In Scandinavia, which is nearly as potato-heavy as Ireland, turnips were a primary staple crop before the potato came around, so much so that in much of the world the rutabaga, a large version of the turnip, is known as a "swede". I would be surprised if this was not the case in pre-1600s Ireland as well.
FWIW, in nearby Scotland "neeps and tatties" (turnips & potatoes) is still the canonical accompaniment to haggis.
> the rutabaga, a large version of the turnip, is known as a "swede".
And "rutabaga" is from "rotabagge", the dialectal word for turnip in the region of Småland, from where the majority of Swedish immigrants to North America came (over 1 million Swedes emigrated to North America in the second half of the 19th century).
Germany chiming in ... We have something that is called "Rote Beete" (eng: beet root) which sounds similar to "rotabagge" (eng: rutabaga), but apparently is a different plant.
It sounds alike but is different. The vegetable has the same name in Swedish, rödbeta (literally red beet, which makes sense since it's deeply red).
Rotabagge is something like "root bug", but where the bagge/bug part is more like an old/dialectal word for "lump", I think.
Edit: "bagge" is likely to have the same root (no pun intended) as bag. After looking up a few of these different roots on wiktionary, it could be that the have common roots but have just been mashes up through the millenia. The etymology seems unclear,and they have similar enough gibberish names in lots of different languages (beterraba, beterraga, etc).
It is actually somewhat suitable. Not only because "små" means small in swedish.
But also because the 1800s version of the ball-pit consisted of lots of round pebbles, put there particularly in Småland by some evil ice-sheet-wielding mastermind, that the kids played with by carrying them from the barren Smålandish fields.
Actually, it's kind of the other way around: IKEA, and Ingvar Kamprad, its founder, are from Småland. He started selling matches as a young boy (connecting to another Swedish business empire of yore, Swedish Match and its founder Ivar Kreuger).
IKEA is an acronym: Ingvar Kamprad, Elmtaryd, Agunnaryd. Elmtaryd was the Kamprad family farm and Agunnaryd is the nearby village.
My father-in-law is from the very same area in Småland as Kamprad, and they were born the same year.
In Germany some less digestible Inulin rich roots were also commonly used before the potatoe became ubiquitous like the Jerusalem Artichoke (which also was imported like potatoes). Now they are mostly used to produce alcohol. Scorzonera are still quite popular.
Rather interesting, I remember reading that humans could generally survive off a diet of only milk and potatoes years ago. Of course sarcastically I immediately thought 'mashed potatoes are a superfood then.'
I find it amazing that Ireland would be eating a plant from the west coast of an isolated mountainous region of South America less than 100 years after Europeans went there. Even things like oranges and bananas were rare in the late 1800s early 1900s in the US and Canada.
It's amazing how much of food from the Americas mostly central and southern is normal everyday food. What would we all be eating if the Americas went undiscovered until recently?
Ireland specifically switched to potatoes as a part of the tenant farming system the British instituted on the Island and its desire throughout Europe combined with the necessity to grow enough food to feed themselves off the product.
Pre-Colombian exchanges, Ireland mostly ate oats/grains, a small variety of veggies and fruits, dairy goods (cheese and milk), meats (cattle and sheep) and a lot of fish. You can still see a bit of this variety in certain areas like Howth in Dublin and the less touched western towns.
Yep, the potato was favoured for the ability to grow enough food to feed your family on the shitty scraps of ground your absentee landlords "allowed" you to keep.
In a similar vein, the potato revolutionised Māori inter-tribal warfare when introduced to Aotearoa New Zealand (possibly more so than the musket), as you could grow far more calories from the same soil with potatoes than the traditional kūmara/sweet potato - and they kept far better than kūmara while on the move.
This allowed for longer campaigning against opposing tribes, which led to widespread mass migrations to escape enemy tribes - hence why the area now occupied by Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau, our largest city, was mostly depopulated when Europeans started settling it.
And of course, those mass migrations led to more conflicts.
Yeah, as a rule of thumb potato and rice can feed twice as many people compared to wheat or other crops. Europe had neither so the potato was an instant hit since the alternative was to starve.
My ancestors left Ireland only to arrive in Canada to the same system of absentee landlords i.e. the British who took nearly everything from tenants, the farmers.
Well, a staple food of the native people of New Zealand was a sweet potato originating from South America, they brought it with them in the 13th century when settling NZ from 'Hawaiki', their ancestral homeland that is thought to be either the Cook or Society Islands.
This comes up surprisingly often on HN, but there isn't really anything surprising about it. The whole reason Europeans went to the Americas was to bring back things to be sold in European markets. They might have been a bit disappointed when potatoes turned out to be so easy to grow in European climates that there was no money to be made by importing them, though.
My father in law born in Norway in 1950s can remember getting excited because the store had these bananas he'd heard about. He ate his first one with the skin and didn't think they were so great.
British children in the 1940s were familiar enough with bananas that they missed them during WW2 [1]. Import was banned during the war because the refrigerated ships were needed elsewhere (and the voyage was risky), but resumed in the early 1950s (?). They were widely imported from the 1880s up until WW2 [2], but I'm not sure how often the typical person would eat one.
(And I don't know how much of this British Empire trade would have spread to Ireland.)
Carbonara, though. Pasta, eggs, bacon, cheese and pepper. Pigs, cows and wheat came with the first farmers, some 6k years ago. Chicken around 2k years ago, but they could have used other eggs. Pepper much later, silk road trade. I imagine they could have had something like carbonara a long time ago.
