Ireland's Green Larder

The Definitive History of Irish Food and Drink

Margaret Hickey

• Editore: Unbound
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781783525263
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Customs & Traditions

Ireland's Green Larder tells the story of food and drink in Ireland, for the first time. From the ancient system of the Céide Fields, established a thousand years before the Pyramids were built, right up to today's thriving food scene.Rather than focusing on battles and rulers, Margaret Hickey digs down to what has formed the day-to-day life of the people. It's a glorious ramble through the centuries, drawing on diaries, letters, legal texts, ballads, government records, folklore and more. The story of how Queen Maeve died after being hit by a piece of hard cheese sits alongside a contemporary interview with one of Ireland's magnificent cheese makers, and the tale of the author's day in Clew Bay on the wild Atlantic coast, collecting the world's freshest oysters, is countered by Jonathan Swift's complaint about dubiously fresh salmon being sold on the streets of Dublin.Beautifully illustrated and dotted with recipes, there are chapters covering everything from strong tea to the Irish rituals and superstitions associated with food and drink. With a light touch and a flair for finding the most telling details, Hickey draws on years of research to bring this sweeping history brilliantly to life.

CHAPTER ONE

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PANORAMA

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

The island of Ireland is so small you can drive across it in a few hours and its population is much the same as that of, say, Croatia. For the greater part of its history, the religion, language and culture of Ireland’s indigenous people were suppressed, and for centuries the poverty of the landless population was as acute as any in Europe. Yet over those same centuries it became the cradle of literature, music and dance, of politicians and soldiers, of philosophers and saints, of boozers and brawlers, and managed to be world class in all categories. How has this small country managed to achieve so much against all the odds? It can hardly be put down to the mythical ‘luck of the Irish’.

Identifying the DNA of Irish culture is a challenge that offers many points of departure, but however you look at it, they all ultimately depend on the irreducible human needs for shelter from the storm and a crust of bread. What is put on a plate reveals much about a nation. Food in Ireland is far more than a body fuel – every cake of soda bread, every jug of buttermilk, every piece of bacon tells a story of the land and its people, a story that recedes into our unrecorded past. Stripped of all but the essential, each of us is, in essence, Lear’s poor, bare, forked creature. In the Irish context, Lear could translate into Sweeney, the mad king who endured the storm and who, according to Flann O’Brien’s affectionate parody in At Swim-Two-Birds, ‘feasted on cresses and nettles’.

One aspect of that story is located along lines of latitude and longitude. The height of a mountain, the prevailing wind, rains that fall or droughts that persist, the clagginess or sandiness of the soil – externals such as these shape our lives. In many parts of Ireland, dense hedges of whitethorn and little fields bounded by unmortared rocks tell of survival wrested from tiny parcels of land, and the lichen-mottled but enduring stone of the dolmen, the round tower and the Celtic cross set you in a landscape that has changed little since the days of Brian Boru, the tenth-century High King of Ireland. The four basic farm animals of today, the cow, the sheep, the pig and the horse, are the same as they were in the seventh century.

Rural Ireland’s unmediated connection with the fundamentals of life seems blessedly anomalous in the twenty-first century. If I step outside at night, here, just west of the Shannon, I see a black sky perforated by a million stars, free of light seepage from streetlamps or neon signs. Some mornings in spring, I spot a leveret helping himself to my sorrel and lettuces, within a few feet of the house, or I might disturb a pheasant, sending it clattering away into the trees. Deer are so plentiful in my patch of Ireland that they have to be culled. Elderflowers, wild garlic and blackberries can be gathered from trees and hedgerows round here with no noxious spraydrift having settled on them. In autumn, mushrooms spring up in fields and woods; even in winter the fat scarlet hips of Rosa rugosa or thorn trees provide food for wild creatures. Ireland is a food island of plenty.

An island of plenty for some, of course, but not for all. The single most important thing to remember about food in Ireland is that, for most of the people most of the time, there just was not enough of it to eat. The old truism that life lurches from famine to feast was particularly relevant to the Irish. Often, obscenely, people close to starvation had food but dared not eat it, because the rent money came from selling it.

An Outline

The story of food is always political and in Ireland’s case intensely so. Significantly, the country never came under the thrall of the Roman Empire. Agricola, Roman governor of Britain from AD 77 to 84, had planned to conquer the Irish Celts (Scotii) for they were always a thorn in his side, regularly sending raiding parties in armed ships in search of plunder and slaves. But circumstances prevented it, and Ireland remained largely untouched by the outside world until the coming of Christianity, leaving aside occasional visiting traders, the Phoenicians among them.

In fact, until the discovery of America, Ireland was just a small island on the far west of the known world, although, out of all proportion to its size, it had had great influence on Europe during the early Christian period. Its wandering monks brought many skills to the countries in which they settled, including introducing cheese-making techniques to Switzerland and parts of France. But with the passing of those early days of Celtic Christianity, Ireland became more closed in on itself. Under the influence of various outsiders – the Vikings, the Normans and pre-eminently the British – the east and south-east coasts knew some development, but the lives of most people were untouched by great upheavals happening in Europe. Even during the nineteenth century, while much of Britain underwent convulsions that marked the change from a rural to an industrialised society, Ireland had almost no factories and the economy remained predominantly agricultural.

