A fruit loaf, £1.50, and fame in The Westmeath Examiner

Eilís Ryan

The first time I ever had my name in The Westmeath Examiner was all because of Mullingar Agricultural Show.

And while that was great, it was nothing compared to the fact that I was £1.50 better off after my first ever attempt at winning an award for my culinary skills!

It remains with me still, my memory of that glorious day, when an adjudicator slipped a card under my "Harvest Fruit Loaf" identifying it as winner of the "Light Fruit Cake" class. It may have been a class for children - that I can't recall - but a check of the files of The Westmeath Examiner reveals that my brief moment of glory occurred at the show of 1975, held at Newbrook, just before my eleventh birthday.

It was all very exciting: the cake and the cailin that I then was, came in from Ballymore to my aunt, Carmel O'Keeffe of Bellvew Heights, who was somehow involved in the process of getting me to enter.

There was a bit of a wait but from outside the competition area we could see there was a card left under a slice of my cake - which meant it had won something.

After the adjudcators had finished their work and the public were allowed in to view the entries, I was the winner!

All the entries had to be left on display for a few hours so the public could see them - and when I went to retrieve mine, it was to discover that someone had left a little note, asking to buy the cake! My little Harvest Fruit Loaf, made in a tin my mother still uses for brown bread, 50 years on.

If I recall correctly, the bidder offered £3 - but I couldn't sell it: I had been told I was to give the cake to Aunt Carmel as thanks for bringing me to the agricultural show.

I remember nothing else about the day, except that I was introduced to the late Beeny McDonnell, a man who always made an impression.

For years after, I fantasised about further successes - and little envelopes containing £1.50 and notes from awed cakelovers, eager to buy my creations. I got the show catalogue: I even got my mother to buy a bottle of that strange substance called “Irel” so I could attempt an Irel coffee cake. It wasn't a success.

Not too many years after that, the show became a big feature of my life as a young journalist: I remember with John FitzSimons spending hours tracking down the names of winners; trekking back and forward to show secretary Mary Nea to get the latest results in from the hundreds of classes. And then, the mammoth task of typing them all up.

I'm not sure, but I don't think I ever did actually enter again.

My baking career never amounted to much - but I still remember snippets of that exciting day. And I still remember how the Harvest Fruit Loaf tasted. It might be worth seeing if the book with that recipe is still out in Ballymore.