Sean Cronin of The Gourmet Shop in Rathgar, Dublin, presents his new honey, saying that it has been a good year: Irish Woodland Honey from Woodtown, Rathfarnham it is labelled. The month of May was favourable to beekeepers, he says. This is the produce from the May gathering of his bees. What flowers would they have mostly been enjoying? Well, hawthorn of course, bramble, sycamore, he thinks, and maybe, though he didn't mention it, the unusual flowering of the oak trees, turning many of them yellow before the leaves began to come though. And what, does Sean think, are the qualities of a good honey? You look, he says, for colour, flavour, body and aroma - the qualities of a good vintage wine. His qualifies.
Honey is, surely, to most people, a delectable substance to be eaten off a spoon or on bread or a biscuit. Or maybe in pies. Mrs Beeton is rather dismissive; in her receipe for Honey Cake she just adds to the ingredients `honey to taste. But then some people may be thought to go over the top.
Our old friend Dr Jarvis of Folk Medicine fame, the sub title of which book is The honey and cider-vinegar way to health pays great tribute to its remarkable virtues. "Yet for me the crowning glory of honey is its medical value. Being a medical man, I would naturally be interested in a substance which study and experimentation have convinced me is a help to living this life literally from cradle to grave." He goes on to tell us of an instance of arthritis not only being relieved, but altogether disappearing.
However, to a more mundane level. It is a most agreeable substance and people who work on a huge scale in the Pyrenees-Rousillon area of the south-west Mediterranean, France, have a catalogue of honey which they gather from scores of miles around, from the scrub along the sea-coast to high mountain plains, and the area from which each pot comes or the particular flower or tree from which each originates is clearly labelled.
Back to the simpler life. In Frank O'Connor's heartwarming Kings, Lords and Commons" there is a poem attributed to St Manchan of Lemananaghan in Offaly which has this verse: "And all I ask for housekeeping/ I get and pay no fees,/ Leeks from the garden, Poultry, game,/ Salmon and trout and bees." The title for the poem is "The Hermitage". Sound man.