Food permeates every aspect of life and society, from birth to death – from the newborn’s first suckle to the food traditions associated with Irish wakes and funerals. Essential for survival, it has historically proven academically elusive, hidden in plain sight. Entangled with the domestic and the feminine, it was perhaps traditionally regarded as too mundane and too quotidian for consideration.
Yet, consider what can be revealed by applying the ‘food lens’ to something as fundamental as our sense of place, our basic grounding in townland and byway. Consider the etymological richness of ‘Bóthar’, the Irish word for road (from ‘bó’ – cow), defined in width by the length and breadth of a cow, a signifier of the long affair of our bovine past; extending also to our ‘buachaillí’ (boys) and ‘cailíní’ (girls), meaning, respectively, cowboy or herd boy and little herder, the suffix ‘ín’ denoting the diminutive.
The true meaning of placenames such as Clonmel, Cappataggle, Glenageary, and Kanturk, all food-related, can only be unlocked through an understanding of their Irish language origins. All are instances of what Martin Doyle succinctly explains as ‘a transliteration from the Irish, preserving the sound but obliterating the meaning’. In a form of reverse colonisation, there are many Hiberno-English words for food we regularly use without ever considering their etymology. For example, we have made the much loved ‘spud’ (potato) our own, descending to us from ‘spuddle’, a small cheap knife, through to ‘spud’, an instrument for weeding, as wielded by Swift:
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Than strongest Weeds that grow these stones betwixt:
My Spud these Nettles from the Stones can part
No Knife so keen to weed thee from my Heart.
Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill memorialised her husband, Art, in the famous poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, re-rendered for the modern reader by the bilingual writer, Doireann Ní Ghriofa as A Ghost in the Throat. Food was one of the touchstones by which her late husband expressed his love and devotion to Eibhlín Dubh. She never repented that love, and expressed it thus:
I never repented it:
You whitened a parlour for me,
Painted rooms for me,
Reddened ovens for me,
Baked fine bread for me,
Basted meat for me,
Slaughtered beasts for me;
I slept in ducks’ feathers
Till midday milking-time,
Or more if it pleased me.
The name ‘Art’ means bear in Irish. In The Solace of Artemis, the poet Paula Meehan is comforted by the realisation ‘that every polar bear alive’ in the world has a trace of mitochondrial DNA from a brown bear that lived in Ireland during the Ice Age.
Our food history lies in the folds and crevices as much as in the grand narratives. Take, for example, the butchery marks that were found on the kneecap of a brown bear from a cave in Co Clare, dating back to c. 10,500 BCE. We know that permanent human settlement in Ireland began c. 8000 BCE: however, again those butchery marks, this time on a reindeer bone found in Co Cork, reveal traces of what have been presumed to be casual visitors (hunters) from as far back as c. 33,000 BCE, prompting JP Mallory to argue that the ‘earliest known item on an Irish menu was venison’.
Recent scholarship reveals a very different story of this island’s food history compared with some of the insular tales and myths peddled in the past. Our ancestors were no strangers to Continental luxuries; consider the pine-resin hair gel found on Clonycavan Man – a bog body discovered in 2002 and radiocarbon dated to between 392 BCE and 201 BCE – which can be traced to northern Spain or southern France.
While wine, spices, and various fabrics may have joined the pine-resin hair gel in the cargo holds of incoming merchant ships, the ballast on their return journeys probably included butter, herring, salmon, and wool. As the Bristol proverb attests: ‘Heryng of Slegothe [Sligo] and salmon of Bame [the river Bann] heis made in Brystowe many a ryche man’.
Further afield, the trilingual ninth-century Irish scholar Johannes Scotus Eriugena, working in the court of Emperor Charles the Bald in the year 858, translated the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite from Greek into Latin. As Michael Cronin has so cogently argued, Ireland, far from being peripheral, was ‘in translation terms, a cultural centre’, with a long tradition of Irish scholars transcribing various texts relating to the heroic wars of Graeco-Roman antiquity into Irish between the 11th and 13th centuries. Cultural influences flowed, and continue to flow, both ways.
