Note on the Author
Margaret Hickey, the former food and drink editor at Country Living magazine, has written for many publications, including the Financial Times, the Guardian and The Times. She is deputy director of Shorelines Arts Festival in Portumna and is a regular judge at the Strokestown International Poetry Festival. Her first book Irish Days is a collection of oral histories.
Also by the author
Irish Days
In tribute to the countless generations of Irishwomen
and Irishmen whose story of fortitude, generosity and
imagination is told here.
Dear Reader,
The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and ebook wherever books are sold, in shops and online.
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Introduction
Chapter One: Panorama
Chapter Two: Bog Butter and Sour Milk
Chapter Three: Barley Loaves and Oatcakes
Chapter Four: On the Hoof
Chapter Five: Poultry and Feathered Fowl
Chapter Six: Fresh from the Sea
Chapter Seven: Vegetables, Herbs, Fruit and Nuts
Chapter Eight: The Potato and the Famine
Chapter Nine: Strong Drink and Pots of Tea
Chapter Ten: Food and the Spirit
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
Supporters
Copyright
I first met Margaret Hickey in London, when I was at a very exciting stage in my career. I had just acquired my first restaurant, The Lindsay House in Soho, and, being a true Irishman, I made space on my walls for some photographs of literary heroes, such as Brendan Behan and James Joyce. She was an editor at the time, at Country Living magazine, and, being always interested in all things Irish, she wrote a profile of me – ‘Young, Gifted and Green’ – which highlighted my philosophy of food. I still live by it today. I was brought up in rural Ireland and I experienced from my earliest days the value of great, honest ingredients and a respect for the land, the rivers and the seas and the creatures that live in them.
When I learned that Margaret was writing a history of Ireland through food and drink, I was delighted to discover that the story of untold generations would now be told. The history of Ireland is often tragic, but even in the very worst times, the people had a resilience and a depth of character that helped them survive. The Irish spirit is proud and resourceful, and that is reflected in the ways in which food and drink is produced and how it is presented on the table. A cake of soda bread, a block of golden farmhouse butter, some prime Irish grass-fed beef, a head of green cabbage and a slab of one of Ireland’s award-winning cheeses – these are the stuff that dreams are made of – each pure and untampered with.
Ireland’s Green Larder is a tribute to the people of Ireland, and particularly to both small and tenant farmers, who worked hard and honestly to grow some of the best food on the planet. It’s a history book with a few recipes included, it is lively and full of fascination and one I know I’ll be dipping into often over the years. It’s the only book on the social history of Ireland that you’ll ever need!
Richard Corrigan
November 2017
Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
The island of Ireland is so small you can drive across it in a few hours and its population is much the same as that of, say, Croatia. For the greater part of its history, the religion, language and culture of Ireland’s indigenous people were suppressed, and for centuries the poverty of the landless population was as acute as any in Europe. Yet over those same centuries it became the cradle of literature, music and dance, of politicians and soldiers, of philosophers and saints, of boozers and brawlers, and managed to be world class in all categories. How has this small country managed to achieve so much against all the odds? It can hardly be put down to the mythical ‘luck of the Irish’.
Identifying the DNA of Irish culture is a challenge that offers many points of departure, but however you look at it, they all ultimately depend on the irreducible human needs for shelter from the storm and a crust of bread. What is put on a plate reveals much about a nation. Food in Ireland is far more than a body fuel – every cake of soda bread, every jug of buttermilk, every piece of bacon tells a story of the land and its people, a story that recedes into our unrecorded past. Stripped of all but the essential, each of us is, in essence, Lear’s poor, bare, forked creature. In the Irish context, Lear could translate into Sweeney, the mad king who endured the storm and who, according to Flann O’Brien’s affectionate parody in At Swim-Two-Birds, ‘feasted on cresses and nettles’.
One aspect of that story is located along lines of latitude and longitude. The height of a mountain, the prevailing wind, rains that fall or droughts that persist, the clagginess or sandiness of the soil – externals such as these shape our lives. In many parts of Ireland, dense hedges of whitethorn and little fields bounded by unmortared rocks tell of survival wrested from tiny parcels of land, and the lichen-mottled but enduring stone of the dolmen, the round tower and the Celtic cross set you in a landscape that has changed little since the days of Brian Boru, the tenth-century High King of Ireland. The four basic farm animals of today, the cow, the sheep, the pig and the horse, are the same as they were in the seventh century.
Rural Ireland’s unmediated connection with the fundamentals of life seems blessedly anomalous in the twenty-first century. If I step outside at night, here, just west of the Shannon, I see a black sky perforated by a million stars, free of light seepage from streetlamps or neon signs. Some mornings in spring, I spot a leveret helping himself to my sorrel and lettuces, within a few feet of the house, or I might disturb a pheasant, sending it clattering away into the trees. Deer are so plentiful in my patch of Ireland that they have to be culled. Elderflowers, wild garlic and blackberries can be gathered from trees and hedgerows round here with no noxious spraydrift having settled on them. In autumn, mushrooms spring up in fields and woods; even in winter the fat scarlet hips of Rosa rugosa or thorn trees provide food for wild creatures. Ireland is a food island of plenty.
