepper. Put the lid on, turn it down as low as the range will go, and leave it alone.
That’s the recipe. Don’t meddle with it.
‘You want to check it every forty minutes or so,’ Donal said.
‘I’m going to leave it for three hours.’
Another pause. ‘Fair enough,’ he said, which is Donal for I disagree but I won’t say so.
We talked for a good while after that – about his daughter, Aoife, and the baby who’s due in March and who I keep forgetting to ask about properly, which I feel guilty about. About the drive down from Cork to Kerry that he keeps saying he’ll do before Christmas. About whether he misses the B&B, which is something we’ve circled around since he left and neither of us has ever answered cleanly. He doesn’t, I think. Or not the B&B itself – maybe just the structure of it, something to get up for in a particular way. I’d be guessing, though. Donal doesn’t say, exactly.
‘Mind yourself,’ he said, before he rang off.
‘You too,’ I said. ‘Drive down soon.’
‘I will,’ he said, the way people say things they mean but aren’t sure of the timing.
The stew sat on the range for the rest of the afternoon. I read for a while on the armchair by the fire – I’m back into Niall Williams after leaving him aside in October, which feels right for this end of the year – and the cottage filled up with that smell, lamb and thyme and something slower underneath it all, the stock doing its work. The light outside was gone by four, which it is now, which you have to just accept about November. The lane was dark and the rain was still making up its mind.
I ate it at half six at the kitchen table with bread from Monday – the bread that actually rose, unlike the three before it. The stew was too hot at first and then the right temperature and then I’d eaten all of it. I hadn’t put in a parsnip and it was fine without one.
I should ring Donal back and tell him that, but I won’t bother.