Irish cuisine
Irish cuisine encompasses the cooking styles, traditions and recipes associated with the island of Ireland. It has developed from antiquity through centuries of social and political change and the mixing of different cultures, predominantly with those from nearby Britain and other European regions. The cuisine is founded upon the crops and animals farmed in its temperate climate and the abundance of fresh fish and seafood from the surrounding waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Chowder, for example, is popular around the coasts. Herbs and spices traditionally used in Irish cuisine include bay leaves, black pepper, caraway seeds, chives, dill, horseradish, mustard seeds, parsley, ramsons, rosemary, sage and thyme.
The development of Irish cuisine was altered greatly by the Tudor conquest of Ireland in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, which introduced a new agro-alimentary system of intensive grain-based agriculture and led to large areas of land being turned over to grain production. The rise of a commercial market in grain and meat altered the diet of the Irish populace by redirecting traditionally consumed products abroad as cash crops instead. Consequently, potatoes were widely adopted in the 18th century and essentially became the main crop that the Irish working class could afford.
By the 21st century, much traditional Irish cuisine was being revived. Representative dishes include Irish stew, bacon and cabbage, boxty, brown bread or soda bread, coddle, and colcannon.
History
There are many references to food and drink in Irish mythology and early Irish literature, such as the tale of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Salmon of Knowledge. They contain many references to banquets involving the heroes' portion and meat cooked in cauldrons and on spits.Prehistoric Ireland
Mesolithic period (8000–4000 BC)
Prior to the Neolithic period in Ireland and advances in farming technology, archaeological evidence such as the discovery of stone tools, bone assemblages, archeobotanical evidence, isotopic analysis of human skeletal remains, and dental erosion on the remains of human teeth indicate the Mesolithic Irish were a hunter-gatherer society that ate a diet of varied floral and faunal sources. Discoveries of food byproducts such as bone fragments and sea shells are key indicators of the dietary habits of the Mesolithic Irish, as immediate food products have long since decomposed —especially in the presence of Ireland's largely acidic soils. However, available archeological evidence of food remains, together with discoveries of Mesolithic food-harvesting tools and the relationship of local environments with settlement sites, provide an understanding of what may have eaten. Settlement sites, in particular, have supported notable insight into the dietary habits of the Mesolithic Irish. For example, the proximity of Mesolithic settlements to water systems point to groups or individuals who ate marine species. The predominant location of Mesolithic Irish settlements are close to water systems, and therefore suggests a diet rich in vegetation, marine life, and smaller mammals, as distinct from their British and Native American contemporaries whose settlements further inland influenced a diet more substantive with meat. For example, deer features minimally in archeological discoveries, thought to be particularly due to the infrequent presence of deer along coastal regions, bays, and estuaries.The deliberate positioning of such settlements also suggests a cultural preference for particular foods. Also unique to settlements positioned close to water systems are large mounds of bivalve shells known as middens, which provide concrete evidence that shellfish played a role in the dietary practices of the Mesolithic Irish. Shell middens are frequent Mesolithic discoveries in Ireland, which for their majority, were predominantly composed of oyster and limpet shells. The coastal town name of Sligo '' which means "abounding in shells", references the area's historic plenitude of shellfish in the river and its estuary, as well as the middens common to the area.
Additionally, Ireland's position as an island and thus the unique composition of biodiversity and geography suggests its Mesolithic people enjoyed a somewhat dissimilar diet to their proximal contemporaries. For example, prehistoric Ireland's paucity of small mammals, and its absences of species important to other Mesolithic communities, such as red deer, wild cow, and elk would have contributed to unique dietary habits and nutritional standards. The persistent evidence of certain species, such as boar in contrast with the scarcity and/or uncooked nature of other animal remains such as bear and birds of prey suggests a particular understanding of certain animals as sources of food, others that served symbolic or medicinal purposes, while others still, such as dog, which are not supposed to have been consumed at all.
