Introduction

This book is the most ambitious and comprehensive academic study of the history of food and drink in Ireland that has ever been published. It is admirably long term in its scope, beginning with the Mesolithic inhabitants of the island and stretching right up to the Irish restaurant scene of the early twenty-first century. It is also interdisciplinary, the outcome of collaboration between archaeologists, historians, natural scientists, a sociologist if you include me, and, yes, cooks.

It is curious that the history of food, drink and cooking remained for a very long time—and emphatically not only in Ireland—the domain of enthusiasts and mainly amateur historians. Cookery books were among the earliest to appear in most of the vernacular languages of Europe during the decades after the invention of moveable-type printing. These, and the manuscript sources that preceded them, did not escape the attention of antiquaries and bibliographers. For example, as early as 1780, Samuel Pegge published his edition of The forme of cury, containing recipes from the court of King Richard II of England (1377–99).¹ In 1790, the Reverend Richard Warner republished that manuscript, along with several others from the late Middle Ages, in his handsome folio Antiquitates Culinariae² Still more were collected in Frederick Furnivall’s Early English meals and manners?³ Similar manifestations of interest are evident in several other European countries, especially in France, where national pride in la cuisine française is clearly evident from the mid-seventeenth century. Georges Vicaire’s Bibliographie Gastronomique of 1890 runs to almost a thousand pages and includes books in a number of European languages.⁴

In the twentieth century, one thread in food studies was work by historically orientated nutritionists and nutritionally orientated historians. Examples include Histoire de l’alimentation et de la gastronomie by the French medical man Alfred Gottschalk, The Englishman’s food by Sir Jack Drummond and his wife Anne Wilbraham, who were nutritionists by training, and Plenty and want by the nutritionally expert social historian John Burnett.⁵ And a final thread worth mentioning is that of the ‘scholar-cooks’—cookery book writers whose pursuit of recipes is grounded in serious historical research and whose writings, in my own experience, often contain insights worthy of historical investigation. Prominent examples from Britain are Dorothy Hartley, Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and Alan Davidson, all of whose works also exhibit substantial literary quality.⁶ The scholarly investigation of old recipes continues, as can be seen in Madeline Shanahan’s study of Irish manuscript recipe books in this volume.⁷

This is only to hint at what was already an extensive literature. Yet, although such trends rarely have a precise beginning, the academic study of the history of food and drink may be said to have commenced its ‘take off into self-sustained growth’ following Fernand Braudel’s celebrated call, in the Annales in 1961, for a ‘history of material life and biological behaviour’.⁸ This was especially influential because the leaders of the Annales School of historians from Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre onwards encouraged collaboration with social scientists, and their journal was read by anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists as well as historians. At least partly as a result, by the 1980s the growing body of research in the history of food and eating had spilled over into more theoretically orientated writing in anthropology by—notably—Mary Douglas, Jack Goody, Sidney Mintz and Marvin Harris, and in sociology by Anne Murcott and (if modesty does not forbid) me.⁹

Archaeologists have for a long time been an exception to the general rule of relative academic neglect of food habits. Utensils for cooking and eating, hunting equipment, and artefacts associated with cultivation, have been recovered during archaeological excavations. Recent scientific advances have made it possible to investigate ancient diets in more detail,¹⁰ and indeed pushed back the field of research into the domain of palaeoanthropology—even before the biological evolution of the current form of human being, Homo sapiens sapiens. Richard Wrangham has argued that Homo erectus emerged about two million years ago through the ability of its immediate hominid predecessors to cook food.¹¹ His case rests mainly on considerations of biological evolution. Cooking increased the nutritional efficiency of food, with the development of a smaller, more effective digestive tract which, by using less energy itself, permitted the growth of a larger brain. The brain is what Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler have labelled ‘expensive tissue’¹²—running the human brain demands a much greater proportion of the energy that the body derives from nutritional input than the brain of any other animal.

