Reimagining Irish food ways for the twenty-first century

Abstract

Food and drink are fundamental to life, and apart from costume, they are among the most noticeable markers of cultural otherness within intercultural encounters. There is a current global interest in foods that are artisanal, local, traditional, seasonal and sustainable, and that tell a cultural story, as witnessed by the popularity of the Nordic Food Movement, or the 2021 Netflix series High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America. In 2019, the Royal Irish Academy published A History of Ireland in 100 Words, which had a special chapter on ‘Food and Feasting’ highlighting the importance of bread, milk, apples, and honey as iconic Irish foods, and including drinking horns, forks, cauldrons, and the champion’s portion ‘curadhmhír’ as other important cultural elements within Ireland’s history. Food history has been gaining momentum globally for over half a century. In an Irish context, it has been sixty years since A.T. Lucas’s seminal paper ‘Irish food before the potato’ was published in this very journal. Other individual researchers on Irish food history, traditions and customs included Kevin Danaher, Fergus Kelly, Louis Cullen, Bríd Mahon, and more recently Finbar McCormick, Katherine Simms and Patricia Lysaght. It has been forty years since Alan Davidson and Theodore Zeldin established the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. The symposium provided both a network and an audience for international ethnographers and food scholars such as Claudia Roden, Elisabeth Luard and Charles Perry to showcase their research, not to mention Irish symposiasts such as Myrtle Allen, Regina Sexton, Darina Allen, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire (the present guest editor), Dorothy Cashman, Diarmuid Cawley, and Anke Klitzing, four of whom feature in this special thematic issue of Folk Life on Irish food ways. Inspired by the Oxford Symposium, the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium (DGS) was organized as a biennial event in 2012. This initial meeting resulted in the publication of ‘Tickling the Palate:’ Gastronomy in Irish Literature and Culture in 2014, part of Peter Lang’s Reimagining Ireland series. This edited collection focused a food lens on Irish authors such as Maria Edgeworth, James Joyce, John McGahern, and Sebastian Barry, along with exploring food and drink consumption in various segments of Irish society from the elite households of eighteenth-century Ireland to the Dublin tenements of the 1950s, and on to the emergence of Ireland as a ‘foodie nation’ with the proliferation of Michelin starred restaurants and the widespread exportation of Irish pubs. The DGS was a collaboration between culinary researchers at Dublin Institute of Technology, Cathal Brugha Street and key members of the Association of Franco-Irish Studies (AFIS) at the Institute of Technology Tallaght, at a time when the TU Dublin project was only aspirational. AFIS conferences soon began to organize gastronomy sessions, and further foodrelated chapters appeared in a number of other edited volumes within the Reimagining Ireland series (cf. volumes 55, 66, 68 and 93), and in volumes 9 and 14 of the Studies in FOLK LIFE 2021, VOL. 59, NO. 2, 77–80 https://doi.org/10.1080/04308778.2021.1957194