One Saturday in spring 1927, an ailing Daniel Sullivan crawled across the floor of his family’s cottage in Castletownbere. He found his wife Mary lying dead. A neighbour would find Daniel and their children close to following her, and in the next days they too would die in hospital. An inquest would find that the family had starved to death after being denied assistance by local authorities because Daniel owned his farm. The verdict was met with cries of “47!” from those outraged that 80 years after that black year, people were still dying of hunger, now in an independent Ireland.
Our history has always been deeply intertwined with food. From Cluain Creamha (”the meadow of wild garlic”) to Leixlip (”the salmon’s leap” in Norse) to Cherry Orchard, it has marked our landscape through centuries of change and colonisation. From the Táin Bó Cúailnge to Aislinge Meic Con Glinne to Dubliners, it has enlivened our literature. And even the very size of our population is still in large part defined by the mass starvation and emigration of the Great Famine.
Yet until recent decades, our food history received relatively little attention, the subject seen as too mundane to be taken seriously, not least in a country scarred by famine. Thankfully food history has now emerged into a rich and vibrant field, with scholars showing how food’s position at the centre of life and society allows it to offer a unique lens for studying the past. The Royal Irish Academy, who in 2015 devoted a special edition of their Proceedings to the subject, have now published what its foreword calls “a subject-defining collection” of 28 essays. For food historians, it is wonderful to see our subject, and the exciting research now being done in Ireland, being given such prominence.
Such a format, however, is perhaps not the most accessible or focused way to bring the subject to a wider audience. Editors Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman wisely caution that “this volume in no way claims to be exhaustive, the opposite in fact”, but at 800 pages, the book is more than just physically unwieldy. There are surveys and overviews of some periods but not others, while the focus and scope is uneven. It is disappointing at times that stronger conclusions and more links to wider historical issues are not made. There are, however, many original and fascinating essays for different audiences, and the volume is beautifully produced, with colourful illustrations and numerous illuminating poems from Seamus Heaney, Paula Meehan and various Gaelic authors.
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As the editors write, “our food history lies in the folds and crevices”, and the collection showcases the wide variety of sources and approaches that can be used to explore food. Environmental archaeobotanist Nikolah Gilligan surveys the archaeological evidence of plant foods in early medieval Ireland, a time when the country was already “a hive of activity” for agriculture and food production. Museum curator Claudia Kinmonth explores the material culture of butter-making, especially the “dash churn” that was once familiar in almost every rural woman’s home.
Kinmonth has been interested in butter-making since childhood, and hers is one of many essays where a striking personal interest shines through, long a notable motivation in food studies. Archaeologist Seamus Caulfield discusses debates over the presence of cattle on the ancient Ceide Fields, a site whose excavation he himself pioneered, decades after his own father had first identified it. Folklorist and beekeeper Shane Lehane writes that “honey was something special” in medieval Ireland, assembling a rich selection on its production, consumption, and status in Gaelic culture. Drinks writer and consultant Fionnán O’Connor explores late medieval Gaelic thinking about “uisce beatha” (or “uisce marbtha” as it was to one over-indulgent Connacht man, in the words of a witty scribe).
The authors of a 1969 French travel guide cuttingly remarked that ‘the tragedy of Irish cuisine is not that it is bad but that the Irish believe it is very good’
The early modern centuries in which the Gaelic and “Old English” island was violently transformed saw both mass starvation and transformative changes in Irish diet. Danielle Clarke uses the manuscript recipe books of Birr Castle to explore the changing identity of the Parsons family over the centuries following the plantation of Offaly. A focus on new orchards (a physical form of plantation) and livestock “of English breed” gradually gives way to recipes of “a more Irish orientation”, with salmon “in the Sligo way”, and ingredients clearly rooted in the local place.
In a survey of food in the 18th century, Toby Barnard wisely notes that “indulgence and extravagance command disproportionate attention” in comparison to everyday diet, but essays on two famous figures highlight the era’s preoccupation with food. Challenging the notion that Jonathan Swift was “not greatly concerned with food”, Tara McConnell argues instead that the Dean thought about it quite a lot, repeatedly making use of it in his social satires. Despite Swift’s famous moderation, McConnell writes that he was still “a gourmet, albeit a thwarted one”, ever concerned with exacerbating health problems that later experts have ascribed to Ménière’s disease.
Daniel O’Connell’s letters by contrast reveal a man who very much enjoyed dining (and drinking), but also worried by his own weight gain: “I am growing so abominably fat that I hate and detest myself”, he wrote to his wife Mary. Grace Neville highlights the Liberator’s lifelong emphasis on Lenten fasting (albeit often including fine seafood), and the quality of wines, the smuggling of which had made his family’s fortune. One of his “very few short-tempered letters” notes his disappointment in the quality of 69 dozen bottles of port, sherry, Madeira and wine from Cork. His later letters detail his growing heartbreak at the famine stalking the country: while the authorities “talk of doing great things ... the people are starving”.