All the same, Wrangham’s evolutionary focus may, it can be argued, put the cart before the horse. It has long been recognised that no other mammal apart from human beings and some of their hominid ancestors possess the means to maintain body temperature other than by eating. Humans can keep themselves warm around a fire. More than that, human beings hold a species monopoly of the active use of fire; once stated, that may seem obvious, but it was not obvious until Johan Goudsblom drew attention to it.¹³ Insufficient attention has been paid to the implications of this human monopoly. Yes, the ability first to capture naturally occurring wild fire, then to tend it in order to keep it going, and eventually to light fires at will was connected both with keeping warm and with cooking food. But, as Goudsblom has shown, the active use of fire came to play a central part in the long-term interweaving of processes of biological evolution and processes of social development. The active use of fire involves overcoming fear: although fire remains forever dangerous, through the exercise of care and foresight the danger can be managed. Safety in the handling of burning wood requires the development of both manual and mental skills—the development of the hand and the brain cannot be separated. Keeping a fire going also required foresight routinised in the form of social organisation: fuel had to be gathered regularly, and some sort of rota to keep watch over the fire was also necessary. Moreover, the human species monopoly over the use of fire changed the balance of power between human beings and other animals: fire not only frightened other animals away, but made them more vulnerable (with implications for human diet) to more elaborate forms of hunting—and the use of fire sticks in more complex hunting strategies¹⁴ was also linked to the further development of the brain and the capacity for foresight and social coordination. Finally, cooperation in activities related to food and eating acquired a rich array of social meanings.

Thus the study of food deserves a more prominent place than it usually holds in historical literature, where it is less prominent and certainly less prestigious than political or social history. Yet, as several of the essays in this volume demonstrate, the production, cooking and consumption of food have always been an important aspect of social life, and are often strongly linked to politics and inequalities of power too. This is evident as early as the Mesolithic; as Graeme Warren writes in the opening chapter,

Food is, and always has been, central to social life. Food maintains individuals and societies, and the archaeological study of food offers potential to understand past social identities. Food is a powerful symbol because it is consumed and because it is of overwhelming everyday significance in small-scale societies, be they hunters or farmers: it is ‘what matters most to most people for most of the time’.¹⁵

That last point scarcely needs emphasis in Ireland, the most distinctive feature of whose food history is that it was this country that suffered the last catastrophic famine in Western European history, following the ravages of potato blight in the 1840s.

Yet, except in such extreme circumstances as famine, it has been noted that no human society consumes everything of potential nutritional value that is available in its environment. Few human groups (apart from, it is said, soldiers in training for recruitment into Britain’s Special Air Service or SAS) have been able calmly to contemplate eating earthworms. Patterns of food avoidance vary markedly from country to country and from social stratum to stratum. For archaeologists, evidence of food discarding is important in showing both what was eaten in the distant past and what was not. In modern times, changes in food avoidances can be traced more accurately. Taste for foods that were once significant elements in diet has sometimes declined decisively. The case of offal is a good example. It seems to be the case not only that some foods are what economists call ‘inferior goods’—that is, foods (like potatoes) of which consumption declines as increasing income makes possible their substitution by more highly valued foods—but also that they become invested with feelings of positive repugnance. Interestingly, a food such as tripe, once commonly eaten by the poor, falls off the menu at the foot of the social pyramid, but then reappears at the top in the best restaurants. (The trend against the consumption of offal is much more marked in the United States of America (USA) than in France, with Britain and probably Ireland somewhere in between but nearer the American pole.)¹⁶