An island of plenty for some, of course, but not for all. The single most important thing to remember about food in Ireland is that, for most of the people most of the time, there just was not enough of it to eat. The old truism that life lurches from famine to feast was particularly relevant to the Irish. Often, obscenely, people close to starvation had food but dared not eat it, because the rent money came from selling it.
The story of food is always political and in Ireland’s case intensely so. Significantly, the country never came under the thrall of the Roman Empire. Agricola, Roman governor of Britain from AD 77 to 84, had planned to conquer the Irish Celts (Scotii) for they were always a thorn in his side, regularly sending raiding parties in armed ships in search of plunder and slaves. But circumstances prevented it, and Ireland remained largely untouched by the outside world until the coming of Christianity, leaving aside occasional visiting traders, the Phoenicians among them.
In fact, until the discovery of America, Ireland was just a small island on the far west of the known world, although, out of all proportion to its size, it had had great influence on Europe during the early Christian period. Its wandering monks brought many skills to the countries in which they settled, including introducing cheese-making techniques to Switzerland and parts of France. But with the passing of those early days of Celtic Christianity, Ireland became more closed in on itself. Under the influence of various outsiders – the Vikings, the Normans and pre-eminently the British – the east and south-east coasts knew some development, but the lives of most people were untouched by great upheavals happening in Europe. Even during the nineteenth century, while much of Britain underwent convulsions that marked the change from a rural to an industrialised society, Ireland had almost no factories and the economy remained predominantly agricultural.
Accordingly, Ireland was, until very recently, one of the last outposts in Europe of a way of life that had changed little since the Middle Ages, and in some respects since prehistoric times, a palimpsest of ancient techniques and beliefs. Never having known an industrial revolution, the country until very recently had only a few cities, a scatter of towns and much of it was under grass. All is now changing at breakneck pace. Like an artefact preserved for centuries under the dark, cool blanket of the anaerobic bog, once it surfaces and is exposed, it begins to disintegrate.
Perhaps inevitably, the English who came to colonise Ireland painted the native Irish as barbaric. Here are just a few of the contemporary reports: Bartholomeus, in 1535, wrote that ‘Men of Irelonde ben singularly clothed … and they be cruel of hert … angry of speche and sharpe … These men ben plesyd with fleshe, apples and fruite for mete and with mylke for drynke and given them more to playes and to huntynge than to worke and traveyle.’
Just as inimical and more influential was John Derricke, who in 1581 published The Image of Ireland with the discoverie of the wood kerne, a work consisting of woodcuts accompanied by text written in doggerel. This blatantly hostile piece of propaganda contains a widely reproduced illustration purporting to show an Irish chieftain’s feast where the guests, Sir Philip Sydney among them, squat at legless tables devouring newly slaughtered meat spit-roasted over open fires nearby. A bard and a musician playing the harp provide the entertainment, while members of the chieftain’s court toast their bare bottoms by the fire and dogs gnaw at bones thrown to the ground by the cooks.
Fynes Moryson, secretary to the new Lord Deputy of Ireland, Mountjoy, came to Ireland during the reign of Elizabeth I and stayed on to witness the first wave of post-Elizabethan ‘planters’. He met another class of Irish at the beginning of the seventeenth century: ‘Touching the Irish diet, some lords and knights and gentlemen of the English-Irish … have as great and for their part greater plenty than the English of flesh, fowl, fish and all things for food … And we must conceive that venison and fowl seem to be more plentiful in Ireland, because [the Irish] neither so generally affect dainty food, nor so diligently search [for] it as the English do.’
Moryson concludes, ‘Many of the English-Irish have by little and little been infected with the Irish filthiness …’
The Englishman who made perhaps the greatest impact on Ireland was Cromwell, although he concentrated his efforts on the north and east of the country. He drove the native Irish westwards, to the inhospitable lands of Connacht, which were exposed to the first force of the weather coming in off the Atlantic, and with wild, mountainous land unsuitable for tillage. His famous malediction ‘To Hell or to Connacht’ was a grim envoi.
Many of the planters Cromwell left behind him – retired soldiers and administrators given land confiscated from the native Irish – felt they were surrounded by a subhuman species. John Dunton, an English travel writer and bookseller, travelled through Ireland in the late seventeenth century and in his Conversation in Ireland, written around 1703, put it bluntly: ‘ … as for the wild Irish, what are they but a generation of vermin?’
Not all the planters remained aloof. Over time many of them integrated and became attached to their adopted homeland. However, whether they showed any sympathy to Ireland or not, the new landlords needed men to work on their estates and house servants to cook the food. Even judged by the standards of the time, many of these landlords doled out harsh treatment, and the house servants, who worked long hours, were fed mostly on the leftovers from the master’s table.
