Start Date
27-5-2026 9:30 AM
End Date
27-5-2026 9:45 AM
Description
Cookbooks published at a time of armed conflict contain practical advice on managing food shortages paired with patriotic nationalistic zeal. This paper examines the advice given to Irish households on cookery and household management in the pages of cookbooks and pamphlets published between 1939 and 1945, a period of political, economic and food supply upheaval colloquially referred to as The Emergency in Ireland. The recipes, advertisements and household advice reflect a growing crisis when the outcome of war was unknown to authors, while, in the domestic sphere, food and fuel shortages were increasingly impacting the home cook. Official food supply notices and calls for patriotic duty are contrasted with sometimes more hopeful food writing such as ingenious means of making the best of limited supplies, small pleasures of eating and preserving self-cultivated food, or rediscovering traditional foods. Themes of the physical published book, official nutritional advice and the duty of women, and ingredient and fuel substitutions in the kitchen are used to examine commonalities and differences between the Irish recipe books with contemporaneous London published cookbooks.
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“Read this - and keep it carefully”: Emergency Recipes in Ireland (1939–1945)
Cookbooks published at a time of armed conflict contain practical advice on managing food shortages paired with patriotic nationalistic zeal. This paper examines the advice given to Irish households on cookery and household management in the pages of cookbooks and pamphlets published between 1939 and 1945, a period of political, economic and food supply upheaval colloquially referred to as The Emergency in Ireland. The recipes, advertisements and household advice reflect a growing crisis when the outcome of war was unknown to authors, while, in the domestic sphere, food and fuel shortages were increasingly impacting the home cook. Official food supply notices and calls for patriotic duty are contrasted with sometimes more hopeful food writing such as ingenious means of making the best of limited supplies, small pleasures of eating and preserving self-cultivated food, or rediscovering traditional foods. Themes of the physical published book, official nutritional advice and the duty of women, and ingredient and fuel substitutions in the kitchen are used to examine commonalities and differences between the Irish recipe books with contemporaneous London published cookbooks.