Irish cuisine

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A pint of stout and some wheaten bread

Irish cuisine can be divided into two main categories – traditional, mainly simple dishes, and more modern dishes, as served by hotels etc. for tourists.

There are many Irish dishes involving potatoes. Colcannon is a dish made of potato and one of wild garlic (the earliest form), cabbage or curly kale, (compare bubble and squeak). Champ consists of mashed potato into which chopped scallions (spring onions) are mixed.

Other examples of simple Irish meals are Irish stew, and also bacon and cabbage (boiled together in water). Boxty is another traditional dish. A dish mostly particular to Dublin is coddle, which involves boiled pork sausages. Ireland is famous for the Irish breakfast, consisting mainly of pork, and may include fried potato farls.

While seafood has always been consumed by Irish people, many shellfish dishes have increased in popularity in recent times, especially due to the high quality of shellfish available from Ireland's coastline, e.g. Dublin Bay Prawns, Oysters (many oyster festivals are held annually around the coast where oysters are often served with Guinness, the most notable being held in Galway every September ) as well as other crustaceans. Salmon and cod are perhaps the two most common types of fish used.

Traditional Irish breads include soda bread, wheaten bread, soda farls, and blaa, a doughy white bread roll particular to Waterford.

1 Food in early Ireland
2 The potato in Ireland
3 Food in Ireland today
4 Misperceptions
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Food in early Ireland

There are many references to food and drink in early Irish literature. Honey seems to have been widely eaten and used in the making of mead. The old stories also contain many references to banquets, although these may well be greatly exaggerated and provide little insight to every diet. There are also many references to fulacht fiadh. These were sites for cooking deer, and consisted of holes in the ground which were filled with water. The meat was placed in the water and cooked by the introduction of hot stones. Many fulacht fiadh sites have been identified across the island of Ireland, and some of them appear to have been in use up to the 17th century.

Excavations at the Viking settlement in the Wood Quay area of Dublin have produced a significant amount of information on the diet of the inhabitants of the town. The main meats eaten were cattle, sheep and pigs. Poultry and wild geese as well as fish and shellfish were also common, as were a wide range of native berries and nuts, especially hazel. The seeds of knotgrass and goosefoot were widely present and may have been used to make a porridge.

From the middle ages, till the arrival of the potato in the latter half of the 17th Century, the dominant feature of the rural economy was the herding of cattle. The meat produced was mostly the preserve of the gentry and nobility. The poor generally made do with milk, butter, cheese and offal, supplemented with oats and barley. The practice of bleeding cattle and mixing the blood with milk and butter (not unlike the practice of the Masai) was not uncommon. Black pudding remains a breakfast staple in Ireland.

[edit] The potato in Ireland

Potatoes form the basis for many traditional Irish dishes

The potato was introduced into Ireland in the second half of the 17th century, initially as a garden crop. It eventually came to be the main food crop of the poor. As a food source, the potato is extremely valuable in terms of the amount of energy produced per unit area of crop. The potato is also a good source of many vitamins and minerals, particularly vitamin C (especially when fresh). Potatoes were cultivated by much of the populace at a subsistence level and the diet of this period consisted mainly of potatoes supplemented with buttermilk. Potatoes were also used as a food for pigs that were fattened-up and slaughtered at the approach of the cold winter months. Much of the slaughtered pork would have been cured to provide ham and bacon that could be stored over the winter. The reliance on potatoes as a staple crop meant that the people of Ireland were vulnerable to poor potato harvests. Consequently several famines occurred throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. The first great famine of 1739 was the result of extreme cold weather but the famine of 1846 to 1849 (see Irish potato famine) was caused by potato blight which easily spread throughout the Irish crop which was heavily dependent on a single variety, the Lumper. Nearly 1,000,000 people died and another 2,000,000 emigrated, and some 3,000,000 people were left destitute.

Fresh meat was generally considered a luxury except for the most affluent until the late 19th century and chickens were not raised on a large scale until the emergence of town grocers in the 1880s allowed people to exchange surplus goods, like eggs, and for the first time purchase a variety food items to diversify their diet.

[edit] Food in Ireland today

In the 20th century the usual modern selection of foods common to Western culture has been adopted in Ireland. Both US fast-food culture and mainland Europe's dishes have influenced the country, along with other world dishes introduced in a similar fashion to the rest of the western world. Common meals include pizza, curry, Chinese food, and lately, some West African dishes have been making an appearance. Supermarket shelves now contain ingredients for traditional, European, American (Mexican/Tex-Mex), Indian, Chinese, and other dishes.

The proliferation of fast food has led to increasing public health problems including obesity, and one of the highest rates of heart disease in the world. Traditional Irish food and diet is also somewhat to blame, with a large emphasis on meat and butter. Government efforts to combat this have included television advertising campaigns and education programmes in schools.

In tandem with these developments, the last quarter of the 20th century saw the emergence of a new Irish cuisine based on traditional ingredients handled in new ways. This cuisine is based on fresh vegetables, fish, especially salmon and trout, oysters, mussels and other shellfish, traditional soda bread, the wide range of hand-made cheeses that are now being made across the country, and, of course, the potato. Traditional dishes, such as the Irish stew, coddle, the Irish breakfast, and potato bread, have enjoyed a resurgence. Schools like the Ballymaloe Cookery School have emerged to cater for the associated increased interest in cooking with traditional ingredients.

[edit] Misperceptions

The commonly-held belief that corned beef and cabbage is an Irish dish is incorrect. Corned beef is an Irish-American innovation to the traditional dish of bacon and cabbage, where corned beef was used as a replacement for the bacon joint when immigrants had difficulty buying it due to a combination of inavailability and cost.

[edit] References

Print

Mitchell, Frank and Ryan, Michael. Reading the Irish landscape (1998). ISBN 1-86059-055-1
National Museum of Ireland. Viking and Medieval Dublin: National Museum Excavations, 1962 - 1973. (1973).