Arthur Young, the most respected British agriculturalist of his time, attempted in his 1780 work A Tour in Ireland to give some ‘General Observations on the Present State of That Kingdom’. ‘The landlord of an Irish estate, inhabited by Roman Catholics, is a sort of despot who yields obedience, in whatever concerns the poor, to no law but that of his own will … A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant, labourer, or cottar dares to refuse to execute. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift his hand in his own defence.’ Confirmation of this is given by Lord Chesterfield, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who wrote in 1745, ‘the poor people in Ireland are used worse than negroes by their lords and masters’.
As can be seen above, relations between the haves and have nots were almost as bad as they could be, but there were undoubtedly ‘improving’ landlords and it was not uncommon for the people employed on some large estates to form a loyal bond with their employers – a lifelong one in many cases. Those working in the kitchen had the chance to widen their culinary horizons vastly. Nonetheless, although it made use of native Irish ingredients, especially the superb beef and seafood, the cuisine of the Big House in Ireland was usually based on that found in large estates in mainland Britain. This history concerns itself chiefly with the food and cooking of the Irish in the hut, the farmhouse and the tenement.
I live west of the Shannon and in my fields boulders of black limestone break the surface intermittently, while elsewhere it is boggy, so that you sink up to your ankles in mud if you attempt to walk to the far boundary after heavy rain. My farming neighbours have gone to great lengths to improve their land by drainage and fertilisation, but the purpose is to achieve better grazing. I know only one person round here who grows crops for a living, and that is my friend Dermot O’Mara, a farmer who farms organically in all but name. He would be really struggling to produce crops all year round if it weren’t for his huge polytunnels.
Given land like this, logic and pragmatism dictated that, for the main part, the native Irish, especially in the west, adopted a pastoral form of agriculture. Grass grows exceptionally well in Ireland, and so it made sense to rear grass-eating animals – cattle, horses, goats, sheep. And because the winters are seldom acutely cold, many animals graze outdoors most if not all of the year.
True, right from the start, farmers grew some oats and barley, but the yields were hard won. One crop, however, grows well in almost any type of soil, even in heavy, muddy earth, and once that crop was introduced it was seized on and grown everywhere, even on parcels of land the size of a pocket handkerchief. I mean, of course, the potato, which is discussed, together with the Great Famine, deeper into this book.
From the eighteenth century on, the Irish peasant was squeezed. He did not own land but rented it. Later on, many peasants were reduced to merely buying the right to grow potatoes on it. This led to hand-to-mouth farming. Most improvements to land need to take the long view. Such schemes as digging drains, planting hedges and building ditches and walls require an investment of money and effort. For those under constant threat of dispossession, and with the certainty of rent increases if land was considered to have been ‘improved’, the long view did not exist.
The Irish, criticised by the English as lazy, were the very opposite, but there was a fatal lack of understanding between the two. As we shall see elsewhere, when the English interfered with the age-old ways of farming in Ireland, they often got it wrong, supposing that methods well suited to Suffolk would equally serve in Sligo.
By the eighteenth century, the gulf between the wealthy and the peasant classes was enormously wide and destined to become wider. A certain Mrs Delany, an Englishwoman who settled in Ireland around 1744, notes in her diary details of a dinner she gave for fifteen guests, consisting of three courses:
First course
Large joint of beef ‘tremblante’ garnished with small pâtés
Two soups
Pigeon pie
Stuffed veal with parsley and cream
Casserole with vin de Bourgogne
Second course
Large plate of Ham and baked tongue for the middle
2 plates of sugar
4 smaller roasts (Turkey, partridge and hare with accompanying side salads)
almond cake
apple pie garnished with peaches en sigovie
Third course
Mushrooms in cream
Foyes gras en ragout
Artichokes with parmesan
We trust her servants enjoyed the remnants of this extraordinary feast.
While high society strove for fashion and elegance, the peasant classes were the most miserably accommodated in Europe. For most city- and town-dwellers, life was frequently a hand-to-mouth affair. Jonathan Swift writes of the drabs who passed themselves off as country maidens, peddling dubious foods through the streets of Dublin, hoping to make a few pence. Old street names, such as Fishamble Lane, tell of the food markets that were held on what were then the outskirts of the city, and these were the haunts of the poor, who hoped to pick up some iffy food on the cheap.
Centuries later, nothing much had changed. Sean O’Casey based most of his characters on people from the tenements of Dublin who struggled to keep going on next to nothing. Dublin Coddle was a dish invented to feed hungry mouths on a handful of cheap ingredients made tasty by ingenuity and slow cooking. In Cork, too, they knew how to make do with the scraps and offal that were left when the better-off had brought away the choicer cuts. Drisheen, tripe and bodices (all will be explained in the chapter on meat) are still eaten there, and relished, too. In Limerick, Galway, Belfast – all the great centres of population – poor people learned to eke out a little to feed a lot.
