December Wonderful Wednesday Webinar

Food permeates every aspect of 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, it has historically proven academically elusive, 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’.

September 2024 saw the launch of an 800-page edited collection titled Irish Food History: A Companion which was published in hard copy by the Royal Irish Academy and open access online by EUt+ Academic Press. The volume is co-edited by Dr Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dr Dorothy Cashman, with a foreword by Professor James Kelly. This exciting new companion to Irish food history builds on the existing work of scholars across the disciplines.

This talk will discuss the background to the book, outlining the development of food history in Ireland. It will identify some of the seminal scholars who have paved the way for this endeavour, and the key publications that precede this volume.