The advent of a brilliant new publication takes readers on a fascinating journey through Ireland’s culinary past. We sat down with the book’s co-editors, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman, to find out more about the work involved in putting together this ground-breaking volume on the history of Irish food.
For many, Ireland has long been regarded as a place that attracted people more for its scenery than its culinary offerings. Viewed from this perspective, the development of the modern Irish food scene tends to be regarded as a relatively recent phenomena. However, this newly published book blows the cobwebs off such preconceptions, beginning by transporting readers to the end of the Ice Age, to the Ireland that existed before reindeer, brown bears, and the giant Irish deer became extinct.
From this unexpected beginning, the reader is propelled forwards on a journey that features the introduction of farming, livestock, and the development of cooking technologies, before arriving at the delicious world of medieval honey, banqueting, bog butter and whiskey distilling. Then it’s on to eighteenth century feasts, nineteenth century famines and more modern developments including the carvery and the toastie in Brian Murphy’s chapter on food in Irish pubs. Along the way, this complex but accessible culinary history reveals nuances of an all-island cultural heritage, interspersed with music, mythology, and poetry from Irish writers including Paula Meehan and Seamus Heaney. Edited by culinary historians Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman, Irish Food History – A Companion brings together contributions from thirty-one specialists from a wide range of academic disciplines. So how did this incredible opus come about?
“In many ways, it goes back around twenty-five years, to Cathal Brugha Street in 1999,” recalls historian Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire. “We started a degree in culinary arts, which was the first degree of its type in the world, which melded together your classical vocational education with liberal arts education. A whole new generation came through that programme – people like Keelan Higgs, Louise Bannon, Eric Matthews, Mark Moriarty, Cúán Greene, Holly Dalton, and Charlotte and Shane in Scéal Bakery – and it was brilliant. Suddenly you were getting really smart people doing an honours degree in culinary arts, and being exposed to the best culinary education from a vocational perspective, from their internships with the best people in Ireland and around the world. They were also getting this liberal arts education where we were teaching them the history of food, the sociology of food, the business of food, the science of food, and art as well.
“Then I started attending the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in the year 2000, meeting amazing people like Jill Norman, Raymond Blanc, and Heston Blumenthal, and after two or three years I had the confidence to take the theme for each year and start writing about some aspect of Irish food. So really that’s where it began.” The Oxford Symposium was also where the book’s co-editors Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman fortuitously met in 2007, and so began a fruitful academic collaboration that led to the establishment of the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium in 2012.
The biennial event attracted Irish and international speakers and participants, helping build a pool of expertise in the area, while also putting Dublin on the map for its hospitality through legendary conference dinners in Thornton’s and Chapter One. The network and connections forged there resulted in an innovative series of academic publications devoted to Irish food, beginning in 2014 with Tickling The Palate (Peter Lang), an exploration of food in Irish literature and culture. A year later, the Royal Irish Academy organised a special issue of their proceedings on the history of food and drink in Ireland, while internationally the subject gained further traction in ‘The Food Issue’ of The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies with Rhona Richman Kenneally in 2018.
By the time the COVID pandemic hit in 2020 the duo were keen to build further on that body of work to tell the story of Irish food from the earliest settlers to the present day. In planning the book, Dorothy says that they were both very conscious of ensuring representation on an all-island basis, aiming “to get contributors from as wide a breadth as we could draw in.” As a result, every major institution of learning within the island of Ireland is involved, with additional contributions from universities in Liverpool, Oxford, and New York (Cornell).
“The generosity of response was incredible,” says Dorothy. “I think we both had an idea of the chronology in our heads and the people who were experts on it. So because we knew researchers doing work in various fields and archives, like John McCafferty, Danielle Clarke, Fionnán O’Connor, and then Maeve Sikora and Isabella Mulhall, who contributed the chapter on the history of Bog Butter, it was a matter of bringing them together and their brief then was to write it in an accessible way. With the pictures and the poems, this was to be three dimensional, but also very accurate, and we wanted people to go off on their own journey as well, so we decided to use footnotes which helped add a whole layer of knowledge underneath, almost like another dimension.”
“We wanted their expertise, and we wanted it to be cutting edge, but also written without the jargon, because every discipline has its own,” Máirtín continues. “Then between myself and Dorothy we tried to work stuff out in the editing. Over the past number of years, I’ve been bringing students down to the Céide Fields to see Seamas Caulfield, and while Seamas is a great teacher and speaker, he hasn’t published all that widely. So it was brilliant to get him to write down all this stuff that he’s been telling us for years. I was also amazed when I wrote to J.P. Mallory, and he came back to me saying that he would do it. When you think that 31 people said yes and actually delivered, it’s brilliant.”
Beautifully designed by Brenda Dermody, the multi-faceted book comes packed with rich illustrations, folklore, songs and recipes, and includes food-related poetry from Raiftearaí, Seamus Heaney, and Paula Meehan. A number of chapters trace the role of food and drink in the country’s rich literary heritage, including one on drinking and dining with Jonathan Swift by Tara McConnell, and a contribution by Grace Neville on food, feast, and famine in the correspondence of Daniel O’Connell. Undoubtedly though, one of the biggest surprises is just how far back the history of Irish food actually goes.