Just the same, the poor of the city have always had a marvellous capacity for endurance, plus a life-saving sense of humour. Derrig Monks, a true Dubliner, told me the story of a woman in the Liberties who went to her butcher and asked him to put aside a nice pig’s head for her for Saturday, ‘And leave the eyes in it – that way it’ll see me through the week.’
There were periods when little gave way to nothing. In the centuries before the Great Famine the people suffered lesser famines, and starvation levels were at times so bad that Jonathan Swift was moved to write his Modest Proposal, a piece of satire as trenchant today as when it was written, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country 1729. The proposal was to look upon a superfluous child as a helpful addition to the larder, as a plump infant would serve well, boiled, stewed or fried!
Certain people in authority did not see starvation in Ireland as an altogether bad thing. A Special Correspondent of The Times wrote home in his Letters from Ireland 1886 complaining that the farmers would not change their ways by, for example, improving their breeding stock of cattle. ‘In some cases, however, they [the Irish] are being starved into improvements.’ The unwritten coda is ‘and a good thing, too’.
As we shall see, most Irish tenant farmers were occupied in producing food they dared not eat themselves. The Irishwoman who made butter knew that it must all be packed into wooden firkins and sent away, for if she put it on the table, where would the rent money come from? The labourer who helped drive cattle never ate a beefsteak in his life. Woe betide those caught poaching so much as a rabbit on the landlord’s estate.
When people remark at the lack of invention in traditional Irish cooking, at the unadorned houses and lack of flower gardens, they fail to grasp the circumstances in which most people lived. Until recent times the peasant in his leaky, dark and smoky hut worked all day to gather the necessities of life for himself and his family. There was no time to create a rose garden. (And if he were mad enough to do so, his landlord would seize upon it as evidence of undisclosed wealth, and raise the rent on the very next gale day.)
The power of the landlords over life and death can hardly be overstated and the worst were the absentees, who lived in some style in London, drawing rents from their tenants through the services of an agent. The sole objective of these owners of vast estates was to keep the rents coming and when they saw a chance to make greater profit from the land by turning it over to grazing for cattle, they had no compunction about evicting families in order to free their acres for this use. The Highland Clearances in Scotland irresistibly come to mind.
My late father had a burning sense of the injustice of this: ‘The Earl of Clanricarde, who owned vast estates in East Galway, was an absentee landlord living in London, gambling and drinking his money that he was screwing out of the peasants in Ireland, and if they didn’t pay their rents, which were rack rents really, he would evict them – regardless of the weather or what time. And he got away with it for a long time because nobody resisted.’
Peasant cooking has always been dominated by practical considerations. In much of China, for example, where fuel can be scarce, they cleverly took to slicing foods very finely, allowing them to be cooked in a few moments using the stir-fry technique. In rural Ireland, fuel was not exactly scarce, but it was precious because it required such labour to cut, save and eventually draw turf. It was not to be squandered, so cooking was usually done on a single heat source. The main fire for heating the house could always be divided into mini-fires in different spots on the hearth, allowing two or three dishes to be cooked at different temperatures. Baking and boiling were always the favoured methods of cooking.
Possessions, though, definitely were scarce. It was not uncommon for some members of the family to wait until others had finished with a spoon or fork before they took their turn. A peasant kitchen would be equipped with a boiling pot, a frying pan, a kettle and little else. (In some counties in Ulster, they also had wrought-iron harnen stands on which oatcakes were put to dry and harden.) Being made of iron and usually very large, these vessels were hard to manoeuvre, so instead of lifting the heavy pots every time, various iron hooks and straps suspended them from the crane, or metal arm, that swung back and forth over the fire. One of the attractions of the little house I bought in the west of Ireland was that it still had the crane set into the wall of a giant fireplace.
The stoicism with which people endured short rations is exemplified by Tomás O Crohan. Born on Great Blasket Island, in the Atlantic Ocean, in 1856, he wrote of his life in The Islandman, as it is translated from the Irish. ‘The poor people of the countryside were accustomed to say that they fancied they would live as long as the eagle if they but had the food of the Dingle people [considered well-fed]. But the fact is that the eaters of good meat are in the grave this long time, while those who lived on a starvation diet are still alive and kicking.’ Moreover, he added, with the simple faith of his time, ‘Don’t you know He who puts us on short commons at one time gives us plenty at another time.’
On the Blasket Islands, people appear to have been hardy and healthy. Tomás O Crohan remembers, ‘Potatoes and fish and a drop of milk – if there was any – that was our food in those days. When the potatoes failed, there would be only Indian meal, just shelled. People today couldn’t make a shift to eat the bread it made, do what they would; they haven’t got the teeth for it. I am sorry that I don’t have the same food today, with the same jaws to eat it with and the same good health.’