From a food literature perspective, the vision (a story within the story) of the 11th-century Aislinge Meic Conglinne was arguably the earliest vernacular European deployment of the conceit of a land of plenty, derivatives of which are found in the later Land of Cockayne of English and French tradition, and also in the German Schlaraffenland. This visionary land of plenty is one in which food and beverages (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) play a central role. ‘Bragget’ (a honeyed beer), ale, and mead are among the beverages referenced, so it is apposite to note that this volume embraces Michael Dietler’s observation that ‘it is perhaps more appropriate to think of alcohol as a special class of food with psychoactive properties’.
Arabic knowledge of distilling was translated from Latin texts by hereditary medical families of Gaelic Ireland, forming the basis of what would later become the whiskey industry. There is a remarkable abundance of explicit and detailed references to distillation as a process, and to uisce beatha as a therapeutic consumable, in the extensive Irish language medical literature that accompanied the c. 1350–1500 Gaelic Resurgence. Beyond this, Susan Flavin and her colleagues working on the FoodCult project are providing evidence of how connected Ireland was conceptually with Europe during the mid-16th and 17th centuries, and how European ideas and symbols were integrated within Irish culture.
This book brings the reader on a journey from prehistory and the Ice Ages in Ireland through to the arrival of fisher-gatherers, early farmers, the introduction of livestock, cultivation of crops and development of cooking technologies, to the setting up of schools of poetry, medicine, and music in the early Medieval period. The extraordinary hospitality of our Gaelic chieftains permeated all levels of society, with the Brehon Laws determining the rations and provisions (eg, wheat, barley, or oat porridge – made on either new milk, buttermilk, or water) required for each class.
Cattle predominated, but when butter became a commercial commodity, its consumption among the poorer citizens declined. With the arrival and adoption of the potato as a staple food the population of Ireland was transformed. Personal correspondences, diaries, literature, and linguistic analysis assist us in charting the rise in social and nutritional importance of the tuber and the ensuing calamity, the Great Famine of 1845–52. Late-19th-century technological changes modernised food production and society at large, and from the early decades of the 20th century Ireland adopted this modernity in all its nuanced facets, from the proliferation of restaurants, hotels, tourism, to rural electrification, televisions and the rise in consumerism and globalisation.
This latest scholarship embraces new sources of evidence and recent developments in scientific practices such as refinements in radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analysis, and how the strontium values in teeth can pinpoint the geology underlying the food consumed. They augment previously used analysis of coprolites, cesspits and waterlogged grains and indeed often reinforce and enlighten knowledge gleaned from folklore, mythological tales and our early medieval vernacular literature, one of the richest collections of vernacular literature in Europe.
Alternative versions of the same stories are frequently found within different regions and groups throughout the island, disseminated like spores in the wind. In his book on Irish plant names and lore, Nicholas Williams tells of the long-standing practice of herbal medicine in the Irish mythological tradition. Dian Céacht, renowned doctor and healer of the Tuatha Dé Dannan, would submerge the wounded men of the Tuatha Dé into a cauldron of boiled medicinal herbs during the Battle of Magh Tuireadh (Moytura), from which they would emerge fully healed and march back into battle against the Fomorians.
Professional jealousy led Dian Céacht to kill his son, Miach, for surpassing his healing power, and the story outlines how Airmed, Miach’s sister, learned the herbal remedies from her brother beyond the grave. Oein de Bhairdúin instances stories within the Irish Traveller community which tell of herbal medicine being handed down by Airmed to the Pavees, highlighting an unbroken tradition in our mythological origin stories down to the present day.
