Collecting Ireland’s Food Memories as a Resource for Food Tourism

An inventory by Teagasc’s National Food Centre, prepared for the Euroterroirs project in 1997, is a rare, if not the only, example of an attempt to recognise, document, and catalogue Irish traditional food and beverages. Even at that, given the brief provided by Euroterroirs, the inventory was limited to 100 local traditional products. But we know from Lucas (1960) that Irish food presents a remarkable continuity of traditions from the time of the earliest documentary evidence to the present. Food and beverages are such an integral part of Ireland’s cultural fabric that the threads, traces, and fragments are not only found in predictable sources like cookbooks, but also elsewhere. Examples include literature (prose, drama, and poetry), disparate fields of study (etymology, botany, history), and primary sources such as newspapers. This paper describes an attempt to collect some of Ireland’s food memories, traces, and fragments which, in turn, reveal where these residues might lie. Currently this collection has approximately 1,000 Irish food and beverages items collected from 350 different sources, and include the following: Bishop, Chinchard, Dining Clubs, Edwards’ Desiccated Soup, Egglers, Ether Drinking, Foosies, Gloria, Heather, Lilt, Loop Liner, Mountain Dew Girls, Ól, People’s Refreshment Rooms, Rasher, Staggering Bob, War Bread. The paper will use a selection of these items to demonstrate not only the diversity and variety of the items themselves, but also the variety of sources where these traces and fragments reside in plain sight.