Hardship seemed not to have harmed those islanders, and even in the times running up to the Famine, some malnourished young lads remained in remarkably good shape. The following tale is told by A Cosmopolite and was published in The Sportsman In Ireland in 1840:
As the coach passed the ragged and shoeless creatures [near Killarney] one [gentleman] amused himself by throwing halfpence, and at length challenged one miserable-looking youth, who had pursued the coach, by the offer of half-a-crown if he would keep up with us a mile. The road was newly covered with broken flint, and the lad’s anxiety to select the shortest way wholly overcame the caution which should have directed his steps. He had almost achieved the undertaking, when the loss of blood from his wounded feet, and want of power to continue the exertion, overcame all his efforts and he sunk on the road amid the violent laughter of the liberal patron who had excited his attempt.
Even with a meagre diet, poor people managed to keep themselves in some degree of health without recourse to a doctor.
In 1990, Anita Hayes founded the Irish Seed Savers Association, a charity dedicated to preserving old varieties of trees, shrubs and plants, cataloguing them and gathering seed for a heritage bank. When I called to see her she told me how she admired the country people’s powers of observation – ‘a forgotten art, a disrespected art’.
She’s right. When I first came to live in the Irish countryside, having been a city dweller most of my life, I had no idea how sharp were the eyes of people who walked the fields and forests at all hours of the day and in all seasons of the year. Animals often have an instinct for herbs to physic themselves and the wildlife observer will learn by watching them, too. Many proprietary pharmaceuticals are derived from plants found in the wild – digitalis from foxgloves, for instance, and aspirin from willow. But the disrespected art is on its way out. Unlike the old herbalists, we are losing our intimacy with the natural world. ‘I think,’ said Anita Hayes, ‘you lose a lot of gentleness when you lose contact with what you eat.’
No matter how they strove to self-medicate, the peasant people of Ireland could compensate for their poverty only so far, and child mortality was high. Where an infant did survive, rickets was a worry, together with other diseases linked with malnutrition. In the early 1900s, J. M. Synge observed the people of Aran. ‘They used no animal food except a little bacon and salt. The old woman says she would be very ill if she ate fresh meat. Some years before, tea, sugar and flour had come into general use. Salt fish was much more the staple diet than at present and I am told skin diseases were very common, though now rare on the islands.’
A combination of political and historical forces that find no parallel elsewhere in Europe created conditions in Ireland inimical to the proper enjoyment of Irish food and the development of an intricate native cuisine. The mass of Irish people were forced to live a hand-to-mouth existence, and so they set their minds on other things. In the absence of material riches, the people tried to find their riches in music, in dance, in sport, in love of nature, in an interior, spiritual life and, above all, in words.
In Lovely is the Lee, Robert Gibbings, that fine writer and etcher, presents the following vignette from Clonakilty. ‘I was standing outside a hardware shop noting the different local patterns of spades, some with a single step, some eared on both sides, some with straight sides, some tapering, when a woman said to me: “Have you ever read De Quincey? Hasn’t he the wonderful English? My husband is inside buying rat traps.”’ I ask you, hadn’t she the wonderful English? To my mind, that sublime collision of two unrelated spheres is the signature of the Irish national genius.
Not only playing with words, but playing with conceits is a national pastime; exaggeration is greatly in favour. My friend Merrily Harpur has a childhood memory of sitting in the kitchen with her brothers and being enthralled by an Irish girl who told them, ‘Sure, my father is the fattest man in Ireland!’ Naturally they were greatly struck by this. Years later they met him, a decent man, only moderately stout.
It takes much to crush the human spirit, and throughout the centuries the Irish responded to oppression by creating an extraordinarily rich body of music – reels and slow airs, jigs and hornpipes – by dancing and by reciting poetry and telling tales of heroes and the fairy people. Elaborate dishes and high cuisine were not in the frame – to keep hunger at bay was the priority.
It is only today that we in Ireland are starting to really relax about food, to relish it and play with new flavours and textures. The Ballymaloe Cookery School, for example, run by Darina Allen, is a marvellous showcase for Irish produce and culinary skills, and attracts disciples worldwide to this corner of east Cork. Yet for much of Ireland’s history most people were grateful if there was enough food to keep them alive. Nowadays the pendulum has swung the other way and a great deal of food is wasted daily. Why? Because it can be. My friend Rachel Martin, who worked with refugees recently arrived in Ireland, noticed that when left to serve themselves they would fill their plates to overflowing, taking more than they could possibly eat. It is not difficult to fathom why their anxiety persisted long after their needs were met. In Ireland it may take generations to erase the old race memory of hunger.
Three things that keep the world alive: the womb of a woman, the anvil of a smith and the udder of a cow.
