Magill’s

thanks to lolaclickclack on flickr

 

I was just thinking about this shop in Dublin, there’s a particular sausage I get in there called Calabrese, a dry & spicy Italian sausage from suppliers like DCW Casing which I’m very fond of. Anyhow, just go there and buy one for a tenner.

I imagine Magill’s is the type of shop that is suffering in the downturn but I’m hoping it’ll endure because Magill’s is an institution. It has been around for 90 years or so and every, olive, spice, sausage, cheese and paté has left a few of their mollycules flying around. So if I can steal from Flann O’Brien’s Mollycule Theory in “The Third Policeman”, this institution is now part shop, part fondu:

People who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of the parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles as a result of the interchanging of mollycules of each of them.

And:

The last hanging we had in this parish was thirty years ago. It was a very famous man call MacDadd. He held the record for the one hundred miles on a solid tyre. I need to tell you what the solid tyre did for him. We had to hang the bicycle.

Now I’m not suggesting you’ll get hung if you go into Magill’s, unlike their sausages which are, um, well hung, but I’m imploring you, cajoling you, pleading with you to go there and buy something small. It’s a fabulous place, all dark and mysterious with rows and rows of exotic-looking spices, pepper, anise, cardamom, cinnamon – you name it, they have it. Great desserts, breads, preserves and the like bedeck their shelves. Hams the colour of gold and dripping with artery clogging fat, eggs, anchovies.

Just go there, you don’t need an excuse, just indulge your palate.

14 Clarendon Street  Dublin, Co. Dublin, 01 6713830

I have no interest in Magill’s other than being a lover of food. And Calabrese.