My Attempt to Understand Irish Food History 1: Country House Cuisine

“Visiting Ireland . . .  is complex,” said John Mulcahey of Fáilte Ireland (the National Tourist Development Authority) during his paper on food and Irish tourism at the Third Dublin Gastronomy Symposium that took place at the beginning of June this year.

I couldn’t have been more delighted to attend the Symposium. Maírtín Mac Con Iomaire, chef, author, scholar, teacher, and singer and his committee put together a splendid couple of days of papers, hosted by the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Scholars from many different countries gathered to present and discuss issues loosely connected around the theme of revolution.  The meals—whether a spread of cold meats and cheeses in the cafeteria of the DIG, or a catered dinner in the splendid barrister’s building, the King’s Inns, or in Chapter One restaurant—demonstrated what really fine food is available in Dublin today.

Lovely Irish butter. Credit Karima Moyer-Nocchi.

Huge thanks to all, and to the major sponsors, Fáilte Ireland and Manor Farm Chicken, as well as the minor sponsors for making this possible. The next Symposium will be in 2018 and I highly recommend it.

What follows, though, is not a report on the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium. Instead, it’s a rumination in four parts on cuisines in Ireland, my attempt to make sense of the complexity of visiting Ireland. I cannot abide just seeing sights unless I can weave those sights into some kind of story, and the obvious story was cuisine, or rather, inter-related cuisines. I especially benefitted from comprehensive anthology of Irish food history to date, Food and Drink in Ireland, edited by Elizabeth FitzPatrick and James Kelly, published by the Royal Academy of Ireland.  When it was presented at the conference, I wondered whether to shell out the $35. I shouldn’t have hesitated even for a second.

There is much other scholarship as well. The authors know far more than I do, so I hope they will forgive and correct errors of fact and interpretation. And be warned, this is a highly personal interpretation.

How Little I Knew of Irish Cuisines

I’d been to Ireland only a couple of times before, both visits in the early 1960s on field trips when I was a geology student at Bristol University in England.

Geology field trips couldn’t care less about gastronomy. Quite the reverse, as interesting rock formations tend to be in scenic but rather remote locations. I remember trudging through boggy heather in the pouring rain on the return from the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland and standing in stinging sleet looking out over the cliffs of Moher near the Burren Limestone.

I have no memory of the food, except that it was basic, as befitted hungry geology students. Nor did I spend evenings in the pub, which I suspect, as in the English countryside, neither served food nor welcomed women.

I do remember, though, the sense of shock and shame at the rusted coils of barbed wire that still surrounded the English military barracks in Tipperary, a place until then known to me only as a place of yearning in the World War I song that my grandmother sang to me as a child.

Finally, I had the date of the Irish Famine wrong in Cuisine and Empire as Maírtín had pointed out to me in the nicest of all possible ways a few months before he invited me to the Symposium. (It’s corrected in the paperback, thanks, Maírtín).

As I set out for a short four days in Ireland, I wondered how I would find the country fifty years on, given the centuries of tension between England, where I had grown up, and Ireland, given the Famine, given my memories.

The Cuisine of the Irish Country House

1690. The Battle of the Boyne.  The first stop on the well-thought-out tour for foreign visitors the day after the symposium was the site of the battle.  I scratched my head, trying to remember.

Oldbridge Estate built at the site of the Battle of the Boyne

The guide provided the answer. It was part of a wider war between the French and the English that stretched across continents and continued on and off for a century.

On the one side was the Catholic James II seeking to regain the throne of with the support of Louis XIV.  On the other was the Protestant Dutch Prince William of Orange, who had been invited to take the throne of England. It was not some minor skirmish. Some 60,000 troops were involved.

William won. Ireland remained in English hands, the colony of a constitutional Protestant monarchy.  In its country houses, the cuisine was first cousin to that of the English across the sea.

As we toured the country house built later at the site of the battle, I gasped: the staircase newel–the twin of the newel in the farm house I grew up in (though that did not qualify as a country house..  

Out to the farm buildings and gardens in back. The layout of the farm buildings, stables, and vegetable gardens was instantly recognizable as being constructed to the same Palladian-inspired plan as improved farms across the eastern and southern England and lowland Scotland (though strangely the books on these model farms do not mention their Irish manifestations).

