Barney and Rosy

For my birthday, David got us tickets to Belfast Bred, a foodie tour put on by a professional actor. Said actor is dressed as a chef and has a painted white face and blue lips. The idea is that he was a chef on the Titanic and, due to global warming, he has just been thawed out from an iceberg, where he spent the past 100 years. His wife Rosy worked 12 hour days in one of Belfast’s shirt factories. As you walk around the town with Barney, he talks about characters from the city’s history and about buildings and fish markets that are no longer with us. As you go from restaurant to bar to deli, he is supposedly gathering ingredients to recreate a sumptuous meal he would have served in the Ritz restaurant on the Titanic.

Here Barney is telling us about this water fountain, the Jaffe Memorial, built by Otto Jaffe, Belfast’s first and so far only Jewish Lord Mayor, in honour of his father, Daniel Joseph Jaffe, who was a merchant, who came to Belfast to set up a linen export business in 1850. I always wondered what this odd structure was all about.
In the lovely bar, The Dark Horse, we saw one of 10 wooden doors that were carved from two trees that fell down in the Dark Hedges, made famous by Game of Thrones. Each door is near a GOT filming location or, in this case, a bar where GOT stars hang out.

We visited the famous Mourne Seafood Bar, which I had to leave early due to a tightening in my throat. Seafood makes me nauseous. The rest of the tour ate deep fried squid.
The character of Barney was named for Barney Hughes, Belfast’s most successful and most well-loved baker. He invented methods of mass production that kept his prices very low. During the famine years, he refused to raise his prices, even though the cost of ingredients was rising. He reduced the price of inputs by mixing pea flour with wheat flour. This gave rise, ahem, to the rhyme:
"Barney Hughes Bread

Sticks to your belly like lead
Not a bit of wonder
You fart like thunder
Barney Hughes bread."
He is credited with keeping many souls alive through the famine. Another source of protein? Oysters. Poor man’s food at the time and plentiful.

Barney’s banter was the best part of the tour--many lovely turns of phrase that I wouldn’t be that familiar with.
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