Food and Drink in Ireland

Description

Though subjects of enduring interest in their own right, food and drink are still more revealing archaeologically and historically when they amplify and illuminate broader societal behaviours and trends. This multi-disciplinary collection of fourteen essays explores the collection, cultivation, consumption and culture of food and drink in Ireland from the beginnings of settlement in the Mesolithic to the present. Among its themes, it engages with what the first settlers gathered; how people ate in Neolithic times; cooking in the Bronze Age; the diet of rich and poor in the medieval era; the impact of conquest on culinary patterns; the differences in the diet of different classes in pre-Famine and the impact of the Famine; the history of haute cuisine in Ireland; the impact of modernisation in the twentieth century, and the changing role of drink in society. This book was commissioned by the editors of the Royal Irish Academy's journal: Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Section C. Contributors: Graeme Warren, Jessica Smyth, Richard P. Evershed, Alan Hawkes, Cherie N. Peters, Susan Lyons, Fiona Beglane, Madeline Shanahan, James Kelly, Regina Sexton, Ian Miller, Rhona Richman Kenneally, Diarmaid Ferriter, Mirtn Mac Con Iomaire, Frank Armstrong.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Ireland
• Stephen Ireland

Informations

• Publié par: Royal Irish Academy
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781908997104
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

FOOD AND DRINK IN IRELAND
Edited by Elizabeth FitzPatrick and James Kelly
First e-published in 2016 by
ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2, Ireland www.ria.ie
ISBN 978-1-908997-10-4
Originally published in 2015 as Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Section C , Volume 115.
Copyright Royal Irish Academy 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any electronic, mechanical or any other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or otherwise without either the prior written consent of the publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, The Writers Centre, 19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1.
While every effort has been made to contact and obtain permission from holders of copyright, if any involuntary infringement of copyright has occurred, sincere apologies are offered, and the owner of such copyright is requested to contact the publisher.
Typesetting by Datapage International Ltd. Printed in Ireland by Sprint-PRINT
Contents
Elizabeth FitzPatrick and James Kelly
Preface
Stephen Mennell
Introduction
Graeme Warren
Mere food gatherers they, parasites upon nature. . . : food and drink in the Mesolithic of Ireland
Jessica Smyth and Richard P. Evershed
The molecules of meals: new insight into Neolithic foodways
Alan Hawkes
Fulachta fia and Bronze Age cooking in Ireland: reappraising the evidence
Cherie N. Peters
He is not entitled to butter : the diet of peasants and commoners in early medieval Ireland
Susan Lyons
Food plants, fruits and foreign foodstuffs: the archaeological evidence from urban medieval Ireland
Fiona Beglane
The social significance of game in the diet of later medieval Ireland
Madeline Shanahan
Whipt with a twig rod : Irish manuscript recipe books as sources for the study of culinary material culture, c. 1660 to 1830
James Kelly
The consumption and sociable use of alcohol in eighteenth-century Ireland
Regina Sexton
Food and culinary cultures in pre-Famine Ireland
Ian Miller
Nutritional decline in post-Famine Ireland, c. 1851-1922
Rhona Richman Kenneally
Towards a new domestic architecture: homes, kitchens and food in rural Ireland during the long 1950s
Diarmaid Ferriter
Drink and society in twentieth-century Ireland
M irt n Mac Con Iomaire
Haute cuisine restaurants in nineteenth and twentieth century Ireland
Frank Armstrong
Beef with potatoes: food, agriculture and sustainability in modern Ireland
Preface
Food and Drink is the second thematic volume to be published since the decision of the editorial board of Proceedings in 2007 to bring out an occasional thematic volume addressing a fundamental theme in Irish life. Like its predecessor, Domestic Life in Ireland (Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy , 111C), which was published in 2011, the current volume favours the multidisciplinary approach that is one of the defining features of the journal. It aspires thereby to provide a forum for new ideas and for syntheses of established approaches and findings. In keeping with the remit and tradition of the journal to explore the Irish past in la longue dur e , it addresses food and drink between the Mesolithic and the present.
As Stephen Mennell s introduction to this collection points out, despite the long tradition of collecting and assembling recipes and the cultural potential of printed cookery books, awareness of the rich and revealing potential of the history of food and drink is a comparatively recent development. The decision of Louis Cullen in 1981 to devote two chapters in his vastly influential exploration of the emergence of modern Ireland to diet in a changing society and hospitality and men was crucial in this respect, because it brought food and diet into the Irish historical mainstream. 1 It did not, to be sure, herald a flood of publications on these or allied subjects. The history of alcohol consumption, for example, remained anchored in a world that answered more visibly to the politics of social control than to the new perspectives presented by sociability, conviviality of sociability. 2 However, it did pave the way over time for more ambitious work, since as well as Regina Sexton s helpful short survey, which appeared in 1998, 3 the publication by Oxford University Press in 2001 of Feast and famine: a history of food in Ireland, 1500-1920 by Leslie Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford can justifiably be identified as a milestone, less for the novelty of its findings, than for the breadth of its conclusions, its temporal range and the eclectic range of sources upon which it draws. 4 It certainly highlighted the riches to be gleaned from parliamentary enquiries and official surveys, which Ian Miller has demonstrated still more authoritatively and in greater detail in his recent pioneering engagement with the way in which science, medicine and social reform intersected to shape attitudes to food and diet in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 5
