An Irishman's Diary

AT LEAST one former employee of a certain great institution in Dublin 8 took grave offence to my reference in Wednesday’s diary about a “rat emerging from a vat of Guinness”.

I used this admittedly fanciful image to describe my condition after running in an April deluge last weekend. It was an attempt to capture the wetness and misery of my situation, while also hinting at the mild euphoria that often follows a run, especially in extreme weather.

But I can see how brewers might have taken it as a comment on their quality control. So I’m happy to clarify that I was using the phrase loosely, and that any comparison with actual rats, living or dead, was unintended.

That said, the mythology of the brewery rat is well established in song and literature. And I can’t but note in passing that, however unwelcome brewers might find it, the association has been a generally positive one for rodents. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in the hierarchy of such things, the brewery rat has always been considered a better class of vermin.

The Dropkick Murphys took the idea to extremes with their humorous 2005 song, Good Rats, which is about a group of the animals who take to drinking Guinness. But I'm reminded of another back-handed compliment to stout that I came across recently, in a book about the artist Alexander Williams, whose family were taxidermists and for many years had a famous shop in Dame Street.

Once, in the early 1900s, the stuffed animals in their window were augmented by a large, beaver-sized rodent which became known as the “Guinness rat”, due to a popular belief that it had been found there and that stout-drinking explained its size.

In fact, it was a coypu, recently expired at Dublin Zoo. Yet such was the sensation it caused that police had to be called to control the crowds.

Nobody would ever happily eat a rat. It sometimes must be done, however. And if you have to do it, again, the brewery rat will be your plat de choix. Just ask the French, who know.

During the siege of Paris in 1871, the city's populace consumed all available animals, starting with the conventional menu items and then extending to horses, dogs, cats, and the inmates of zoos. Even then, however, local food shoppers retained at least some of their famous fussiness. As Alistair Horne writes in his fine book Seven Ages of Paris, "there was a significant variation in price between brewery and sewer rats".

In fact, Horne adds, the better rodents became perversely something of a luxury: "The elaborate sauces that were necessary to render them edible meant that rats were essentially a rich man's dish – hence the notorious menus of the Jockey Club, which featured such delicacies as salmis de ratsand rat pie."

CHANGING TACK, for a moment, mention of the Paris Siege reminds me how quickly and utterly the French shrugged off the military and financial disaster of that war with Prussia. In the midst of our own current humiliation, such history lessons can be a source of optimism. But in any case, it was from the ashes of " l'anné e terrible" that the splendours of Belle Époque Paris rose, and within only a few years.

By the 1880s, when French travel writer Madam de Bovet visited Dublin, the siege was only a memory and she could be unapologetically horrified at the things poor Dubliners ate. Here she describes a food market in the Liberties: “There are barrels of red herring, pickled in brine; flat baskets in which are spread out the most disgusting bits of meat that one can possible imagine: stale cows’ feet, overkept sheeps’ heads, bits of flabby pink veal, tripe, intestines, skins, and fat of every animal eatable or otherwise – refuse that no well-trained dog would touch.” But I only mention her here, because a bit further on, she says it would be remiss of any tourist to leave the Liberties without visiting “the immense industrial establishment which, on the confines of this miserable quarter, represents the fortune of Dublin”.

She means, of course, the aforementioned brewery. And soon, sure enough, she is gazing into one of the aforementioned Guinness vats, awe-struck. The spectacle sets her thinking about George Plantagenet, a 15th-century English duke and a noted drinker, said to have been executed in the Tower of London by forced submergence in a barrel of Malmsey wine.

“The visitor who has the curiosity to poke his nose through one of the openings made in the side [of a Guinness vat],” she wrote, “may have a very good idea of the feelings the Duke of Clarence experienced when he was drowning in the butt of Malmsey, with this difference, that if he fell headlong into this seething frothy mixture, he would be asphyxiated by the carbonic acid gas it gives off, before he could arrive at the surface.” Perhaps herself intoxicated by the surroundings, Madam de Bovet suggests it would be a pleasant way to go. But she adds that, without experiencing it in person, no one could imagine “the strength of the fermenting fumes of stout”. So powerful were they, she said, that “after a vat is emptied the washers are obliged to wait four and twenty hours before they can enter it. One second of it is enough to turn you dizzy, and two to make you insensible.”

So there you have it. I hope this further clarifies Wednesday’s throwaway comment. But by way of underlining my apology, I’d like to make it clear that, whatever chance there is of a rat entering a vat of Guinness, the prospects of one emerging from it are minimal.

* fmcnally@irishtimes.com