Before I went off on my summer holidays I had been approached from the City Library here in Waterford and asked if I could do a talk on Irish Food for the Heritage Week in September. I agreed happily, it was two months away at that stage, and it was a subject I am very interested in (even if ignorant of.)
We went trooping into the library when we came back, to return our holiday books, only to be greeted with a huge display of cook books with a shrine like photo of myself in the centre, this was advertising my talk, which I had labelled
“From Fullacht Fiadh to Cream Crackers” and was to take place on that Friday.
I buried my self in books for the next five days.
I discovered, as I always did while in college when I did a bit of swotting two days before the exam, that the subject was even more fascinating than I imagined it would be and I hope I will have the chance to get back to it sometime.
I will here however deliver the rough notes of this rough guide.
Very much a tentative and eclectic work in progress.
Food Talk
Food is I think one of the great agents in the founding of Civilization
Civilization started when Man the Hunter started hunting in groups
Then cooking in groups
Then eating in groups…
This leisure makes conversation possible
This is nowhere clearer than in Ireland where we have the archaeological evidence of the :
Fullacht Fiadh
This is a very good example of communal eating after communal hunting.
The Fullacht Fiadha is rectangular pit dug into the ground, generally lined with wood or stones, usually of a capacity to hold about 500 litres of water.
Near the pit was a hearth on which stones were heated in a fire.
For a long time in Ireland these were known in the folk memory as Fullacht Fiadh (Possibly means Cooking place of the Deer) but it wasn’t known exactly how the cooking was done.
Academics were sceptical about the possibilities of boiling water in a pit by dropping hot stones into water.
There are about 120 such sites in county Waterford alone.
(I know as my daughter had to do a college project on them, I was the designated driver.)
An experiment was carried out in East Cork in the 80’s and Myrtle Allen gives an account of it
“Joints of lamb and wild venison were covered with bay leaves, wild garlic and rosemary, wrapped in hay or straw and tied into parcels. After about an hour in the fire about 20 stones were shovelled out of the fire and placed most spectacularly in the cold water.
There was a great hissing and rumbling, a spout of steam shot into the air. It took about 20 mts for the water to boil and then the meat was put in.
…All the time the helpers watched over the cooking pit, adding more stones whenever the bubbles faltered and sometimes throwing out cooled stones.
The meat was given two hours to cook.
… Finally the joints were taken from the murky water, unwrapped carved and tasted by all.
They were perfectly cooked very tender with no taint of ash or anything other than the herbs and the meat.”
I love Myrtle’s final comment on the lamb.
“A little sauce would have brought them up to restaurant standards.”
She’s always the restaurateur.
The Fullacht Fiadh leads directly to the pot of stew over the fire with potatoes. This was simmered over the fire in cottages, cooking the potatoes for the main meal.
Frequently pieces of bacon or other salted and preserved meats would be cooked up with the potatoes.
In Clare about 30 years ago a local man told me that he still ate the salted mackerel that his forefathers had, he even gave me some to cook myself.
I found them totally inedible, he afterwards explained that to make them edible they used to cook them up with a large pot of potatoes which would absorb the salt.
(Occasionally they would have to discard the potatoes they being too salt and start again)
These were the Irish version of Salt Cod which sustained Europe on Fridays for many years.
After the time of man the hunter in Ireland.
The next major change which happened in the cuisine of Ireland was the Arrival of Beaker Folk around 3000 BC
These brought farming with them.
(We have a long tradition of farming)
We know this as with them came Weeds of cultivation, Plantago Lanciolata tell us when these people arrived.
They set about forest clearing, husbanding of cattle and sheep for milk and cheese, leather food, and wool.
They also planted crops of early forms of oats and barley.
This changed our diet remarkably as we started to eat what we had harvested rather than what we had hunted or gathered.
The problems of poverty were always with us.
Subsistance farming always has its lean times.
But we had various solutions.
One of these (which a horrified Anglo Irish member of the gentry observed
And recorded in the 17th century) was that, like the Masai warriors in Africa we sustained ourselves in time of scarcity by bleeding our cattle.
However unlike the Masai we didn’t drink the blood directly from the cattle, we made it into black puddings.
This is certainly one of the reasons why there is such a strong tradition and enjoyment of black pudding in Ireland to today.
An old by product of the black pudding is still eaten in Cork today, this is Drisheen, made from the serum whish floats to the top of the blood. This sets like a jelly, is made into sausages and fried in butter in Cork.
It was traditionally served with tansy sauce, a little bitter for modern tastes I think, but as a child I always thought the drisheen was delicious.
Preserving meat
Meat was preserved in various ways pre fridge and freezer.
The introduction of spices
The Crusades were much more about opening up spice roads than religion
The Normans were the people who brought spices to Ireland, these remained popular but chiefly in the Big House.