This is a most important development because for all their intrinsic interest as subjects in their own right, food and drink are still more revealing archaeologically and historically of the societies, peoples and eras in which they are located when they are appealed to amplify and to illuminate broader societal behaviours and tendencies. This is something that Irish archaeology does particularly well. The archaeological essays in this volume introduce several new themes around food-related behaviour and culinary material culture, supported by innovative theoretical frameworks and breakthroughs in scientific methodologies. Complexity has been recognised as a feature of Mesolithic diets and foodways, with belief exercising an influence on food consumption and identified in the archaeological record as specific rituals and patterns of discard. The potential of stable isotope analysis on lipid residues has been realised in its initial application to Irish Neolithic ceramic vessels. This method has revealed that vessels were used mainly to process dairy fats and other foodstuffs, thereby providing new insights into diet and food procurement among the earliest farming communities on the island and marking a beginning to the research journey needed to understand more fully the place of food and drink in prehistory. The fact that Ireland was the most prominent user of pyrolithic technology during the Bronze Age, as evidenced in the extensive survival of burnt mounds or fulachtai fia in the Irish landscape, has encouraged new thinking about social bonding during that period. The image presented is one of small family groups food-sharing and hosting feasts around these cooking sites.
Sophisticated ways of thinking about foodways in medieval Irish society show that there was restricted access to particular foods based on grade and status. The Middle Irish law tracts of the seventh and eighth centuries enshrined those proscriptions, while in the period 1100-1600 access to hunted foods such as red deer, fallow deer, hare, rabbit and wild pig was a marker of status and means of mediating social relationships. Where plant foods are concerned, archaeobotanical research has confirmed an abundance of native seasonal fruits in the Irish urban medieval diet and some of the earliest physical evidence for imported exotic foodstuffs such as fig, grape and walnut. It has proven to be groundbreaking too in recognising chronological and geographical variation in crop use which otherwise cannot be gleaned from documentary sources.
The social meaning that can be derived from food research has also been demonstrated by historians working in other jurisdictions. The significance and impact of Rebecca Spang s reconstruction of the invention of the restaurant in late eighteenth-century France has served not only to illuminate the emergence of one emblematical modern institution in a new and novel way, but also to encourage greater inquiry into the concept of public and private space which is central to the influential interpretative models associated with J rgen Habermas and Norbert Elias. 6 This is not an arena with which the essays in this volume engage directly, for the simple reason that insufficient work has yet been completed to permit the application of a purely theoretical approach, and because of the utility of an empirical methodology. Yet all contributors eschew simple reconstruction in favour of an attempt to relate consumption, be it of food or drink, which provides the collection with its thematic frame of reference, to the social world in which they occur, and to engage in new and novel ways with the evidential record that remains. Mention has already been made of the usefulness of official inquiries for the reconstruction of diet and consumption patterns in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prior to this period, outside of a handful of carceral institutions, the state seemed little interested in what people consumed, but this does not mean that diet is a subject closed off to inquiry. The analyses ventured by Madeline Shanahan and Regina Sexton of receipt books permits a revealing investigation of diet and dining patterns that underlines the extent to which early modern Ireland conformed to British and European norms, and how this and other forms of evidence allow us to identify how deeply these dining patterns percolated societally. The value of the press as a source, both for public (restaurant) dining and the varieties of alcohol that were available for purchase in the eighteenth century offers another reminder of the responsiveness of even the most ostensibly unpromising sources to focused interrogation, and of the dramatic shifts in diet that have occurred across the millennia that people have lived and consumed on this island.
It may be that for many it is the explanation of the current pattern