Old Irish triad
In the days when no one could read or write, save a handful of monks and scholars, Ireland possessed a spontaneous and vital oral tradition, as rich as any in the known world, and the accumulated wisdom of a people was passed on by means of storytelling, riddles, wordplay, verse and song. Among the very earliest fragments of written Irish are the triads – sayings that poetically proclaim a truth, expressed in terms of the magical number three. One triad claims that the three slender things that best support the world are the slender blade of green corn above the ground, the slender thread over the hand of a skilled woman and the slender stream of milk from the cow’s teat into the pail.
In a world full of uncertainty, hardship and the dread of hunger, the cow’s udder was the source of bàn bídh, two words that honoured milk in all its manifestations and all the precious foods made from it. Bàn bídh (we find a similar phrase in both Welsh and Old Norse) was what every hungry Irishman dreamed of when his belly yearned for its fill and his mouth watered at the very thought of food.
The Elizabethans translated bàn bídh as ‘white meats’, using ‘meat’ to denote any kind of food, not exclusively flesh. (Sweetmeats were usually meat-free dainties, although in its earliest form the mincemeat that we put in pies at Christmas did indeed consist of chopped meat, plus fruits and spices, and to this day it contains suet.) Fynes Moryson, secretary to Lord Mountjoy, the Lord Deputy of Ireland at the end of the Elizabethan era, whom we met earlier, wrote in 1606, ‘They [the Irish] feed most on whitemeats, and esteem for a great dainty sour curds, vulgarly called by them bonaclabba.’
Fish was never the supreme object of desire, although in those days the seas around Ireland were billowing with fish and the rivers leaping with them. Nor was meat, the food of warriors and lords. For the hungry peasant the dream was of cream and butter, milk and cheese.
Back in the twelfth century, a poor Irish scholar had created a testimony to the mouthwatering desirability of these white meats, the marvellous, rollicking poem, The Vision of Mac Con Glinne. Written by the eponymous Mac Con Glinne, it contains a wonderful account of the court of the King of Munster, a region famed for its dairy herds where the most luscious food in Ireland was to be found. Once he arrived, Mac Con Glinne relates:
The vision that appeared
Splendidly to me, I now
Relate to all;
Carved from lard, a coracle
In a port of New Milk Lake
On the world’s calm sea.
We climbed that handsome boat,
Over ocean’s heaving way
Set out bravely;
Our oars as we leaned
Raised the sea’s harvest
Of honeyed algae.
The fort we reached was beautiful –
Thick breastworks of custard
Above the lake
Fresh butter for a drawbridge
A moat of wheaten bread
A bacon palisade.
Stately and firmly placed
On strong foundations, it seemed
As I entered
Through a door of dried beef
A threshold of well-baked bread
Walls of cheese-curd.
Sleek pillars of ripe cheese
And fleshed bacon posts
In alternate rows;
Fine beams of yellow cream
Thin rafters of white spice
Held up the house.
Mac Con Glinne lived in a world of insecurity. Ireland, with its hundreds of miles of coast, could not prevent marauders from landing, plundering and making their escape. The south and east coasts were the hardest hit, but the pirates could also travel inland, following rivers and beating into the hinterland. The centres of calm, industry and learning that were the early monastic sites were usually hidden away in lonely spots and the monks had learned by hard experience to develop systems of self-defence against raiders.
The brothers usually kept bees (as much for the wax candles needed for church as for the honey) and some monasteries had fish ponds. Orchards had been planted and kitchen gardens established. At the heart of the farming activity were the dairy cattle, and the monks were skilled breeders, improving the stock generation by generation. A monastic site represented rich pickings for the marauders and the round towers that are found all over the land, some still in a fine state of repair even after the passage of a thousand years, bear witness to the need for defence. Faced with attack, the monks often concealed a few cows and could begin again to breed cattle for milk, meat and leather.
During the first millennium AD and beyond, people believed that a satisfactory yield of milk from one’s animals could only be achieved when there was right governance in the land. A good king or ruler, they felt, ensured abundant yields in his territory, so the lord was encircled with duties and rituals he must perform to maintain fruitfulness on the land. Equally, it was acknowledged that injustice provoked ‘dryness in milking’.
From the earliest times, the Irish were skilled stockmen and a great part of their livelihood depended on cattle, sheep and pigs, but very few actually owned animals in feudal times. A system called clientship operated, in which a lord handed over to the client a fief or favour, in return for which the client was bound to make certain precisely defined renders to the lord. A common practice saw the client bound to give one-third of the amount of the fief each year in the first three years: thus if the free client had received three cows in fief, the lord, by the end of the third year, would have received a total render of three cows. If the relationship was maintained for a further three years, the yearly render was then paid in the produce of the cattle – milk and calves – again up to one-third the value of the cattle; and if the relationship was maintained for yet a seventh year, this was free of render. The client never became free of his debt, and although these are the principal renders, there was an obligation to pay subordinate renders, such as flitches of bacon, sacks of malt and wheat, and supplies of pork and butter. Nevertheless, even though the odds were all stacked in favour of the lord, it was a cold world outside his protection, and so men had no choice but to take part in the system.