(the exception being the Spicing of Sausages which are enjoyed by all classes in Ireland, even though very heavily spiced)
The big houses in Ireland like their English equivalents have always enjoyed spicy curries and hot relishes after colonial expansion.
We also used to often kill our cattle in the late autumn when the would tend to be getting weaker and thinner from lack of fodder, then this we would preserve by spicing.
There is a most unfair tradition that the Irish tradition of spicing beef was to cover the taint from meat which had gone off.
I do not believe that our ancestors would have been so foolish., to wait until the meat is tainted when they could preserve it from taint by spicing.
The Irish Christmas spiced beef is one of the great dishes of Irish cooking.
There is a great story told about the Mc Ilhenny family.
Having been evicted by the landlord from their cottage on the estate in Glenveagh Co. Donegal they took ship to America where they founded the firm which makes the hot sauce Tabasco. In the fullness of time they returned
Bought the castle and estate from the owners and then presented it to the Irish state.
I can find no evidence that this is true but it makes a great story.
Pickling
It is said that Britain fought the naval battles of the Napoleonic wars with salt beef, salt lamb and salt pork from Waterford, and Cork.
We have always tended to prefer our pork pickled in the form of ham or bacon.
This obviously started in the days before refrigeration when it was the only way of preserving the pork, that and of course smoking which would often have been done in the chimney over an open fire.
We have got so used to the taste of preserved pig that now like many cultures (Alsace in France for example) we now prefer it.
The only part of the pig which didn’t pickle well was the fillet or pork steak.
This has for this reason become one of the favoured cuts of meat and all parts of Ireland enjoy Stuffed Pork Steak.
Pigs until comparatively recently tended to be raised by people in their back yards.
There have been Ordinances trying to stop pigs roaming on the streets until recent times, having found one such law for Waterford I was delighted to discover that the same law existed in New York in the 1890s.
It was plainly a handy hedge against hunger to keep a pig even in the city.
When I worked in Dublin in the 70s there were several pig farmers living in the centre of Dublin, they used to feed the animals with the leftovers in restaurants which they used to pay the restaurants for. This was abandoned in the eighties due to new health regulations, this came as a shock to restaurants, suddenly they had to pay to get the pig swill removed.
Rashers have always been very important in the Irish diet.
The fry was traditionally produced at breakfast and, when the main meal was eaten at lunch the fry was often produced again for the tea, (as the evening meal was called then.)
Just as Cork had its drisheen, Waterford also had its favoured pig products like Cruibins –still popular- and skirts and kidneys. (Skirts were the trimmings from the pork steak)
It is important to remember that it is not just the pig we preserved by pickling.
Irish corned beef is still very popular and as salt lamb is no longer available, I have persuaded one butcher in Waterford to put a leg of lamb in with his pickling pork. (It should have been mutton)
The result was succulent and moist and delicious.
Eggs were also preserved in various ways, the gluts feeding the lean periods.
One way of preserving eggs was to coat them on butter when still warm from the hen, this closed the pores of the shell and resulted in a delicious buttery boiled egg even after several weeks.
These eggs were still available in the English market in Cork when I was a boy.
A less expensive and more common preservation of eggs was to soak them in waterglass.
Vegetables
The potato
It was Sir Walter Raleigh who brought the potato back to Europe from America.
He apparently planted the first potatoes in his estate near Youghal. The Irish took to them with great joy and very shortly afterwards they took over from cereal crops to become our staple-with disastrous consequences when blight struck in the 1800s and the population decreased by millions here in the famine.
As Walter Raleigh was a great favourite of Queen Elizabeth’s he obviously gave some samples of the crop to her as well. History has it that the potatoes were planted in the royal gardens, when harvested the green tops were carefully cut off, the root ignored, and these were boiled like cabbage.
As these were coarse and not appetising the whole experiment was abandoned and it was many years afterwards that they were introduced into England again.
Funnily enough a similar story was told by Muiris O Suilleabhain in his story, Fiche Bliain a’ Fas, about growing up in the Blasket Islands off Kerry.
It seems that a chest of Tea leaves was washed off a passing ship and, being curious about the tea about which they had heard, the carefully boiled up the leaves, discarded the liqueur and tried to eat the boiled leaves with butter, salt and pepper.
As you can imagine it took a while before they tried it again.
But to go back to Raleigh, it is amazing how many culinary riches were brought over to Europe from
America.
Tomatoes, avocados, chocolate to name but a few.
Odd to think that the cooking of the Mediterranean only saw a tomato for the first time a couple of hundred years ago.
We do in Ireland eat other vegetables beside the potato.
My feeling is that we used to eat a lot more in years gone by.
I have noticed that there often seems to be lots of wild garlic growing about the doors of abandoned cottages.
How could our forefathers have not been attracted to its wonderful smell.