Some food avoidances are ritualised in religious prohibitions, as in the cases of pork for Jews and Muslims, and beef for Hindus, although cases of this kind do not much feature in the food history of Ireland.¹⁷ One specific religious intervention in the diet of the people of Ireland was the obligation in the Catholic tradition to abstain from meat during Lent, and indeed the doctrinal view of Fridays as year-round penance days when Catholics were supposed to refrain from eating meat.¹⁸ Apart from that, where religion has often been thought to play a part in people’s eating habits in these islands is in the churches’ attitudes towards the enjoyment of good food. More specifically, it has frequently been suggested that English cookery was ‘stunted’ by the victory of the Puritans in the civil wars of the seventeenth century.¹⁹ Serious historical evidence for this is weak. For one thing, the Puritans did not ‘win’—the monarchy was restored in 1660, and Dissenters were subject to civil and political discrimination. Asceticism continued to be a strand in the religious currents of these islands, but history is written by the victors, and the general killjoy attitudes of seventeenth-century Puritans have been exaggerated. True, they strongly opposed drunkenness, but they were not unique in that—as the campaigns of Father Matthew in Ireland a century and a half later serve to remind us.²⁰ What is more probably the case is that by the nineteenth century, in the spirit of the age all the Christian denominations preached what E. P. Thompson called an ‘all-embracing “Thou Shalt Not”’.²¹ This appears to apply to both islands; it fits better with what we know about the dominant Roman Catholic church’s asceticism in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Ireland. It also fits better with something that is absent from this collection, namely signs of markedly different culinary cultures in the predominantly Catholic Republic and the majority Protestant Northern Ireland.

So is there any such thing as a distinctively Irish national cuisine, or Irish culinary culture? Probably not. What we think of as ‘national cuisines’ were a relatively late arrival on the European scene. Even Italian cuisine, which we regard as one of the most distinctive in western Europe, did not begin to take its present shape until long-distance international trade was regularised: imagine Italian food without pasta (probably adopted from China) and the tomato which, with its botanically close relative the potato, is one of the most obvious imports through the ‘Columbian exchange’. Before Columbus, it has been observed, the cabbage was a staple from Sicily to Scotland. Even the ‘French bean’ has American origins. That is not to deny the probability that all parts of Europe had regional dishes, or that these regional differences seem to have survived more markedly in countries like Germany and Italy that were unified as states only in the nineteenth century.²² The local or regional specialities were often feast-day dishes that were cooked for a few special occasions in the year. It was these special dishes—such as the famous cassoulet of Castelnaudary—that French gastronomes like Curnonsky, de Croze and Rouff collected in the early decades of the twentieth century as ‘the gastronomic treasure of France’.²³ Soon complaints were heard that in Paris ‘everything is available all the time’—an early example of the now ubiquitous dissatisfaction at the disappearance of the seasonality of the diet in the supermarket age.

Yet it is misleading to think of ‘country cooking’ as the foundation of haute cuisine even in France. One mark of ‘fine dining’ is the sheer variety of ingredients that go into it, and that is the product of urban markets rather than of rural tradition. A second mark is its labour intensiveness: it is expensive cuisine not only because it makes use of costly ingredients, but also because dishes often require many stages of preparation in well-staffed kitchens. It is no accident that we use the expression ‘haute cuisine’, or that French is more generally the language of cookery. French cuisine achieved a kind of culinary hegemony in Western Europe from the seventeenth century onwards, and by the nineteenth century its dominance had spread to North America and to other parts of ‘Europe overseas’. I have argued that French haute cuisine took shape in the absolutist court of the ancien régime, mainly because for the French aristocracy deprived by (especially) Louis XIV of independent power and social function, conspicuous consumption—competitive virtuosity in rank-related houses, décor, equestrianism, music and art as well as food—became central to their social identity. The models set at court were emulated by lower but rising strata. Of course, other countries had court societies too, though the Versailleslike royal and ducal palaces that tourists visit today testify to the influence of French models. By Napoleonic times, when Parisian restaurants took over the function of culinary competiveness driving culinary innovation, ‘path dependency’ had made French leadership hard to dislodge for two centuries.²⁴ The upper reaches of society in many countries long remained French culinary colonies.²⁵

So often, trends in culinary culture subtly reflect changes in the distribution of power in society more widely. England appeared to be on a similar trajectory towards an absolutist monarchy—and there appeared ‘courtly’ cookery books on the French model—until the Civil Wars of the seventeenth century nipped the development in the bud. After the Restoration in 1660, the great landowners retained their regional power bases and many of their old social functions. They lived large parts of the year outside London, eating the products of their own lands. Of course, some symptoms of conspicuous consumption can be found, but it was not so central to upperclass social identity as it was in France.

