Irish Food History: A Companion

Authors

Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, Technological University DublinFollow
Dorothy Cashman, Independent Researcher

Files

Publisher

Technological University Dublin

Table of Contents

Foreword: Professor James Kelly

Introduction: Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman

Section 1: Prehistory and Archaeology of Food in Ireland

CH.1: Food in Irish Prehistory: Archaeological, Linguistic, and Early Literary Evidence, with a Note of Caution - J. P. Mallory

CH.2: Lovely Bones: Osteoarchaeological Evidence of Animal Produce in Ireland - Finbar McCormick

CH.3: ‘A Landscape Fossilized’: Céide Fields, Dairy Farming and Food Production in the Irish Neolithic - Seamas Caulfield

CH.4: Dishing up the Past: A Review of Plant Foods, Food Products and Agriculture in Early Medieval Ireland - Nikolah Gilligan

Section 2: Bog Butter, Bees and Banqueting in Medieval Ireland

CH.5: A History of Bog Butter in Ireland - Maeve Sikora and Isabella Mulhall

CH.6: Beekeeping and Honey in Ancient Ireland - Shane Lehane

CH.7: Banqueting and the Medieval Gaelic Chiefs - Katharine Simms

CH.8: Irish Diet in the Eleventh Century as Reflected in the Satire of Aislinge Meic Con Glinne - William Sayers

Section 3: Sources for Food History in Early Modern Ireland

CH.9: The Humours of Whiskey: Uisce Beatha in Feudal Irish Hospitality and Medicine - Fionnán O’Connor

CH.10: Franciscans and the Power of Fish in seventeenth-century Ireland - John McCafferty

CH.11: Food in Eighteenth Century Ireland - Toby Barnard

CH.12: Receipt Books from Birr Castle, County Offaly, 1640–1920 - Danielle Clarke

CH.13: Prodigious Fine Dinners: Drinking and Dining with Jonathan Swift - Tara McConnell

Section 4: Developments in Food Supply, Technology, and Trade

CH.14: Food, Feast and Famine in the Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell - Grace Neville

CH.15: Eating Abroad, Remembering Home: Food Parcels, 1845–1960 - John Mulcahy

CH.16: ‘Joined in Butter’: The Material Culture of Irish Home Butter-makers, Using the Dash Churn, up to the Late Nineteenth Century - Claudia Kinmonth

CH.17: A Dairying Democracy: The Co-operative Movement and the Improvement of Pre-Independence Irish Dairying 1889–1922 - Patrick Doyle

Section 5: Food, Folklore, Foclóirí, and Digital Humanities

CH.18: ‘Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin’: Hearth Furniture from the Famine to Rural Electrification - Clodagh Doyle

CH.19: Seventy-two Words for Potato: Exploring Irish Language Resources for Food History - Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire agus Dónall Ó Braonáin

CH.20: The Wake for the Dead and Traditional Hospitality in Ireland in the Twentieth Century: Continuity and Change - Patricia Lysaght

CH.21: Food in the Irish National Folklore Collections - Jonny Dillon and Ailbe van der Heide

Section 6: The Development of Modern Irish Food and Identity

CH.22: Cookery Notes: Domestic Economy ‘Instructresses’ and the History of their Cookbooks in Ireland - Dorothy Cashman

CH.23: Hunger and Starvation in Modern Ireland - Ian Miller

CH.24: Food in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s - Bryce Evans

CH.25: The President requests the Pleasure: Dining with the Irish Head of State 1922–1940 - Elaine Mahon

CH.26: Fact and Fiction in Maura Laverty’s Food Writing, 1941–1960. - Caitríona Clear

CH.27: ‘If its eatin’ and drinkin’ you want, take a spoon and fork to a pint of stout’: A Brief History of Food and the Irish Pub - Brian J. Murphy

CH.28: The Matriarch of Modern Irish Cooking, Myrtle Allen (1924–2018): Her life and legacy - Margaret Connolly

Description

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.

ISBN

978-1-90-045482-7

Publication Date

2024

City

Dublin

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities

Disciplines

Culinary Arts, Food and Beverage Writing, Food Culture, Gastronomy, Food Studies, *Irish Food Studies, Food History

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/5WHY-0K87

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.