Food, in its various manifestations, has been used as a weapon of war, a symbol of prestige, a mark of hospitality, and associated traditions are found in most calendar and feast days in societies around the world. Many of these traditions, from spilling blood on Martinmas, killing the Michaelmas goose, consuming nettles in the Spring (three times during May, and on three Fridays in March), pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, picking fraughans or bilberries at Lúghnasa, blackberry picking in late August (given heavy rain and sun), to eating barmbrack or colcannon at Halloween, still remain in living memory, and have been captured by folklorists.
One possible reason for the late appearance of what could be considered Irish-authored cookbooks is that the traditional foodways and associated recipes were so strongly tied in with the calendar and the agricultural year, that they did not need to be written down. At the other end of the social scale, the importance attached to orders of precedence and the rituals surrounding the performance of prestige are equally found in Katharine Simms’ chapter on feasting in Medieval Ireland, and in Elaine Mahon’s chapter on Irish State Dining in Áras an Uachtaráin in the 20th century.
The various visitors, monastics, planters, refugees and people who have settled here from the Vikings through to the Huguenots and the Irish Palatines, on to the multi-ethnic make-up of the island today, have all played a role in shaping what we eat and how we perform the rituals surrounding that. The story of food and foodways has always been and remains dynamic – a dynamism that attests to the fact there is no one single narrative that can do justice to that rich tapestry of human history.
Food history has been gaining momentum globally for over half a century, greatly influenced by the French concept of ‘histoire des mentalités’, principally associated with the Annales School. The oldest and longest-running food history conference is the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery (1979 – present), founded and co-chaired by Alan Davidson (retired diplomat, food historian and editor of The Oxford Companion to Food), and the social historian Dr Theodore Zeldin. Their spirit of generous curiosity and shared interest in the topic of food permeates this volume, and continues to influence similar gatherings to this day.
Irish food history remained relatively under-explored until two decades ago, despite the work of some seminal researchers on Irish food before the potato, early Irish farming, economic history, archaeology, folklore, and folk traditions and customs. The expansion of the field in Ireland coincided with the development of a new liberal / vocational paradigm of culinary education in the Dublin Institute of Technology (now Technological University Dublin) in the 1990s, and with the attendance of Irish scholars at the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery, influencing Regina Sexton’s A Little History of Irish Food. From this point on, it is evident that Irish food history was on a secure footing within academia and the wider community. Postgraduate and doctoral research into food history soon followed in the new millennium, research which is continuously expanding and developing.
In 2012 the first biennial Dublin Gastronomy Symposium was held at the School of Culinary Arts and Food Technology, Cathal Brugha Street, now relocated to the campus at Grangegorman. The symposium is directly influenced by the Oxford example, that first gathering leading to the publication of ‘Tickling the Palate’: Gastronomy in Irish Literature and Culture. In 2015, a special issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Section C, was published, titled Food and Drink in Ireland, which was made available the following year in book form. The special ‘Food Issue’ of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies in 2018 further championed the importance of food in Irish scholarship, bringing it more into the mainstream.
That same year, Christopher Kissane observed that ‘we are long past the days when food was not given serious attention by historians. But that does not mean we have figured out how to approach such a vast subject’. This was also the year that Dr Susan Flavin of Trinity College Dublin, secured European Research Council (ERC) funding for the FoodCult project, a collaborative undertaking which commenced in 2019, aiming to establish both the fundamentals of everyday diet, and the cultural ‘meaning’ of food and drink in early modern Ireland (c. 1550–1650).
In 2021, a special issue of Folk Life: Journal of Ethnological Studies was published on Irish Food Ways. This exciting new companion to Irish food history builds on the existing work of scholars across the disciplines. It includes contributions from experts in the fields of archaeology, history, mythology, linguistics, literature, folklore, Irish studies, food studies, beverage studies, gastronomy, and culinary history, while also applying the latest thinking and scholarship to the history of Irish food from the earliest inhabitants to the 21st century.