In this and many other respects the history of food in Ireland—the Famine apart—is not radically different from that of England. That is not offered as a criticism. Both countries have much in common with these parts of Western Europe where the trickle-down effect from court was weaker than in the special case of France: for example in the Netherlands, the urban regenten (‘regents’) rather than the courts of the Stadhouders were the model-setters, while in Germany a considerable cultural gulf developed between the Bürgertum (‘middle class’) and the numerous courts (which for a long time remained French-speaking).²⁶ So what we think of as typical German food is gutbürgerlich (‘home cooking’), and Dutch food in the past often made English ‘plain cookery’ look quite elaborate.

In these islands, differences between social strata have been more evident than national differences—with the added complication that in Ireland for a long time the social elite actually were English. From her long and richly detailed study of food culture in pre-Famine Ireland, Regina Sexton concludes that

The elite consumption cultures of the wealthy classes were received, directed and guided by British, and to a lesser extent, European norms. Wealthy gentry women embraced British styles of cookery and brought dishes that were strongly imbued with a British sense of identity and tradition to their homes and estates.²⁷

As for the lower classes, the picture is largely of stagnation. Again, this is not unusual: even in France, as Marc Bloch remarked, on the eve of the Revolution, in contraposition to a bourgeois and even artisan diet which had already undergone appreciable development, the everyday food of the peasant remained singularly archaic’.²⁸ In Ireland after the Famine, according to Ian Miller, the story was one less of stagnation than actual nutritional decline.²⁹ Frank Armstrong continues the story into post-Independence Ireland, when— even if decline were halted—the sheer ordinariness of domestic cooking in the Irish countryside persisted. However, this picture of a diet dominated by bread and tea, cabbage and bacon is hardly more depressing than how Raymond Postgate colourfully described food in British hotels (and by implication much of domestic cooking) up to the mid twentieth century: there was a sort of Maginot Line of forbidding, unfriendly hotels, offering stringy over-cooked meat in tiny portions, sodden vegetables, and saccharined or tinned fruit with packet custard . . .’³⁰ Not surprisingly, Miller recounts the beginnings of cookery classes intended to improve the skills of Irish housewives. Not surprising, because such classes were spreading at about the same period in Britain, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and the USA. They often had a de haut en bas (‘from top to bottom’) character, as recounted by Magdalen Pember Reeves in her report on Fabian ladies’ initiatives among the very poor in early-twentieth-century Lambeth.³¹ A different twist to the story of cookery classes intended to improve’ domestic cookery is provided by Rhona Richman Kenneally, who shows how in the 1950s organisations like the ESB, ICA and RDS³² engaged a new mechanism for the purpose: the pursuit of social distinction.³³ Again, there are parallels with Britain, where at the same period women’s magazines ran columns on what they called hostess cookery’³⁴—more or less explicitly understood as a form of competitive culinary showing off’. Court society had come to the middle classes!

Great restaurants also came to Ireland in the twentieth century. In one of the final essays, far from the ambience of cabbage and bacon, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire charts the success of some leading exponents of haute cuisine on this island. As a fairly recent blow-in—I came to live in Ireland in 1993—I was surprised to learn how early international recognition had come to long-surviving Dublin restaurants like Jammet and the Russell. Less surprising was that they were bastions of grande cuisine in the style of Escoffier, whose name is synonymous with the codification of French cuisine in the age of the first great international hotels. Not until the nouvelle cuisine revolution of the 1960s, led by people such as Paul Bocuse and the Troisgros brothers, was the relatively heavy Escoffier dispensation overthrown. Even today, French influence is evident in the recent crop of Irish Michelin-starred restaurants: Patrick Guilbaud (obviously), Kevin Thornton and the Rankins. Even the Allen dynasty at Ballymaloe, Co. Cork, are not exempt from French influence. Mention of Ballymaloe, though does point to something that has changed since French haute cuisine was taking shape in the early modern period. The Allens pride themselves on sourcing their ingredients locally as far as possible, and growing quite a lot themselves; but today, with what has been called total urbanisation’, it is no longer impossible for there to be great restaurants deep in the countryside.