Without livestock, it was difficult to have any standing in rural society, for cattle were of pre-eminent importance. Land was measured in the number of cows that could graze on it. Legal compensations were measured in terms of cattle. A cow was money on four legs.
Cattle were generally pastured on the rougher land (the better being reserved for crops) and herded by youths, whose duties were to prevent calves from suckling and to protect the animals from harm. Danger might come in the form of a wolf or a savage dog, but also in human form, for cattle-raiding was a recognised form of warfare and also a form of sport for young nobles.
The buaile or booley was a designated place where cattle were taken in good weather, with a rude cabin for the cattleherd to sleep in. It was usually up in the rough lands or mountains away from the home farm, and was always in danger of being raided in wartime.
Eventually, the beasts were brought down when the weather worsened, but only a limited amount of winter fodder was available. Significantly, no words exist in Old Irish for hay or for the scythe. Giraldus Cambrensis writes of Ireland that ‘the grass is green in the fields in winter, just the same as in summer. Consequently, the meadows are not cut for fodder, nor do they ever build stalls for the beasts.’ If this is true (and much of what Giraldus writes is heavily salted from his imagination) it was not a great strategy, as a long cold winter usually led to loss of cattle, resulting in want, famine and disease. Eventually, farmers began to bring their animals inside during harsh weather. The so-called ‘strong farmer’, one with many head of cattle, put up shelters. The family that had one cow brought her into their own shack. Later, it became normal for animals to come into part of the house. The warm breath of the animals brought welcome heat to the draughty, ill-lit rooms where a family huddled in the depths of winter, plus the farmer knew his animals were safe from rustlers or from attack by famished predators. Nonetheless, it was a practice that visitors, particularly the English, viewed with horror and it confirmed a prejudice that the native Irish were little more themselves than the animals with which, at times, they shared living space.
In the very earliest times, cows were kept more for milk than for meat. When you are poor, you need to have a source of food that is not easily exhausted. The notion of slaughtering the most precious resource on the farm for the sake of a few meals never even arose. In India, where the cow provides milk and also, through her dried cowpats, a vital source of fuel, the Hindu religion declares her sacred, thus safeguarding the provider of food on a daily basis.
Only a rich man could afford to eat meat regularly. For the mass of the people in Ireland, beef was almost unknown. On occasion they might cull an old cow whose milk yield was becoming scanty, plus they might butcher the odd animal that was killed or maimed by accident; in these cases, the meat was shared among many. But the flesh with which the generality had the greatest acquaintance was that of the pig, and that none too often.
Evidence that cattle were kept more for their milk than their meat is provided by an analysis of Iron Age bones found at Dun Ailinne, Co Kildare. It was concluded that cattle were kept in ancient Ireland primarily for dairying rather than for meat, because the bones of the animals fell into two main groups – bones from young animals of six months or less (more than two-thirds) and the rest elderly adult animals, most of them female. This would make sense if unwanted male calves and elderly cows running short of milk were being slaughtered.
The lush pastureland of Ireland is particularly good for milk production. Even the stony Burren of County Clare has good grass growing within the grykes between the clints – that is, in the cracks or crevices that open out between the blocks of limestone paving. This is something that Edmund Ludlow, one of Cromwell’s generals, noted, when he writes of the Burren, ‘of which it is said that it is a country where there is not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him, which last is so scarce that the inhabitants steal it from each other, and yet their cattle are very fat, for the grass growing in the tufts of earth of two or three feet square that lie between the rocks which are of limestone, is very sweet and nourishing.’
An old Irish saying goes thus: As a caenn a bhlitear an bhó. This translates as: ‘The cow is milked from her head.’ In other words, what she eats dictates the amount of milk she gives. Cows fattened in the rich pastureland of the south-west were particularly sought after. A good dairy farmer will always try to get the most from his cows, whatever his top priority: high yields or easy calving or rich yields. Today, most Irish farmers with milk quotas have switched to the high-yielding Friesian cow, but these are not native. If we think of the beasts herded by early Irish farmers, they might well resemble the little, hardy, black Kerry cows of today. A cow had to be hardy because she mostly had to survive outdoors.
The most famous cow in the early literature of Ireland belonged to St Ciaran of Clonmacnoise, his Dun Cow. In the earliest Life of the saint, written down around 1100, we read that Ciaran as a young boy left home to study under St Finian. Before he set off on his journey, he asked his parents for a cow to provide him with milk while at school, but they demurred. Nothing daunted, Ciaran blessed the prize cow of the herd while he was crossing his father’s meadow, whereupon the cow followed him. His parents, taking this as a supernatural sign, gave him the cow. The cow and also its calf followed Ciaran to Clonard, where he marked out a grazing ground with his staff between cow and calf. Beyond this mark, the calf could not go, though the cow could lick him across the divide.