The book is divided into six sections. The first section, Prehistory and Archaeology of Food in Ireland, has four chapters. JP Mallory brings the reader on a journey from the last Ice Age through to the Iron Age, noting that a culinary revolution occurred during the Neolithic (4000–2500 BCE) which saw the introduction of domestic cattle, sheep/goats and pigs, along with the cultivation of wheat and barley. The chapter concludes by indicating the linguistic and literary evidence for foodstuffs and their preparation that was inherited from the Proto-Celtic language and introduced into Ireland with the arrival of the earliest speakers of Irish.
Finbar McCormick, using osteoarchaeological evidence, notes that Mesolithic settlers in Ireland had a more restricted meat diet than encountered anywhere else in mainland Britain and Europe. The last glacial period had robbed the country of most of its medium and large-sized animals and the lack of a postglacial land bridge to Ireland meant that it could not be repopulated by these animals after the glaciers retreated. It was with the introduction of agriculture in the Neolithic that cattle became the main source of meat, and have remained so until modern times.
Our food history becomes a deeply personal matter with Seamas Caulfield’s chapter on the landscape of the Céide Fields where he uses intergenerational local knowledge, practice and memory, along with the most recent stable isotope and radiocarbon dating of lipids in potsherds, to understand ancient dairy farming in his native Co Mayo. Concluding this section, Nikolah Gilligan reviews plant-based foods and agriculture in Medieval Ireland c. 500–1100 CE, using evidence from historical texts, archaeological excavation and archaeobotanical analysis.
The second section, titled Bog butter, Bees and Banqueting in Medieval Ireland, is self-explanatory. Maeve Sikora and Isabella Mulhall’s chapter showcases the most recent analysis on bog butter finds in Ireland, ranging over 4,000 years, from the early Bronze Age to the post-medieval period. All of the radiocarbon dates for bog butter obtained by the National Museum of Ireland since the year 2000 are laid out for the reader, and a comprehensive overview is given of the type of vessels or coverings in which butter was deposited. The chapter also explores the complex and wide-ranging reasons why butter was deposited in Ireland’s bogs in the first instance.
Shane Lehane combines his background in history and folklore with his applied knowledge of beekeeping in his rich chapter on honey and beekeeping in ancient Ireland. Although evidence of bees and honey in the prehistoric archaeological record is purely circumstantial, the legendary association of the introduction of beekeeping into Ireland by St Modomnóc can be interpreted as an indication that more elaborate apicultural techniques were introduced by the cultural influences of Christianity.
Katharine Simms’ chapter reinforces the importance of banqueting among the Gaelic chiefs in medieval Ireland. One of the main sources of evidence of seating plans, prestige and precedence comes from the legendary feasting-hall at Tara, the Tech Midchuarta (House of Mead Circulation), which had a large vat of mead or ale, either at one end, or in the middle, depending on which version of the text you consulted. Honey also features in William Sayers’ chapter which provides a detailed account of one of the richest sources of Irish food history, the aforementioned Aislinge Meic Conglinne. In his vision of (literally) a land of milk and honey, a horse in this Otherworld is described thus: ‘the bacon horse he sat on had legs of custard and hooves of coarse oat bread, ears of curds, and eyes of honey. Its breath plumed sour cream from each of its nostrils, and there was an occasional gush of bragget from its bum’.
Sources for Food History in Early Modern Ireland begins with Fionnán O’Connor’s chapter on the history of distilling in Ireland and its link with both medicine and feudal hospitality. This is followed by John McCafferty’s chapter on the Franciscans and the power of fish in the 17th century before Toby Barnard brings the reader on a tour of food through all social classes in 18th-century Ireland, richly illustrated by drawings from Hugh Douglas Hamilton’s Cries of Dublin. Danielle Clarke’s chapter on the manuscript recipe books held at Birr Castle allows a unique glimpse into the food culture and culinary activity of the Parsons family over three centuries. In the final chapter in this section, Tara McConnell delves into the personal correspondence of Jonathan Swift, describing the heretofore unexplored gastronomic world of the much-studied satirist, essayist, poet, and cleric, highlighting the nuanced judgments he made about dining and his diet, while also explaining how his various health issues led him towards moderation in the consumption of both food and drink.