The tour went on, that sense of familiarity hitting me time and again.  At the next stop, we  stood on the ramparts of an Iron Age fort and gazed out on a glorious green and white day as spring turned into summer, green from new growth grass and leaves, white from the may in hedgerows and the Queen Anne’s lace, across the River Boyne to one of the great megalith monuments, New Grange.

Standing on Iron Age Battlements looking out at New Grange

Just two days earlier I had stood with my sister on the ramparts of an Iron Age fort above the River Avon gazing across Salisbury plain in the direction of another great megalithic monument, Stonehenge.

Standing on Iron Age battlements looking toward Stonehenge

Ireland and the West of England, rainy, green, great for dairy cattle, great for butter. In the wonderful National Museum of Ireland you can see fossilized butter, preserved in bogs since prehistoric times. Butter was (and is) one of Ireland’s sources of export wealth. Cork has its own butter museum and one of the conference participants, Jeremy Cherfas, explains all in his Brief History of Irish Butter podcast.

Butter (at back) preserved in a bog and its container (at front). National Museum of Ireland.

Megaliths and Iron Age forts, Viking invaders and Norman invaders, the international monastic orders of the Middle Ages (the Cistercian Mellifont Abbey we visited the Boyne Valley, the Benedictine Shaftesbury Abbey of my home stamping ground), the histories of Ireland and England had run in parallel for millennia.

The elegant white buildings of Georgian Dublin were a grander version of Clifton, the inner suburb of Bristol where I had lived as an undergraduate.  Both are ports, both have dock areas in lined with warehouses in the town center.  with its dignified white terraces high above the docks lined with warehouses. A quick look at the map and yes, Dublin and Bristol face one another across the Irish Sea. 

The River Liffey, Dublin

No surprise, then, that the Irish gentry kept manuscript cookbooks like their English (and colonial American counterparts).  Nor that the sweet and savory pies and puddings, ragouts, fricassees, the butter-rich sauces, the creams, the jellies, the tarts, the custards and the sweetmeats would be similar. Nor that they borrowed extensively from French recipes, or that they announced their cosmopolitan sophistication with exotic ingredients and products. The cuisines of England, Ireland, the American colonies (and France too) are intertwined.

These manuscripts are now being studied by Irish food historians such as Regina Sexton (author of the pioneering Little History of Irish Food), Madeline Shanahan of University College Dublin, and Dorothy Cashman of the Dublin Institute of Technology. (For articles by Regina Sexton and Madeline Shanahan,

The same three-way links existed with drinks, particularly wine and cider. As Chad Ludington, author of The Politics of Wine in Britain, here it was Irish merchants, both Protestant and Catholic, who took the lead. They set up warehouses along the river in Bordeaux, bought the local vin ordinaire, aged and blended it, thus creating the famous Grands Crus, which they shipped back to Cork and then on the wealthy of England, Scotland and Ireland.  Just as the Irish merchants introduced claret, so the Bristol merchants with a long history of wine importing introduced sherry (think Harvey’s, though it was not founded until the beginning of the nineteenth century. 

Maírtín pouring cider tastings

Throughout the conference we tasted fine cider (and I mean cider, not apple juice). On the tour, we visited prize-winning cider maker, Mark Jenkinson, who makes a fine cider called Cockagee (a green cider apple the color, just the color you understand, of goose turd for which it was named).  Lovely stuff

In England, and perhaps in Ireland too, fine cider’s earlier heyday had been in the eighteenth century, enjoyed as a more affordable alternative to wine. Cider continued popular in the West of England. It was my introduction to alcohol as a undergraduate. On field trips to the Mendip Hills west of Bristol to explore the local Carboniferous Limestone, the male students ventured into the pub for scrumpy (as it was called), bringing out half pints to go with our packed lunches.  

it was a nice completing of the circle then to discover this description of cockagee in the English Dialect Dictionary edited by Joseph Wright at the end of the nineteenth century.

English Dialect Dictionary, edited Joseph Wright, various editions, late 19th century.

 The cockagee apple, brought from Ireland to Minehead in Somerset in the West of England, just below the the Carboniferous Limestone of the Mendip Hills.  In the lobby of my comfortable, quiet, and central hotel, hung the huge original geological map of Ireland, published by Richard Griffiths in 1853.  Oh joy, the joy that only someone who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the development of geological mapping in the first half of the nineteenth century could feel.  It’s a magnificent work of science and of art.  And yes, from Dublin to the Boyne and beyond, it’s Carboniferous Limestone.

Richard Griffiths’ Geological Map of Ireland, 1843.

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