Garlic is also often mentioned in our early literature.
More often for its medicinal than its culinary merits.
I have come across an old saying;
Is leighas air gach tinn
Creamh ‘us a Mhaigh
(Garlic with May Butter cures all disease)
Which would seem to me that someone was enjoying the protection offered by garlic.
There is also evidence in our literature that cress and sorrel were enjoyed by the peasants in Ireland.
Sorrel must have been the poor mans lemon long before the lemon was first imported, it still acts as an astringent in French cooling and as in Sauce “A l’oseille” traditionally served with fish. As children we used to search it out in the woods and eat what we called Sauries with relish, a folk memory I am sure.
Nettles are certainly still used in cooking in Ireland.
There is a great tradition that they “purified the blood”
The young nettles were picked (with gloves on) and cooked like spinach and also made into soup.
They were also used in place of cabbage in a version of champ in the north.
We must not forget Carigeen Moss, which was reckoned to have both medicinal and culinary values.
Myrtle Allen has heroically used its setting properties to make set desserts, not I think its most successful use.
Alan Davidson, author of the Oxford Book of English Food, suggests it might well be used to make fish aspic dishes and I am always intending to try this.
Dilisk or Dulse is a great favourite in Waterford which people chew as they would chew gum, Darina Allen also has a version of Colcannon in which she uses it.
Talking about seaweeds leads me nicely on to fish.
Fish
Fish has been a bit of a problem food in Ireland during the twentieth century particularly.
Despite our island position and the great abundance of fish in our rivers we had lost our taste for seafood for many years.
My Father showed me apprentice agreements from Dwyer and Company in Cork where the apprentices, not the best considered of people normally, were guaranteed that they would not be given boiled salmon more than once a week. Such was the antipathy to fish and also of course this shows the abundance of salmon at this time.
To some extent I blame this antipathy on the rulings of abstinence of the catholic church.
By banning the eating of meat on a Friday they made the eating of fish penitential and there fore much less appealing.
There have also been an alarming tradition of the legendary high kings of Ireland choking to death on fish bones.
In my family home growing up in Cork in the fifties such was the dislike of fish that we were always offered the option of Eggs instead of fish on a Friday, to my shame most of us opted for eggs.
Interestingly we Irish often found ways of dodging this abstinence law.
In Mayo Wild Geese were regarded as fish rather than meat.
This was mainly because they spent their winters and bred outside the country, the people decided that they came from the shell, the goose barnacle, which hatched out at see-the direction from which they first saw the geese approaching, and that there fore they were fish and could be enjoyed on Friday
Old cook books also give a notion of the reasons why we found fish unappealing. There was a tendency to overcook it enormously, I think based on some Victorian fear of its deadliness, this effectively reduced it to a dried and mushy condition, it wasn’t until I went to France and ate lightly cooked moist and al dente fish that I really began to enjoy it.
It was not always so.
There are shell middens all around the coast of Ireland,
These show that there was a long tradition of eating shell fish-usually raw- directly from the sea.
We enjoyed Limpets mussels razor shells
In habitations near our rivers there are also the remains of our many fish suppers from prehistoric times.
The salmon is much revered in Irish legends
Witness the story of
Fionn Mc Cool and the Bradan Feasa.
The Salmon of Wisdom was eaten by Fionn before his tutor Fionangus and so he gained the power and the knowledge.
Also note that the Irish alone in these waters realised the true deliciousness of the large prawn known as Scampi or Norway Lobster.
Instead of discarding them when caught in nets as the other nations did we kept them and the fisher women (not all of whom were called Molly Malone) used to make journeys out in small boats to sell them to passing steamers. They thus became best known here as Dublin Bay Prawns.
That we also enjoyed Lobster is evident from this account by Vanity Fair author Thackery on holiday here in 1843:
The Irish Sketch Book 1843
“You take a Lobster about three feet long if possible, remove the shell cut or break the meat into pieces not too small.
Someone else meanwhile makes a mixture of mustard, vinegar catsup and lots of cayenne pepper.
You produce a machine called a dispacher which has a spirit lamp under it which is usually illuminated with whiskey.
The lobster the sauce and a near half pound of butter are placed in the dispacher which is immediately closed.
When boiling the mixture is stirred up, the lobster being sure to heave about the pan in a convulsive manner, while it emits a rich and agreeable odour through the apartment.
A glass and a half of sherry is now thrown in and the contents served out hot and eaten by the company.
Porter is commonly drunk and whiskey punch afterwards, and the dish is fit for an Emperor.
N.B.- you are recommended not to hurry yourself getting out of bed in the morning and may take soda-water with advantage.
Probatum Est”
Desserts
I don’t think that there is any real tradition of the dessert in Ireland until comparatively recent times.
Sugar, for one thing would be a recent import.
Honey was particularly important as the only sweetener before the introduction of cane and then much later beet sugar.