Ciaran’s dun cow ‘supplied an incredible amount of milk each day, sufficient to divide amongst a multitude and to feed every pupil at the school … ’ Even after it died, the cow was regarded as miraculous and its hide was preserved, the story going that any disciple of St Ciaran who died on the skin would possess eternal life.
Another saint was considered to be the best dairywoman in Ireland – Saint Brigid. One of the plagues of medieval Europe was leprosy, and milk was thought to assuage its symptoms. The tale is told of two lepers who came to St Brigid looking for charity. She had only one cow to give them, bidding the two of them to share it. The one praised her bounty, but the second made off with the cow, driving it across a section of the River Liffey that had dried up. When he was halfway across, the waters of the river rose up and drowned both man and cow. Brigid then acquired another cow, which she gave to the grateful leper, who went on his way, blessing her. Perhaps it was rather harsh on the innocent first cow, but the story is told approvingly of her sense of justice as well as generosity.
To get a notion of the scale of Irish dairy farming we could turn to a report sent in 1562 to Queen Elizabeth. She was told that Shane O’Neill the Proud had made off with 10,000 head of cattle from the territory of the O’Donnells, in other words, Donegal. Eleven years later, in 1573, Turlough O’Neill lifted 30,000 head from his kinsman, the Baron of Dungannon. And another eleven years later still, the forces of the Crown, under Lord President Norrys, joined in the sport by confiscating 40,000 from Sorley Mac Donnell. An estimate made at the time judged that Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, had nearly half a million cattle at his disposal, including 120,000 milking cows. These figures are probably exaggerated – one side boasting, the other side inflating the numbers lost to increase the grievance. And for those loyal to the Virgin Queen, it was important to convey the magnitude of the feat they had pulled off and the subsequent riches that would accrue to the Crown. Even allowing for the figures being inflated, the numbers are vast.
But a much more important political strategy lay behind the English interest in how these white meats dominated the Irish diet. By fighting Irish men, the generals could win battles, but if they attacked the very foodstuff of the rebels (as they saw them) they could win the war. In Munster in 1580 ‘great preys of cattle were taken from the Irish and so has brought them to the verge of famine’. In Ulster in 1600, the Lord Deputy ‘forced all the cows from the plains into the woods so that for the want of grass they would starve and O’Neill’s people would starve for the want of milk’.
Having broken up and scattered the great herds, the English decided to change the feckless Irish ways. They were revolted at the thought of the Irish doing little more than ‘follow a few cows grazing … driving their cattle continually with them and feeding only on their milk and white meats’. If only they could force the lazy Irish to give up their lackadaisical ways and instil in them the need for hard work, they would have achieved their goal. They are even explicit as to the motive behind this: ‘ … if they (the Irish) were exhausted by working in the fields and gardens, they would have less energy for raiding’.
As we shall see in the chapter on the Great Famine, the strategy of quelling the rebellious Irish by letting them feel the bite of hunger never died out. (As my friend Mary Dermody remarked to me, ‘Aren’t we still using hunger as a political weapon in the world?’)
In The Farm by Lough Gur, Mary Carbery tells a touching story of an innocent life lived in the second half of the nineteenth century in Co Limerick. Here a Mrs Fogarty tells of her mother’s love of cows.
My mother became interested in Kerrys through Belinda, the black Dexter, who continued to provide her rich, creamy milk. Dexters are like Kerry cows, but their horns curve upwards. Kerrys are just as black, but their horns turn down and they are a bit smaller. They have a long history and descend directly from the herds kept by Celtic farmers.
In due course the pretty bad-tempered cattle with their proud Celtic pedigree went to Laragh to form a much loved herd of little animals that had the grace and gaiety of fallow deer. Their milk, too creamy for my liking, was splashed into the thinner stuff provided by lesser cows to beef it up, so to speak.
Until not long ago, almost everyone living in the country owned a cow and milked it. It was taken for granted you had a cow, and the notion of buying milk was odd. Jimmy Murray, born in 1917, lived over the shop and pub in Knockcroghery, Co Roscommon, that his father ran before him. ‘I often said that if my father came back here and looked at that shop he’d think we’d all gone crazy … Even people today who have cows of their own buy the milk, the pasteurised. Especially with a young family. The doctors more or less frightened the people to get pasteurised milk for the youngsters, I think, instead of straight from the cow.’
One family that didn’t hesitate to drink the milk direct from the cow was the Slattery family who lived near Woodford. One of the daughters, Bernie, a second cousin of mine, explained to me, ‘We used to have shorthorns and Herefords. You’d get a bucket out of them, morning and evening. The muscles in your hand! I don’t know if I could do it now, but then we were doing it every day and you’d be used to it. But at the beginning, your hand would be as sore!’
Irish farmers always kept sheep and goats and as late