Due to Ireland's geography and the locations of Mesolithic settlements, the variety of food sources available to the Mesolithic Irish was consequently unique. Outside of boar, large predators including the wolf, the brown bear, and lynx are scarce in archaeological assemblages, and understood to have been generally avoided as a source of food, as they were in most of contemporary Mesolithic Europe. Likewise, while cereals were unlikely to have been yet consumed due to the processing required to make them digestible, fungi, roots, leaves, stems, flowers, nuts, seeds, berries and fruits were all otherwise simple to harvest and eat and would have substantiated the Mesolithic diet with nutritional variety and a diversity of flavour. Honeybees, and their honey, were probably not present in Mesolithic Ireland.
This in combination with the prevalence of settlements along waterways suggests key dietary staples of the Mesolithic Irish were marine and floral sources of food. Additionally, that boar was brought to Ireland by early Mesolithic colonists and features frequently in archeological assemblages of faunal bones, points to another noteworthy staple in the Mesolithic Irish diet. Despite the scarcity of plant-based artifacts in light of Ireland's wet weather and acidic soil, biochemical assessments of human bone have been used to provide evidence for a variety of floral sources, including apples, crowberries, raspberries, blackberries, water-lily seeds, tubers, and hazelnuts.
The sizable presence of hazelnuts in many archaeological assemblages in both Mesolithic Ireland and Britain suggests the nut was important, and may have even been used as a form of currency, as acorns were for Native Americans of California during the same period. There is an indication that these nuts, in particular, were stored underground during the winter months. Elm bark is also suspected to have been a prized source of food for being particularly rich in nutrients, as well as featuring in the diets of other northern Mesolithic European communities, the Scandinavian in particular.
Despite Ireland's coastal geography, there is no evidence of seaweed collection among the Mesolithic Irish in archaeological remains, as well as little evidence of deep-water ocean species. However, the presence of shellfish and in-shore fish—particularly salmonids—in the Irish Mesolithic diet is impressive. The absence of evidence for seal is a notable contrast with Mesolithic Scotland, where archaeological sites demonstrate the significant exploitation of seals.
Though the Mesolithic Irish were a hunter-gatherer people, such assemblages as middens, discoveries of lithic tools and technologies, and seasonal organization of animal remains alludes to understandings of environmental management to meet subsistence needs. For example, the transportation and management of boar through selective hunting and culling techniques suggests a food source potentially purposefully semi-domesticated, as well as a species important to the Mesolithic communities of Ireland. Research into the composition of middens, as well, suggests that these Irish communities understood tidal behaviours, and optimal harvest periods for respective marine species. Different species of shellfish require different environmental conditions, such as intertidal flats for mussels and cockles, and rocky shorelines for limpets so different harvesting strategies would have been required to harvest and profit from different varieties of shellfish. As well, that freshwater, coastal, and in-shore marine life features greater than deep-sea species in archaeological evidence of the Irish Mesolithic diet inherently points to the use of in-shore fishing techniques such as traps and nets, in lieu of off-shore or deep-sea hunting techniques.
The recovery of stone tools in specific sites and vogue technologies of the period such as blade-and-flake likewise suggests their roles in the construction and maintenance of basic food procurement technologies like fish traps. There is even some suggestion of the Mesolithic Irish being actively engaged in land snail farming.
The fundamentally seasonal nature of the Mesolithic diet and the various seasonally-conscripted food-gathering activities affected the time and social organization of the Mesolithic Irish during the year. Such activities would have consisted the hunting and foraging of seasonal plants and animals when they were at their most abundant, as well as storage-related activities such as preserving meat and seafood through smoking, and caching nuts and seeds. As various plants are fertile only biannually, and the migratory patterns of animals can change over time, these food-gathering activities would have been significantly varied and as such, would have required attention and understanding of environmental and animal behaviours.
While most foods would have been eaten raw and out-of-hand, archaeological evidence has provided insight into Mesolithic food processing techniques, such as crude forms of butchery, the soaking of seeds, and thermal processing to directly heat or smoke foods. At a site in Kilnatierney where ash, burnt shells, fish, and pig bones were discovered in a dug-out depression, the diminutive size of the fish bones suggests they were cooked on skewers or directly on hot rocks. The presence of burnt mounds of stones indicate cooking methods likely focused on direct heating methods such as roasting on spits constructed on tripods over open flames, and in earthen hearths.