“I thought we went back around 10,000 years, so it was lovely to find out that there were butchery marks on reindeer bones in 33,000 years BC,” says Máirtín. “The next bone, dating from around 13,500 years ago, was the patella of a brown bear, which fitted in perfectly with Paula Meehan’s poem, The Solace of Artemis. I love that deep thinking, and her saying that she thinks that every polar bear out there has some form of mitochondrial DNA, which stems back to this brown bear that lived in Ireland. We have Paula’s poetry throughout, and the fact that some of her poems speak literally through different chapters is just amazing.”
Another surprise is how well fed Dubliners were back in the 1800s. In his forward to the book, James Kelly cites John James McGregor’s assertion in 1821 that the city’s Ormond Market was ‘well supplied with poultry, fresh and cured fish, bacon, butter, cheese, fruit, and vegetables’. Some analysts have suggested that there was more meat per capita being sold in Dublin at that time than there was in London. Máirtín observes, “Initially this seems surprising, but Louis Cullen’s economic history also mentioned that the average person here was actually better fed. This runs contrary to the narrow myths that have been pedalled because of the famine generally. You hear always about the extremes, about the banquets and the poverty, but very little about the middle ground where most people survive and exist.”
One such area is cooking in the domestic sphere, which Dorothy covers in the book. “I was really conflicted when I was writing my chapter about the domestic economy instructors, because, obviously they were incredibly strong women, but the whole premise of the government who employed them was to teach women to stay at home. That’s fine if you chose to be in the home, but not if you didn’t.
“We don’t have a long history of cookbooks, but you see them emerging in the late 1900s. I had seen one called Cookery Notes referenced, but no author was given for it. The cover just said ‘originally published by the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction’. Archives relating to cookbooks are very rare, the National Library has Maura Laverty’s one, but after a lot of investigation I eventually tracked down the author. Her name was Marion Laird and she was paid the sum of £50 for the rights to what was possibly the best selling Irish cook book ever, which was published from the early 1900s right up to the 1970s. She was a fascinating woman and I’m sure I would have enjoyed sitting down with her over a cup of coffee.”
Such investigations are often the meat and potatoes of a historian’s work. “You have all these stories that you’re trying to unravel, and often you’re pulling at threads to get to the truth.” Máirtín remembers seeing a play called Improbable Frequency by Rough Magic as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival years ago. “It was set during the Second World War in the old Red Bank Restaurant in D’Olier Street, which people thought had been owned by a German and was a centre for Nazis in Dublin. When I did my homework I couldn’t find any German, but I knew the granddaughter of the guy who had owned the building, and when she interviewed her grandfather on his deathbed he told her that it had never been out of the family. It turned out that the German in the rumours was the general manager of the Solus Light Bulb factory in Bray and the minute the war broke out he went back to Berlin. So clearly that was just a mistake in one person’s research. Sometimes you get Chinese whispers about places, and Dublin is a bit like that.”
“I love bringing my students on a walking tour every year, down O’Connell Street and around Dublin, to look at things that are hidden in plain sight. People pass by them every day and never notice them. Not far from Burger King, near the Savoy, used to be the Hammam Buildings, where they had Turkish baths. There were around three Turkish baths on O’Connell Street, and loads more around Dublin. There were vegetarian restaurants in the city over a hundred years ago, and in 1904 there was an Indian restaurant next to the Gresham Hotel for a while. So often we’re doing what our ancestors were doing years ago and we think we’re doing it for the first time! Back when Robert Emmet and his friends used to meet in Oyster Taverns, he said that sometimes he worried that they were more interested in oysters and drinking than in revolution. Even before that, there were the Coffee Houses, which were shut down by the authorities for fear of dissent. This is the thing about history that’s fascinating – everything we do in life, goes around sort of cyclically, and the subject of food is always about more than just simply eating and dining.”
When it comes to future research, both Dorothy and Máirtín are more than happy for the generation currently undertaking the master’s programme and PhDs in TU Dublin to keep this work going. Dorothy reckons that, “Whoever does it, it will have much more of an urban shape, because I think that’s where it’s moving, and obviously they’ll be dealing with different set of problems, climate change and agriculture and issues like that.” Máirtín concludes, “We hope that this book will serve as the inspiration to the next generation to go out and start digging because we’re only tipping the iceberg and guiding the path here, but I feel very confident that the future of Irish food history is bright.”
Irish Food History – A Companion, edited by Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman is available to order for €45 from the Royal Irish Academy and from bookshops nationwide. It is also available digitally open access from EUt+ Academic Press (https://arrow.tudublin.ie/irishfoodhist/1/).
Words: Martina Murray
Image Credits: Mrs Redhead
Chapter 26, fig. 4 (from chapter Maura Laverty’s food writing, 1941–1960- Caitríona Clear) The cover of The Milky Way to Good Health by Maura Laverty (1954).
About The Authors
Dorothy Cashman is a culinary historian and independent researcher whose research interests include the history of the recipe in Ireland, and the configuration of national identity as it intersects with Irish food history.
Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire is a senior lecturer in the School of Culinary Arts and Food Technology, Technological University Dublin and Chair of the Masters in Gastronomy and Food Studies in TU Dublin. In 2018, he presented ‘Blasta’, an eight-part television series for TG4 celebrating Ireland’s food heritage.