The Brehon laws had special rules about bees called
Beacbreatha, these were strict particularly if it was reckoned that the bees were feeding in a neighbours land.
All this changed with the huge popularity of cake and biscuit making in England in Victorian times.
Long before we realised that there was a relationship between tooth decay and calories the art of cake making became the centre of the house wife’s life and the judgement of her culinary skills.
So many cooks books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are totally dominated by sweet baking, up to 90% in some cases.
All house wives had special cakes which they baked and Christmas became a positive orgy of sugar with Christmas cake, Mince pies, Plum Pudding, etc etc.
(A point of interest is that Mince meat was originally a way of preserving beef killed in the lean times of winter,
The only vestiges of that in our modern mince pie are the name and the use of beef suet in the mix.)
In hospitality however we were never lacking.
Englishman Edward Wakefield wrote in the 19th century
“The Wexford peasants have a custom when at meals to sit with their doors open which is an invitation to those passing to enter and partake of their homely fare. So innate is their hospitality that the stranger is always welcome. Even in Celtic and Medieval times Irish people were expected to keep open house. The Brehon laws laid down the level of hospitality required and those who fell short of it risked ridicule by their bards who travelled the country side as entertainers. Later the anxiety of appearing inhospitable acquired a Christian edge. The tradition of showing kindness and generosity to visitors,
of sharing the best food with them, of cooking something special is still strong especially in the country. It has provided the impetus for many marvellous old recipes.
Bread
Here I go back to Myrtle Allen and their experiment with the Fullocht Fiadh.
“A hearth stone had been set between the stream and the fire, a thick rough slab of sandstone,about two feet in diameter, slightly raised, on top and around it another fire was lit…… after some time…..the hearth stone was swept ready for use. We thought oatcakes would be appropriate. We used Macroom ground oatmeal with a little butter rubbed in, salted, and moistened with milk.
We flattened pieces in our hand and threw them on the stone.
We turned them, they swelled up and they were definitely edible.
Steaks and scraps of venison were next for the griddle, they were delicious.
(And we think that barbecues are a modern invention)
It was in the 1840s that bicarbonate of soda was first introduced to Ireland.
It was an instant hit.
Our previous staple breads had been coarse and either unleavened or unreliably raised and lightened with brewers barm, or yeast.
Bicarbonate of soda combined with buttermilk (the staple drink of the peasants to produce a light and tasty loaf.
It soon became the ubiquitous Irish loaf.
It is usually made with a cross on its back, not from any religious significance but so that it can be easily broken in four after baking and the cut or stored as wanted.
In the north they cut in eight, thus making Farls, handy to use like dinner rolls.
Here I must mention the Cream Cracker.
I am prepared to make a case that it, like the Bla, was a true Waterford invention.
The Jacobs family were making biscuits on Bridge Street in Waterford prior to their departure to Dublin.
I assume that it was here they started the manufacture of their cream cracker, now made all over the world.
I am rather inclined to think that it was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Irish cooking began to lose its way.
With the rise at that time of an Irish middle class they began to copy the food of the Anglo Irish gentry and began to adopt some of the worst aspects of English cookery.
This was a great emphasis on great joints of meat, plainly cooked with little or no flavourings added and on the skills of cake and biscuit making being more important than savoury, witness our savage overcooking –to recent times- of both fish and vegetables.
Forgotten and forsworn was our enjoyment of Herbs and garlic.
These were regarded by the British as Fancy French things and so they were avoided.
In my family house in Cork growing up in the nineteen fifties we never used either garlic or olive oil (except to put on burns, bought in the chemist shop)
In The Cookin’ Woman by Florence Irwan, written in 1949, she only mentions garlic once and that as a cure for sore throat.
There now is a new life in food in Ireland.
Spearheaded by Myrtle Allen, and by her daughter in law Darina Irish food is now beginning to enjoy its great harvest.
It is common knowledge that we can produce great food, meat, fish and vegetables in Ireland.
If we can guard this great larder from alien invaders like GMO products and the worst aspects of pollution and over fishing and intensive farming we could start into the twenty first century as a great culinary exemplar and leader.
And here is a list of some of the books I consulted:
Irish Traditional Cooking by Darina Allen
Ireland’s Traditional Foods by Cathal Cowan and Regina Sexton
Salt Spices and Aromatics in the English Kitchen
By Elizabeth David
The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy edited Alan Davidson
The Oxford Companion to Food edited Alan Davidson
Food, A History, by Filipe Fernandez-Armesto
A Taste of Ireland by Theodora Fitzgibbon
Irish Traditional Food by Theodora Fitzgibbon
English Food by Jane Grigson
The Cookin’ Woman by Florence Irwin
Food for Free by Richard Mabey
Archaeological Inventory Co. Waterford by Michael Moore