One final thought arises from this comprehensive long-term history of food and drink in Ireland. There is no shame now in not being able to identify an Irish national cuisine’, for pretty well all national cuisines have subtly merged into each other. I reflect that even when it was published 30 years ago, my book All manners of food was fast becoming an historical document. Since about 1980, the age of national cuisines has passed. We have witnessed the internationalisation of cooking and eating (or perhaps one should say not-cooking and eating). In every country in Europe and beyond, mass catering and fast food outlets have become normal. Most cities have a wide range of ethnic’ restaurants, and they have gradually influenced each other through the development of fusion food’. Even at the pinnacle of the culinary hierarchy of prestige there is more emphasis on the brilliance of innovative individual chefs than on their location within national traditions. In all these respects, Ireland is part of the modern world.

Stephen Mennell, MRIA
University College Dublin

* doi: 10.3318/PRIAC.2015.16

¹ Samuel Pegge (ed.), The forme of cury (London, 1780).

² Richard Warner, Antiquitates Culinariae, or Curious tracts relating to the culinary affairs of the Old English (London, 1790; facsimile edn London, 1981).

³ Frederick J. Furnivall (ed.), Early English meals and manners (London, 1868).

⁴ Georges Vicaire, Bibliographie Gastronomique (Paris, 1890; facsimile edn London, 1978).

⁵ Alfred Gottschalk, Histoire de l’alimentation et de la gastronomie depuis la préhistoire jusqu’à nos jours (2 vols, Paris, 1948); J. C. Drummond and Anne Wilbraham, The Englishman’s food: a history of five centuries of English diet (London, 1939); John Burnett, Plenty and want: a social history of diet in England from 1815 to the present day (London, 1966).

⁶ Dorothy Hartley, Food in Britain (London, 1954); Elizabeth David, Italian food (London, 1954), French country cooking (London, 1951), English bread and yeast cookery (London, 1977), An omelette and a glass of wine (London, 1984), etc.; Jane Grigson, Charcuterie and French pork cookery (London, 1967), English food (London, 1974), etc.; Alan Davidson, The Oxford companion to food (Oxford, 1999).

⁷ See Shanahan’s essay, pp. 197–218 below.

⁸ Fernand Braudel, Robert Philippe, Jean-Jacques Hémardinquer and Frank Spooner, ‘Vie matérielle et comportements biologiques—Bulletin No. 1’, Annales E-S-C 16: 3 (1961), 545–74.

⁹ See: Mary Douglas, ‘Deciphering a meal’, Daedalus 101:1 (1972), 61–81, and ‘Food as an art form’, Studio International September (1974), 83–8; J. R. Goody, Cooking, cuisine and class: a study in comparative sociology (Cambridge, 1982); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history (New York, 1985); Marvin Harris, Good to eat: riddles of food and culture (London, 1985); Anne Murcott (ed.), The sociology of food and eating (Aldershot, Hamps., 1983) and The nation’s diet: the social science of food choice (London, 1998); Stephen Mennell, All manners of food: eating and taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the present (Oxford, 1985; revised edition, Champaign, IL, 1996). A survey of social scientific work on food up to the early 1990s can be found in Stephen Mennell, Anne Murcott and Anneke H. van Otterloo, The sociology of food: eating, diet and culture (London, 1993). A more up-to-date, theoretically informed survey of the literature is in the pipeline: Alejandro Colás, Jason Edwards, Jane Levi and Sami Zubaida, Food, politics, and society: social theory and the modern food system (Berkeley, CA, forthcoming c. 2017).

