What Food Culture in Ireland?

Food is a pressing issue right now in a way it hasn’t been before, and some of my food habits are standing me in good stead. I am used to planning a week’s worth of meals and shopping once a week on that basis. I am confident in improvising with leftovers. Knowledge about buying, growing, preparing, cooking and sharing food has been handed down to me by my mother and one grandmother, and added to in various ways during my 41 years living on the island of Ireland, but I don’t think I am drawing on anything that could be termed a collective heritage. I hesitate to claim connection to a national food culture because ‘national’ cultures on this island tend to exclude at least some of the people all of the time, and because I wonder whether Ireland has a national food culture at all.

Growing up, my sisters and I benefited from our mother’s adventurous approach to cooking, inflected by her family’s wealth and foreign travels. This was not the norm in the 1980s, even in urban and middle-class communities. I remember asking a friend to stay for dinner when we were both nine or so. She asked what we would eat and I told her spaghetti bolognese. She had never heard of it. When I ate at her house, we were invariably served slices of meat, boiled potatoes and two other vegetables, also boiled.

When I married, my husband and I moved from Belfast to rural County Leitrim, in the Republic of Ireland, and he began a course in organic horticulture. Growing food became a preoccupation. We borrowed a patch of land and gardened in it, providing ourselves with lettuce, herbs, carrots, peas, parsnips, broccoli, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, peppers, onions and garlic. We gathered gorse blossom in the fields and wild raspberries from the hedgerows and brewed delicately flavoured wines. I began making rye sourdough and yogurt and we bought meat from a local butcher who had raised the cattle, too.

Talking to older neighbours, we learned that 50 years ago, growing food here had meant a cow, perhaps a pig or two, turkeys and hens, cabbages, turnips and potatoes. In County Down, where I grew up, cereals and brassicas could be seen in some fields, but in Leitrim rushes and sheep dominated. A Basque acquaintance moved to Belfast and when we picked her up from the airport in Antrim and drove her south to the city she could not understand why the rural landscape was empty of food. We went with a group of people studying and working with my husband to Terra Madre, the slow food festival, in Turin, and were a little in awe of the fruit and vegetable wealth of Italy. Having learned that it is possible to grow many things even in the poor soils and heavy rainfall of the west – with good compost – I began to think about why we have had none of this wealth here. The most obvious factor seemed to me our history of dispossession, colonisation, precarious tenant farming, exporting most of what we produced, poverty, famine and political and cultural dependence on Britain.

When we paid our monthly visit to our Leitrim landlords to give them the rent, we usually arrived in the aftermath of their dinner, always signalled by a pile of potato skins and bacon rinds among the plates and cutlery on the table. Seeking out fresh fish to eat along the coast was a challenge. We went to Rathlin Island off the north-east coast and got frozen bread-crumbed cod. In Donegal’s Tory Island one October, we lived off the fried breakfasts at our B&B and Pringles and sliced white pan loaf for a day or two, in the absence of other options. On a voyage around Ireland in an Irish-crewed currach, alongside traditional boats from the Basque country and Brittany, we got all our food from each port’s nearest Supervalu while the Basques and Bretons based their meals on the fish and shellfish they caught and gathered as they went. Talking to a friend who was working on a seaweed recipe book, we discussed Ireland’s heritage foods, and only came up with soda and potato breads. These aren’t even counted as breads in the encyclopaedic Modernist Bread. When I spent a year studying in England, in 2002, breads from India, Spain, Italy, France, Germany and Poland were available in my local supermarket, but none from Ireland.

In the last 15 years, I have spent a lot of time talking to people about their lives and experiences and opinions across Northern Ireland and in the border counties of the Irish Republic. Food has almost never been a topic of conversation. It seems that for the most part, food is seen pragmatically. If food has a place in a ‘national’ culture (in itself a doubtful concept) it is, perhaps, the stereotypical potato or soda farl, too ordinary to be of much interest. I recall a Leitrim neighbour comparing Irish people in the 21^st century to ‘the calf that got the sweet cream’. He explained that when the family’s milk was sent to the creamery to sell, the cow’s calf got what was left after the first milking. If ever a calf got to drink the creamy milk, it didn’t know when to stop. He was talking about dysfunction in new-found affluence, but I think it significant that his image was based on food-based deprivation. I wonder whether I am right in diagnosing an island-wide dislocation from food, and if so, whether it is a legacy of our troubled history.

The first, and so far the only time that food became the explicit subject, was during research into eel fishing on Lough Neagh. Sited in the middle of Northern Ireland, this is the biggest lake in Britain and Ireland, but little known beyond its shores, even within our tiny six counties. Eel has been fished there probably since people first arrived, and methods and equipment have changed only a little and only in recent decades. However, almost all the eel caught in Lough Neagh is exported to London, the Netherlands and Germany. There is, as yet, little or no domestic market.

Talking with fishing families, we discovered that they were all fans of eating eel, and had been for generations. But people living at a distance of even a few miles from the lough-shore never ate eel. Indeed, most found the idea repellent. We heard that eating fish was still tainted with shame from the time of the Great Famine, when those who lost all other means of feeding themselves scavenged from rivers, loughs and the seashore. We heard that the only local customers for Lough Neagh eel had been Japanese and Dutch restaurateurs in Belfast and Bangor. Towards the end of our research, we spent a few hours with eel fishers Gary and Anne-Marie McErlain on their boat, embarking from Gary’s homeplace of Traad, on the north-western shore. Gary took two of the eels he and Anne-Marie netted that evening, killed, gutted and skinned them with a sharp knife, cut them into pieces and fried them in butter in a pan on a tiny gas stove there on the boat. We ate the eel with what we call in the North wheaten bread, and in the South brown bread, spread with more butter.

From my days in County Leitrim, I have a recipe for wheaten, or brown, bread, called after the woman who gave me it. I am imagining how good it would be paired with freshly caught and fried eel. For those of us who have been used to getting all the food we want when we want it, food is a little more scarce and possibly more emotionally significant. This bread recipe comes to mind again now because it represents self-sufficiency in a food staple and is so easy to make. Once the ingredients are to hand, measuring and mixing are the only skills needed. Anyone is capable of it, and these breads don’t even need ovens. Traditionally cooked as farls (flattish cakes) over a fire on a griddle, they can be made in a pan on a hob. The basic wheaten bread is cheap and simple, a legacy of hand-to-mouth living. The version below has been enriched in a way that reflects new-old forms of food production developing in our new-old Ireland.

1 lb wholemeal flour
½ lb white flour
2 teaspoons bread soda
2 handfuls fine porridge oats
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons rapeseed oil
2 pints buttermilk
2 tablespoons molasses
Pumpkin, sunflower, hemp and poppy seeds to taste

1. Heat the oven to 160°C.

2. Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl.

3. Add the wet ingredients and stir together thoroughly.

4. Pour into a 3-lb loaf tin.

5. Bake for an hour-and-a-half or so.

6. Turn out of the tin to cool.

7. Alternatively, dollop the batter in heaped serving-spoonfuls on to a hot non-stick frying pan and cook (turning) until both sides are browned and a skewer poked in comes out clean.

Bryonie Reid is a writer and artist exploring ideas of belonging and place on the island of Ireland. She works with her sisters as quarto collective in the fields of culture, heritage and the arts.