Section four, titled Developments in Food Supply, Technology, and Trade, begins with Grace Neville’s chapter drawing on the personal correspondences of the Irish political leader and activist Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847). Neville provides further insight into the feasting, fasting and food passions of O’Connell, noting his efforts to assuage minor famines, cholera outbreaks, and food shortages in his home region of the Iveragh Peninsula (Uíbh Ráthach) in southwest Kerry.
One of the technologies which benefited O’Connell’s correspondences was the improved postal system, which became even more efficient with the enhancements of steam engine technology. This technology, powering both steamships and railways, enabled huge numbers of food packages to be sent into, across and out of Ireland from 1845 to 1960, the subject of John Mulcahy’s chapter. Turkeys, geese, or chickens could be killed, posted from rural Ireland and delivered within 18 hours to any one of England’s industrial cities. So plentiful was the dried fruit sent in packages from the United States of America at Christmas 1944 that a local Limerick newspaper reported that ‘the spotted dog will this year be barking in an American accent’.
Irish butter became a global brand in the 19th century, the subject of the following two chapters. Claudia Kinmonth forensically discusses the home production of butter using the dash churn, and the associated material culture and folklore, before the invention of the cream separator made home churning uneconomical. This innovative separating technology and the subsequent rise of the co-operative movement in Ireland is outlined by Patrick Doyle, noting the influence of key figures such as Horace Plunkett and the work of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS).
The alchemy of home butter making during his Co Derry childhood was poetically revisited and captured by Seamus Heaney in ‘Churning Day’, the butter being described as ‘coagulated sunlight’ heaped up in a tin strainer like ‘gilded gravel in the bowl’.
The penultimate section is titled Food, Folklore, Foclóirí, and Digital Humanities and opens with a splendidly illustrated chapter on Irish hearth furniture by Clodagh Doyle, which discusses the rich folklore behind the artefacts, customs and practices of cooking on the open fire in Ireland until the arrival of rural and urban electrification. Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dónall Ó Braonáin extol the various uses that can be made of Irish-language sources in the study of food history and point out that many of these sources are now freely available online, thanks to the democratising effect of the digitisation of Dictionaries, the Schools’ Collection of Folklore, and the Placenames Database.
The aforementioned rituals of food at wakes and funerals in the 20th century are explored next by Patricia Lysaght, drawing on the rich writing of Tomás Ó Criomhthain. Many international folklorists visited Ó Criomhthain’s native Blasket Islands and the final chapter in this section, from Jonny Dillon and Ailbe van de Heide, outlines the origins of the Irish Folklore Commission, noting that it was a six-month visit to Sweden in 1928 by James Hamilton Delargy (Séamus Ó Duilearga), particularly the meeting with Åke Campbell (1891–1957), along with their various visits to folk museums, that revealed ‘a new world which lay right under my nose in Ireland but which I never noticed’. This new world included food, foodways and the material culture that was associated with its production, transformation, cooking, and consumption.
The chapter outlines the different collections held at the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin, including the Urban Folklore Project (1979–1980), and notes that, along with the digitisation of the Schools’ Collection, the Audio and Photographic Collections similarly offer huge scope to food researchers interested in Irish food history.
The final section, The Development of Modern Irish Food and Identity, is the largest and spans the entire 20th century. In the first chapter, Dorothy Cashman uncovers the identity of the anonymous author of Cookery Notes, which may still be the bestselling cookbook in Irish history – it ran to multiple reprints and was used in schools, training colleges and in homes for over half a century. The history of the Domestic Science/Economy movement in Ireland, its key instructresses and their publications are also discussed.