¹⁰ See for instance the essays by Jessica Smyth and Richard Evershed, and by Susan Lyons, pp. 27–46 and pp. 111–66 below.

¹¹ Richard Wrangham, Catching fire: how cooking made us human (New York, 2009).

¹² Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler, ‘The expensive tissue hypothesis: the brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution’, Current Anthropology 36:2 (1995), 199–221.

¹³ Johan Goudsblom, Fire and civilization (London, 1992); see also Goudsblom’s chapter ‘Fire and fuel in human history’, in David Christian (ed.), The Cambridge world history (Cambridge, 2015), vol. I, 185–207.

¹⁴ Including in fishing, as Graeme Warren indicates in his essay; see p. 18 below.

¹⁵ See Warren’s essay, p. 1 below.

¹⁶ See Mennell, ‘An excursus on offal’, in All manners, 310–16.

¹⁷ Anthropologists of the structuralist persuasion like Mary Douglas tended to treat such prohibitions as rationally inexplicable; in Good to eat, Marvin Harris offered developmental or ‘materialist’ explanations for several such cases, including those of pork and beef.

¹⁸ This tradition by no means disappeared from Protestantism after the Reformation, though the justification for it did. In the Church of England’s Homilies of 1562, congregations were instructed to observe the fasts not for religious but for political reasons: ‘as when any realm in consideration of the maintenance of fisher-towns bordering upon the seas, and for the increase of fishermen, of whom do spring matriners to go forth upon the sea, to the furnishing of the Navy of the Realm, whereby not only commodities of other countries may be transported, but also may be a necessary defence to resist the invasion of the adversary’. See Certain sermons or homilies appointed to be read in churches in the time of Queen Elizabeth of famous memory (London, 1687), 300. The Homilies are formally anonymous, but were mainly written by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer,

¹⁹ See Mennell, All manners, 103–08.

²⁰ See Diarmaid Ferriter’s essay, pp. 350–1 below.

²¹ E. P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (Harmondsworth, Middx, 1968), 411.

²² For Germany, see for example Horst Scharfenburg, The German kitchen (New York, 1989).

²³ Curnonsky (pseud. of Maurice-Edmond Sailland) and Marcel Rouff, La France gastronomique: Guide des merveilleuses culinaires et des bonnes auberges françaises (Paris, 1921–); Curnonsky and Austin de Croze, Le Trésor gastronomique de la France (Paris, 1933).

²⁴ Mennell, All manners, 108–44; Rebecca Spang, The invention of the restaurant: Paris and modern gastronomic culture (Cambridge, MA, 2000).

²⁵ On this, see also Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for taste: the triumph of French cuisine (Chicago, IL, 2004).

²⁶ See Stephen Mennell, ‘Eten in Nederland’, De Gids 150:2–3 (1987), 199–207 (the unpublished English original, ‘Eating in the Netherlands’ is available at http://www.stephenmennell.eu/publications/journalArticles.php (last accessed 10 August 2015)); and Eva Barlösius, ‘Soziale und historische Aspekte der deutschen Küche’, Afterword to Stephen Mennell, Die Kultivierung des Appetits (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 423–44.

²⁷ See Sexton’s essay, p. 306 below.

²⁸ Marc Bloch, ‘Les Aliments de l’ancienne France’, in J. J. Hémardinquer (ed.), Pour une histoire de l’alimentation (Paris, 1970), 231.

²⁹ See Miller’s essay, pp. 307–23 below.

³⁰ Raymond Postgate, ‘Preface’, in The good food guide, 1963–64 (London, 1963), xiii.

³¹ Magadalen Pember Reeves, Round about a pound a week (London, 1913).

³² That is: the Electricity Supply Board, the Irish Countrywomen’s Association and the Royal Dublin Society.

³³ See Richman Kenneally’s essay below pp. 325–47.

³⁴ Mennell, All manners, 257.