The Waterford Archaeological and Historical Society’s next lecture will be at 8 pm on Friday, February 28th in St Patrick’s Gateway Centre, Waterford (Eircode X91 YX61) when Dr Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, will deliver a talk titled ‘Exploring the making of ‘Irish Food History: A Companion’’.
Food permeates every aspect of Irish life and society, from birth to death—from the new-born’s first suckle to the food traditions associated with Irish wakes and funerals. Essential for survival, historically it has proven elusive to scholarly research, hidden in plain sight. Entangled with the domestic and the feminine, it was perhaps traditionally regarded as too mundane and too quotidian for consideration. Yet, consider what can be revealed by applying the ‘food lens’ to something as fundamental as our sense of place, our basic grounding in townland and byway. Consider the etymological richness of ‘Bóthar’, the Irish word for road (from ‘bó’—cow), defined in width by the length and breadth of a cow, a signifier of the long affair of our bovine past; extending also to our ‘buachaillí’ (boys) and ‘cailíní’ (girls), meaning, respectively, cowboy or herd boy and little herder, the suffix ‘ín’ denoting the diminutive. The true meaning of placenames such as Clonmel, Cappataggle, Glenageary, and Kanturk, all food-related, can only be unlocked through an understanding of their Irish language origins. All are instances of what Martin Doyle succinctly explains as ‘a transliteration from the Irish, preserving the sound but obliterating the meaning’.
In September 2024 an 800-page book titled Irish Food History: A Companion was published by the Royal Irish Academy, and in an open access online version by EUt+ Academic Press. The volume was co-edited by Dr Mac Con Iomaire and Dr Dorothy Cashman, with a foreword by the distinguished historian Professor James Kelly. This exciting new companion to Irish food history builds on the existing work of scholars across various disciplines. Within its twenty-eight chapters, there are contributions from experts in the fields of archaeology, history, mythology, linguistics, literature, folklore, Irish studies, food studies, beverage studies, gastronomy, and culinary history, who apply the latest thinking and scholarship to the history of Irish food from the earliest inhabitants to the twenty-first century. The book is divided into six sections:1. Prehistory and Archaeology of Food in Ireland; 2. Bog Butter, bees and banqueting in medieval Ireland; 3. Sources for food history in early modern Ireland; 4. Developments in food supply, technology, and trade; 5. Food, folklore, foclóirí, and digital humanities; and 6. The development of modern Irish food and identity. The section breaks are interspersed with food related poetry from Raiftearaí, Seamus Heaney and Paula Meehan, along with some recipes and old songs.
In his talk Máirtín will discuss the background to the book, outlining the development of food history in Ireland. He will discuss some of the seminal scholars who paved the way for this endeavour, and the key publications that preceded it. He will also discuss the main findings outlined in the book, before opening the floor to a wider discussion on Irish food history more generally.
Dr Mac Con Iomaire is a senior lecturer in the School of Culinary Arts and Food Technology, Technological University Dublin and Chair of the Masters in Gastronomy and Food Studies in TU Dublin, the first such programme in Ireland. With Dorothy Cashman and Michelle Share, he has been co-editor of the new European Journal of Food, Drink, and Society since 2021. Mac Con Iomaire is co-editor with Eamon Maher of ‘Tickling the Palate’: Gastronomy in Irish Literature and Culture (Peter Lang: 2014) and New Beginnings: Perspectives from France and Ireland (Peter Lang, 2023), and with Rhona Richman Kenneally on ‘The Food Issue’ of The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (2018). He is also the co-founder and chair of the biennial Dublin Gastronomy Symposium, and a former two-term trustee of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. In 2018, he presented Blasta, an eight-part television series for TG4 celebrating Ireland’s food heritage. In 2021, Máirtín guest edited a special issue of Folk Life: Journal of Ethnological Studies in the topic of Irish Food Ways. He was awarded an IRC Research Ally Prize in both 2021 and 2022 for mentoring doctoral candidates.
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