Neville’s use of O’Connell’s correspondence is one of many essays based on sources being digitised. Jonny Dillon and Ailbe van der Heide survey sources about food in the National Folklore Collection, where the schools’ collections of the 1930s included a questionnaire on “Food in Olden Times” (”Were potatoes eaten at every meal?”). Clodagh Doyle uses such collections, and those of the National Museum, to survey the furniture of hearths, “an emblem of Irish identity”. Patricia Lysaght uses the folklore collections to explore hospitality at 20th-century wakes, where tea, sandwiches, porter, whiskey and tobacco became omnipresent, but eating and drinking could not be overdone: you shouldn’t “make a show of yourself” in a grieving house, Tomás Ó Criomhthain explained.
Ian Miller highlights that “until relatively recently, many Irish families faced hunger and starvation as a matter of course”. The Sullivans of Castletownbere are far from the only family he finds that were living in what the authorities called “semi-starvation”, often with an attitude close to “victim blaming”. Miller rightly criticises “tendencies in some strands of Irish culinary history to romanticise Ireland’s dietary past”. Bryce Evans notes that while independent Ireland did prevent the famines that affected many parts of interwar Europe, more starvation was mostly avoided only through mass emigration. He argues that the “agricultural autarky” of the period was a failure.
Mac Con Iomaire and Dónall Ó Braonáin argue that that era’s political orientation is partially responsible for the widespread “fallacy” that Ireland – its culture, language and food – was historically “insular”. As Mac Con Iomaire and Cashman write in their introduction, “recent scholarship reveals a very different story” to the myths peddled by colonial writers, with more international connections and influences being revealed all the time.
Elaine Mahon shows how the new state used food as a diplomatic tool through the menus of state dinners and receptions. At Dublin Castle, Éamon de Valera eschewed the “meagre repasts and frugality” for which he was known in order to celebrate Irish ingredients and hospitality to foreign visitors: the Italian ambassador in 1938 was served Irish oysters and “Jambon du Limerick au champagne” among eight courses. At Áras an Uachtaráin, Douglas Hyde sought to create “a bastion of Irish culture”, with Irish language menus listing dishes such as “mayonnaise gliomaig” (the president’s secretary Michael McDunphy chose to emphasise seafood at Friday events even though Hyde himself was a Protestant).
Essays by Cashman on the bestselling “Cookery Notes”, Caitriona Clear on the writer and “celebrity chef” Maura Laverty, and Margaret Connolly on Myrtle Allen (”the matriarch of modern Irish cookery”) show how more popular culinary attitudes developed. Connolly notes, however, that the authors of a 1969 French travel guide still cuttingly remarked that “the tragedy of Irish cuisine is not that it is bad but that the Irish believe it is very good”.
There is disappointingly no final chapter drawing the different essays and their conclusions together, but the editors rightly note that there are “many more chapters of Irish food history still waiting to be written”. The European Research Council-funded project on Food, Culture, and Identity in Ireland circa 1550-1650 (”FoodCult”), led by Susan Flavin at Trinity College, is revolutionising our understanding of Irish food before the potato. New degrees and courses at our universities are bringing through a generation of young researchers interested in food. And the food history of our own recent past, from the Common Agricultural Policy to the diversity brought by immigration, will help us understand how Ireland is perhaps finally emerging from the shadow of the Famine.
“We are gradually figuring out,” the editors write, “how to approach this vast subject.” As research moves forward we must remember that even as we fill in the blank spaces of our past, food history must always be more than exposition, and should never shy away from offering arguments about “bigger” historical issues, from religion to empire, economy to environment. Food is much too important not to argue about.
Dr Christopher Kissane is the author of Food, Religion & Communities in Early Modern Europe (Bloomsbury, 2018), and the host of Ireland’s Edge.
Further Reading
Food: Why It Matters (Yale UP, 2021) By Paul Freedman
The medieval historian passionately makes the case that food should be at the centre of how we see and study all of human civilisation.
Civilised By Beasts: Animals and Urban Change in nineteenth-century Dublin (Manchester UP, 2020) By Juliana Adelman
Adelman’s highly original study offers a new perspective on life in the capital during the 1800s, through the lens of human relationships with animals, from butchery to transport.
[ Juliana Adelman: Lessons of history: What diet says about who we areOpens in new window ]
An Irish Food Story: 100 Foods That Made Us (Nine Bean Rows, 2024) By JP McMahon
The Galway chef’s forthcoming follow-up to the bestselling The Irish Cookbook will explore the stories and recipes of foods that have defined Ireland’s past and present.
