Irish Food History: a companion is an academic and comprehensive look at the history of food in Ireland. Edited by Dorothy Cashman and Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, it’s nominated for TheJournal.ie’s Best Irish-Published Book of the Year. Here, the authors share a chapter from the book:
FOOD PERMEATES EVERY aspect of life and society, from birth to death — from the new-born’s first suckle to the food traditions associated with Irish wakes and funerals.
Essential for survival, it has historically proven academically elusive, hidden in plain sight. Entangled with the domestic and the feminine, it was perhaps traditionally regarded as too mundane and too quotidian for consideration.
Yet, consider what can be revealed by applying the ‘food lens’ to something as fundamental as our sense of place, our basic grounding in townland and byway. Consider the etymological richness of ‘Bóthar’, the Irish word for road (from ‘bó’—cow), defined in width by the length and breadth of a cow, a signifier of the long affair of our bovine past; extending also to our ‘buachaillí’ (boys) and ‘cailíní’ (girls), meaning, respectively, cowboy or herd boy and little herder, the suffix ‘ín’ denoting the diminutive.
The true meaning of placenames such as Clonmel, Cappataggle, Glenageary, and Kanturk, all food-related, can only be unlocked through an understanding of their Irish language origins. All are instances of what Martin Doyle succinctly explains as ‘a transliteration from the Irish, preserving the sound but obliterating the meaning’.
In a form of reverse colonisation, there are many Hiberno-English words for food we regularly use without ever considering their etymology. For example, we have made the much loved ‘spud’ (potato) our own, descending to us from ‘spuddle’, a small cheap knife, through to ‘spud’, an instrument for weeding, as wielded by Swift:
My love to Sheelah is more firmly fixt
Than strongest Weeds that grow these stones betwixt:
My Spud these Nettles from the Stones can part
No Knife so keen to weed thee from my Heart.
Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill memorialised her husband, Art, in the famous poem ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’, re-rendered for the modern reader by the bilingual writer, Doireann Ní Ghriofa as A Ghost in the Throat.
Food was one of the touchstones by which her late husband expressed his love and devotion to Eibhlín Dubh. She never repented that love, and expressed it thus:
I never repented it:
You whitened a parlour for me,
Painted rooms for me,
Reddened ovens for me,
Baked fine bread for me,
Basted meat for me,
Slaughtered beasts for me;
I slept in ducks’ feathers
Till midday milking-time,
Or more if it pleased me.
The name ‘Art’ means bear in Irish. In ‘The Solace of Artemis’, the poet Paula Meehan is comforted by the realisation ‘that every polar bear alive’ in the world has a trace of mitochondrial DNA from a brown bear that lived in Ireland during the Ice Age.
Our food history lies in the folds and crevices as much as in the grand narratives. Take, for example, the butchery marks that were found on the kneecap of a brown bear from a cave in Co. Clare, dating back to c. 10,500 BCE.
We know that permanent human settlement in Ireland began c. 8000 BCE: however, again those butchery marks, this time on a reindeer bone found in Co. Cork, reveal traces of what have been presumed to be casual visitors (hunters) from as far back as c. 33,000 BCE, prompting J.P. Mallory to argue that the ‘earliest known item on an Irish menu was venison’.
Irish Food History: A Companion is out now, published by Royal Irish Academy and edited by Dorothy Cashman & Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire. It is nominated for TheJournal.ie Best Irish-Published Book of the Year. More at irishbookawards.ie.
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