TD 1
HISTORICAL EATING The advent of a brilliant new p
ublication 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. WORDS Martina Murray PHOTO Mrs Redhead 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. 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 44 So how did this incredible opus come about? “In many ways, it goes back around twentyfive 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