This is followed by Ian Miller’s chapter which outlines reports of starvation and death in Ireland, revealing a shocking story of poverty and hunger in the new Irish Free State, reminiscent of the worst elements of the previous century. Bryce Evans’ chapter on food in the 1930s and 1940s discusses the economic war and the years of the Emergency, when rationing was introduced and Irish farmers were told to ‘till or go to jail’.
The outbreak of the second World War put a premature halt to Douglas Hyde’s planned series of official dinners aimed at bringing politicians, public servants and representatives of other interests throughout the state, who were on opposite sides of the Civil War, together. This is outlined in Elaine Mahon’s chapter titled ‘ “The President requests the Pleasure”: Dining with the Irish Head of State 1922–1940′, which documents how the fledgling state developed diplomatic protocols to entertain foreign dignitaries, heads of state, and important guests in the first two decades post-independence. Food was used by de Valera, along with the magnificent setting of the Throne Room in Dublin Castle, ‘as a stage for his own brand of majesty’ at various state banquets.
The novels and the cookbooks of Maura Laverty are discussed by Caitríona Clear. Laverty was described by the Irish Press journalist, Anna Kelly, as the writer who could not ‘keep away from writing about food’, even when writing about other things. In her cookbook Kind Cooking, Laverty famously declared that Ireland gave the world a four-leaf shamrock – one leaf was WB Yeats, another was boiled potatoes in their jackets, yet another was Barry Fitzgerald, and the fourth was soda bread: of them all, soda bread was the greatest. Irish food, to her mind, was equivalent to the work of its poets, writers, and actors.
The final two chapters focus on recent changes in Irish food culture over the last six decades. Firstly, the growing transformation of food service in pubs is explored by Brian J Murphy, ranging from the occasional bag of crisps, or toasted sandwich, to the full-scale carveries of the 1980s and the later phenomenon of the gastropub.
The life and legacy of Myrtle Allen, of Ballymaloe House fame, is the subject matter of the final chapter. Margaret Connolly discusses how Mrs Allen’s philosophy of using local, seasonable and sustainable food (which we can now appreciate as ultra-modern), ran counter to the period within which she established her reputation, a period when packet soup, instant mash and TV dinners were more in vogue. As one of the founding members of Euro-Toques in 1986, Mrs Allen was active in defending European culinary heritage, but her actions began with leading by example at home in Ireland. She indirectly influenced the formation of the Nordic Food Movement, and who else but Myrtle Allen would have opened an Irish restaurant in Paris in the 1980s? She must undoubtably rank as one of the most influential people in Irish food history in the last half century.
This interdisciplinary book will be a landmark publication within the growing fields of food studies, Irish studies and Irish food history, and will also be of interest to the general reader who wishes to explore elements of Ireland’s culinary history and heritage. In his introduction to the 2015 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy special issue on Food and Drink in Ireland, Prof Stephen Mennell noted that any attempts at identifying an Irish national cuisine were futile, since from the 1980s, the age of national cuisines had passed.
Fast food, mass catering, ethnic restaurants and the internationalisation of cooking and eating – or perhaps more accurately, not cooking and eating – was the reality, even in the 1980s, equally in Ireland as in every other European country and beyond. He noted that at the top of the culinary hierarchy, there was more emphasis on the ‘brilliance of innovative individual chefs than on their location within national traditions’, concluding that in all these respects, Ireland was part of the modern world.
There are of course many more chapters of Irish food history still waiting to be written. This volume in no way claims to be exhaustive, the opposite in fact, but we are gradually figuring out how to approach this vast subject. Augmenting previous publications, it provides a worthwhile introduction for both the novice and the established researcher to numerous aspects of Irish food history and aims to ‘whet the appetite’ for more in-depth research into facets of our culinary past, both ancient and more recent.
The ever-changing dynamic nature of foodways means that the various contents and contexts of today’s meals, fashioned significantly by present-day issues such as war and climate change, shape tomorrow’s food history.
Irish Food History: A Companion is published by Royal Irish Academy; EUt+ Academic Press. It will be launched this evening at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin
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