St Patrick's Day Week (Blarney Castle Gouda!)

So to recap where we left off, Constant Readers, at the end of the Week 7 Afterthoughts post, I said that there would be a theme to this week’s posts and gave a hint to what the theme was.  The hint was “We’ll be Dublin the fun and Irish you all enjoy it”.  Have you guessed the theme yet?

Thursday is St Patrick's Day.  And so, in honour of this, we will be spotlighting Irish cheese all this week.  Much like St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, drove all the snakes out of Ireland, my goal is to drive all the cheese out of stores… BY EATING IT!!!

Before I get to the actual cheese tasting, perhaps you want to know what qualifies Captain Cheese to consider himself a worthy reviewer of Irish cheese.  Excellent question!

The Captain has Irish ancestry on both sides of his family with his great-grandfather on his mother’s side being born in Ballymena, County Antrim in Northern Ireland, and his great-great-grandfather on his father’s side being born in County Cork in Ireland.  As well, when both sides of the Captain’s family came to Canada, they settled in the Pointe-Saint Charles area of Montreal.  Today, Pointe-Saint-Charles is considered the heart of Irish Montreal, with street names like Saint-Patrick, Hibernia, Dublin Place and Rue des Irlandais testifying to its heritage.  And finally, the Captain’s family name is one of the most common in all of Ireland. (Whalen origins)
Yes, Whalen and Whelan, the two most common forms of the name,  together rank 79th on the list of 100 most common surnames in Ireland.  If you add the variant Phelan to the group, the name ranks as the 44th most common.

And now on to the cheese....

The first cheese on our tour of Ireland is Kerrygold Blarney Castle gouda. If Blarney sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because you may have heard of the Blarney Stone. The Blarney Stone is a stone built into Blarney Castle.  Legend has it that if you kiss the Blarney Stone, you will be given the gift of the gab, or great eloquence or skill at flattery.  The Captain would never presume to call himself eloquent but he certainly has been accused of having the gift of gab.    

Blarney was defined this way by an Irish politician: Blarney is something more than mere flattery. It is flattery sweetened by humour and flavoured by wit. Those who mix with Irish folk have many examples of it in their everyday experience.

I have reviewed gouda before but that was a smoked gouda.  This one is not smoked.  You can definitely taste a difference between the two and I think might prefer the smoked gouda over this one.  It’s still very, very good and if someone offered me some, I would take it.  But, if I had to choose, I would go with the smoked gouda.  Also, if you were serving a cheese tray and already had a smoked cheese, this would be a good choice to replace the smoked gouda.  As per the Kerrygold website, It both feels and tastes similar to a young Dutch Gouda cheese and makes a perfect complement to fresh fruit and a glass of crisp wine, like Sauvignon Blanc.

I leave you with this poem by Francis Sylvester Mahony, an Irish writer, who has this to say about the Blarney Stone:

'Tis there's the stone that whoever kisses

He never misses to grow eloquent;

'Tis he may clamber to a lady's chamber,

Or become a member of Parliament.

"A noble spouter he'll sure turn out, or

An out and outer to be let alone;

Don't try to hinder him, or to bewilder him,

For he is a pilgrim from the Blarney stone."

Stay cheesy!

Captain Cheese