Accordingly, Ireland was, until very recently, one of the last outposts in Europe of a way of life that had changed little since the Middle Ages, and in some respects since prehistoric times, a palimpsest of ancient techniques and beliefs. Never having known an industrial revolution, the country until very recently had only a few cities, a scatter of towns and much of it was under grass. All is now changing at breakneck pace. Like an artefact preserved for centuries under the dark, cool blanket of the anaerobic bog, once it surfaces and is exposed, it begins to disintegrate.

Plesyd with Fleshe

Perhaps inevitably, the English who came to colonise Ireland painted the native Irish as barbaric. Here are just a few of the contemporary reports: Bartholomeus, in 1535, wrote that ‘Men of Irelonde ben singularly clothed … and they be cruel of hert … angry of speche and sharpe … These men ben plesyd with fleshe, apples and fruite for mete and with mylke for drynke and given them more to playes and to huntynge than to worke and traveyle.’

Just as inimical and more influential was John Derricke, who in 1581 published The Image of Ireland with the discoverie of the wood kerne, a work consisting of woodcuts accompanied by text written in doggerel. This blatantly hostile piece of propaganda contains a widely reproduced illustration purporting to show an Irish chieftain’s feast where the guests, Sir Philip Sidney among them, squat at legless tables devouring newly slaughtered meat spit-roasted over open fires nearby. A bard and a musician playing the harp provide the entertainment, while members of the chieftain’s court toast their bare bottoms by the fire and dogs gnaw at bones thrown to the ground by the cooks.

Fynes Moryson, secretary to the new Lord Deputy of Ireland, Mountjoy, came to Ireland during the reign of Elizabeth I and stayed on to witness the first wave of post-Elizabethan ‘planters’. He met another class of Irish at the beginning of the seventeenth century: ‘Touching the Irish diet, some lords and knights and gentlemen of the English-Irish … have as great and for their part greater plenty than the English of flesh, fowl, fish and all things for food … And we must conceive that venison and fowl seem to be more plentiful in Ireland, because [the Irish] neither so generally affect dainty food, nor so diligently search [for] it as the English do.’

Moryson concludes, ‘Many of the English-Irish have by little and little been infected with the Irish filthiness …’

The Englishman who made perhaps the greatest impact on Ireland was Cromwell, although he concentrated his efforts on the north and east of the country. He drove the native Irish westwards, to the inhospitable lands of Connacht, which were exposed to the first force of the weather coming in off the Atlantic, and with wild, mountainous land unsuitable for tillage. His famous malediction ‘To Hell or to Connacht’ was a grim envoi.

Many of the planters Cromwell left behind him – retired soldiers and administrators given land confiscated from the native Irish – felt they were surrounded by a subhuman species. John Dunton, an English travel writer and bookseller, travelled through Ireland in the late seventeenth century and in his Conversation in Ireland, written around 1703, put it bluntly: ‘ … as for the wild Irish, what are they but a generation of vermin?’

Not all the planters remained aloof. Over time many of them integrated and became attached to their adopted homeland. However, whether they showed any sympathy to Ireland or not, the new landlords needed men to work on their estates and house servants to cook the food. Even judged by the standards of the time, many of these landlords doled out harsh treatment, and the house servants, who worked long hours, were fed mostly on the leftovers from the master’s table.

Arthur Young, the most respected British agriculturalist of his time, attempted in his 1780 work A Tour in Ireland to give some ‘General Observations on the Present State of That Kingdom’. ‘The landlord of an Irish estate, inhabited by Roman Catholics, is a sort of despot who yields obedience, in whatever concerns the poor, to no law but that of his own will … A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant, labourer, or cottar dares to refuse to execute. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift his hand in his own defence.’ Confirmation of this is given by Lord Chesterfield, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who wrote in 1745, ‘the poor people in Ireland are used worse than negroes by their lords and masters’.

As can be seen above, relations between the haves and have nots were almost as bad as they could be, but there were undoubtedly ‘improving’ landlords and it was not uncommon for the people employed on some large estates to form a loyal bond with their employers – a lifelong one in many cases. Those working in the kitchen had the chance to widen their culinary horizons vastly. Nonetheless, although it made use of native Irish ingredients, especially the superb beef and seafood, the cuisine of the Big House in Ireland was usually based on that found in large estates in mainland Britain. This history concerns itself chiefly with the food and cooking of the Irish in the hut, the farmhouse and the tenement.

Hard-won Yields

I live west of the Shannon and in my fields boulders of black limestone break the surface intermittently, while elsewhere it is boggy, so that you sink up to your ankles in mud if you attempt to walk to the far boundary after heavy rain. My farming neighbours have gone to great lengths to improve their land by drainage and fertilisation, but the purpose is to achieve better grazing. I know only one person round here who grows crops for a living, and that is my friend Dermot O’Mara, a farmer who farms organically in all but name. He would be really struggling to produce crops all year round if it weren’t for his huge polytunnels.

Given land like this, logic and pragmatism dictated that, for the main part, the native Irish, especially in the west, adopted a pastoral form of agriculture. Grass grows exceptionally well in Ireland, and so it made sense to rear grass-eating animals – cattle, horses, goats, sheep. And because the winters are seldom acutely cold, many animals graze outdoors most if not all of the year.

True, right from the start, farmers grew some oats and barley, but the yields were hard won. One crop, however, grows well in almost any type of soil, even in heavy, muddy earth, and once that crop was introduced it was seized on and grown everywhere, even on parcels of land the size of a pocket handkerchief. I mean, of course, the potato, which is discussed, together with the Great Famine, deeper into this book.

From the eighteenth century on, the Irish peasant was squ...