Irish Food History: A Companion
ISBN: 978-1-90-045482-7
Abstract
Irish Food History: A Companion provides the most comprehensive collection of information to date on this topic. It includes twenty-eight chapters from experts in the fields of archaeology, history, mythology, linguistics, literature, folklore, Irish studies, food studies, beverage studies, gastronomy, and culinary history, which apply the latest thinking and scholarship to the history of Irish food from the earliest inhabitants through to the twenty-first century. The individual chapters bring 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. Personal correspondences, diaries, literature, and linguistic analysis assist in charting the rise in the social and nutritional importance of the potato from its arrival in the sixteenth century to the ensuing calamity, the Great Famine of 1845–52. Late-nineteenth century technological changes modernised food production and society at large, and from the early decades of the twentieth 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.
Divided into six sections with a comprehensive Introduction by the editors Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman, and a Foreword by James Kelly, the collection augments previous publications, providing a worthwhile introduction to 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 everchanging 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. This book is being uploaded one section at a time by EUT+ Academic Press, commencing in December 2023 and the whole book will also be published in conjunction with the Royal Irish Academy in Summer 2024.