I’d never seen a fireplace like it. Big enough for a giant, and, set into one side, an iron arm that pivoted out across the hearth. That was, I learned, the crane, essential for cooking in houses with no oven, and it was what clinched the deal. I resigned from my job and left my hectic life in London in order to move into this cottage in east Galway, with no running water, no electricity and neither doors nor windows. Ah, but it offered views on all sides of infinite peace and beauty and it had the crane!
Eventually I got to grips with the reality of what I’d chosen, and it was, of course, infinitely more interesting than my glossy magazine fantasies. I started taking stock of the differences between what I’d known in England and what I was experiencing beside Lough Derg. Since the matter of food and drink was of daily concern, it made the biggest impression. I’d been brought up in the north of England, where we are weaned onto pork pies and meat and potato pies and cheese and onion pies. Yet there were no savoury pies to be had in Ireland! (Some time later, Myrtle Allen told me about Dingle pies, made with mutton, but they hardly count.)
I was entranced by the bread. My elderly aunt made loaves (which I learned to call cakes) of soda bread every day and even shop-bought brown bread was delicious. The local greengrocer stocked slabs of buttercup yellow butter wrapped in greaseproof paper, made by a woman who lived 15 kilometres away. That same shop was the forum for an informed debate as to which potatoes were best that week, with the unspoken assumption that you would only be looking for the flouriest possible variety.
My small local town sustained not one but two butcher’s shops, selling first-class beef, as well as a supermarket whose meat counter looked appealing, with no sign of those pale pink mounds labelled economy mince that you’d find in London. On the other hand, I could whistle if I went looking for such items as cottage cheese or double cream, watercress or Earl Grey tea. The only fish was frozen or looked tired.
In short, there was the very best of food in a narrow enough range but some strange gaps and absences. I started digging deeper and before I knew it I was hooked. Studying the history of food and drink in Ireland reveals far more about the country and the lives of ordinary people than is found in conventional histories, charting battles and politicians.
Not far from Shannon airport is Craggaunowen, where they have replicas of the fulachta fiadh, the cooking pits used in very early times in Ireland. I visited them and marvelled at an idea so simple and effective. I drove up to the Ceide Fields and was even more impressed to learn that this cold and windy spot in north Mayo is the site of the oldest known field system in the world. A thousand years before the pyramids were built, people were growing oats and barley in demarcated fields, with the possibilities that offered for crop rotation and protecting the plants.
There was no stopping me after that. I interviewed food producers – smokers of fish and makers of cheese, brewers of beer and bakers of biscuits. I consulted records of folklore and looked at old law texts. Letters, diaries, old ballads and poetry were all grist to my mill. And, yes, I visited a mill, too, to see for myself how a watermill ground corn into flour. And all the time I was talking to people of all ages and backgrounds. At the time of researching all this I had no broadband worth mentioning at home, so most of the information came the old-fashioned way.
And I had a marvellous time cooking over my own turf fire, employing the crane and learning how to bake bread in an iron pot known as a bastable. I cooked salmon wrapped in cauliflower leaves and made scones using bee-stings provided by a kind neighbour. It was all very instructive!
I discovered that Irish monks brought cheese-making techniques to continental Europe and that Queen Maeve died after being hit on the head by a flying lump of extremely hard cheese! I learned what the Normans brought to Ireland – the rabbit, for one thing. I found a recipe for Grunt Soup! No, I’m not telling. You’ll have to buy the book to find out. And during my researches I became ever more in admiration of the cheerful tenacity of poor people in the face of extreme hardship.
The book I ended up writing, Ireland’s Green Larder, is organised into 10 chapters. The first, Panorama, gives an overarching picture of the compass of the book and the last, Food and the Spirit, looks at the myths, superstitions and pishogues that attend all aspects of food and drink and considers the importance in Ireland of what transcends the material world. Michael-Joe Torpey, a friend and neighbour who went to school with my father, told me about an old woman he knew who never went out to the dairy to milk the cows without taking a live coal in the tongs and setting it near the churn to keep away the little people. She lived but a half mile from my house.
The other chapters list, in order of importance, the main foodstuffs that sustained life down the centuries. Dairy is of primordial significance – the so-called “white meats” – with grains of almost equal importance. The potato, of course, comes a long way down the list of vital ingredients because it is a relative Johnny-come-lately. I devote an entire chapter to it, with the second half given over to the tragic circumstances of the Great Hunger, which moved me to both compassion and anger.
Here is where I might as well confess that I have given free rein to my opinions throughout this social history. An academic historian might strive for a neutral tone, but I have not felt constrained to do so. Just to keep things lively, I have interwoven little anecdotes into the text and I’ve quoted from poems quite liberally. I’ve also dotted around a generous handful of recipes that are as authentic as possible.
To give you a flavour of the book, here is a brief extract from the opening chapter, Panorama:
The island of Ireland is so small you can drive across it in a few hours and its population is much the same as that of, say, Croatia. For the greater part of its history, the religion, language and culture of Ireland’s indigenous people were suppressed, and for centuries the poverty of the landless population was as acute as any in Europe. Yet over those same centuries it became the cradle of literature, music and dance, of politicians and soldiers, of philosophers and saints, of boozers and brawlers, and managed to be world class in all categories. How has this small country managed to achieve so much against all the odds? It can hardly be put down to the mythical “luck of the Irish”.
Identifying the DNA of Irish culture is a challenge that offers many points of departure, but however you look at it, they all ultimately depend on the irreducible human needs for shelter from the storm and a crust of bread. What is put on a plate reveals much about a nation. Food in Ireland is far more than a body fuel – every cake of soda bread, every jug of buttermilk, every piece of bacon tells a story of the land and its people, a story that recedes into our unrecorded past. Stripped of all but the essential, each of us is, in essence, Lear’s poor, bare, forked creature. In the Irish context, Lear could translate into Sweeney, the mad king who endured the storm and who, according to Flann O’Brien’s affectionate parody in At Swim-Two-Birds, “feasted on cresses and nettles”.
One aspect of that story is located along lines of latitude and longitude. The height of a mountain, the prevailing wind, rains that fall or droughts that persist, the clagginess or sandiness of the soil – externals such as these shape our lives. In many parts of Ireland, dense hedges of whitethorn and little fields bounded by unmortared rocks tell of survival wrested from tiny parcels of land, and the lichen-mottled but enduring stone of the dolmen, the round tower and the Celtic cross set you in a landscape that has changed little since the days of Brian Boru, the 10th-century High King of Ireland. The four basic farm animals of today, the cow, the sheep, the pig and the horse, are the same as they were in the seventh century.