All good thoughts. I think Italy has the soil and weather for goood tomatoes though, so it took off. That said, I think most sauces in Italy are not tomato based. Simple things like Oil and salt is pretty common on pasta (and VERY tasty if u ask me). But to the point, yeah, bread, pasta, and olive oil…
> There was drinking milk, and buttermilk, and fresh curds, and old curds, and something called "real curds," and whey mixed with water to make a refreshing sour drink
This sounds a lot like Lithuania today. If you go into most supermarkets the milk products section is usually bigger than the produce section.
They also like potatoes. Usually served with milk products...
Wow, expected to see those other Northern European countries up at the top of the lactose tolerance list, but was surprised to see Niger. Googling brought up some interesting data on how lactase persistence was selected for in Africa.
The lists are based on intolerance not tolerance, so the top list is inverted. This depicts the percentage of each population that is lactose intolerant, so Denmark and Ireland are among the top countries in the world for lactose tolerance:
The source for that page has a much better layout, and shows Finland at 12th. There seems to be a separate lactose intolerance that also affects people starting when they are infants and it's most common in Finland.
> Rowan fruit contains sorbic acid, and when raw also contains parasorbic acid (about 0.4%-0.7% in the European rowan[15]), which causes indigestion and can lead to kidney damage, but heat treatment (cooking, heat-drying etc.) and, to a lesser extent, freezing, renders it nontoxic by changing it to the benign sorbic acid. They are also usually too astringent to be palatable when raw.
Beans have to be carefully processed? I soak them in a half-gallon Ball jar for at least a day, but that's pretty much it. I usually swap the water out a few times because I procrastinate pretty badly when it comes to cooking and the water gets murky after half a day or so. If I haven't cooked them by the next morning I toss them in the fridge so that they don't start smelling sour.
What have I been neglecting to do, and when should I expect it to kill me?
>Poisoning can be induced from as few as five raw beans, and symptoms occur within three hours, beginning with nausea, then vomiting, which can be severe and sustained (profuse), followed by diarrhea.
Another issue might be that the water used for soaking, will froth up, and start to smell bad. This happens if it is let standing for longer than 12 hours usually.
Why is everyone constantly tossing (or banging etc) things when they're cooking? I'm usually very careful with my cooking ingredients and handle them delicately and with calm, measured motions. I'm especially careful when I'm chopping up things with a small cleaver or a very big knife, say, or when I'm frying things. I would never dare "bang" something in the oven (as I've seen a few recipes instruct).
Actually the lacto-fermentation process that you're starting to do to the beans is great for getting rid of the phytic acid and other "anti-nutrients". Just rinse them and add clean water before cooking them. Tossing in a teaspoon of baking soda will off set any acid produced from the process which might cause the beans to remain too firm while cooking.
Yes, they are poisonous raw. Not a real problem because they are swallowed will go out again entire but you can't made bread from beans without a lot of troubles
Other fruits are like that. In North America, the native persimmon is highly astringent and inedible until after the first frost and then it becomes very sweet.
The population of Ireland was actually greater in 1840 than it is today [0]. It's hard to overstate just what a catastrophic event the potato famine was.
Also: It was butter, the Japanese thought, which made Europeans so peculiarly rank: bata-kusai they called them (using the English word for the foul substance): “butter-stinkers." The terms Bata-kusai, “stinking of butter,” is still a derogatory term for things obnoxiously Western.
> As traditional as it seems, the Irish Soda Bread that you might be trundling out this weekend wasn't invented until 19th century, since baking soda wasn't invented until the 1850s.
Interesting fact: prior to the development of baking soda, ammonium (specifically, ammonium carbonate) was a commonly used leavening agent for cookies and crackers. It was obtained by distilling ground-up deer antlers, giving it the traditional name "salt of hartshorn".
I'm Irish, there still exists a lot of pride for potatoes here. I have a small allotment here as part of a communal garden and each spring there is probably more excitement about the potatoes crops than any other. People want to know what types you are planting, how early to put them down, tips for managing damage from a late frost etc. Not to mention it really is a productive crop and really can last all winter when stored correctly and you can be self sufficient for "spuds" from a relatively small sized plot.
Tayto was the first/one of to infuse the flavour into the crisp (US:chip). Before that there were little salt packets that you sprinkled. The guy who invented the process was nicknamed "Spud" Murphy.
I read in the book 1493 that the Irish were basically the healthiest Europeans post-potato and pre-famine because potatoes+milk is as nutritionally complete a diet as you could find.
If we limit the scope to macronutriens it is indeed correct.
If you could choose only one food to eat, potatoes would be a wise choice. Every other single food will cause you to become deficient much more quickly.
No, ruminant meat such as beef or steak or even fatty fish such as salmon is a far more complete source of nutrition. Pre-agricultural humans lived almost exclusively on meat for hundreds of thousands of years. Potatoes lack certain essential nutrients meat does not, such as Vitamin D, Vitamin K, heme iron, zinc, omega 3s, etc.
You seem to be ignoring the “gatherer” half of “hunter-gatherer”. I’ve seen no widespread acceptance that pre-agricultural people ate only meat. They would have eaten a large number of plants, nuts, roots, fruits as well as insects and anything else they could find. You can find this in coprolites preserved in habitable caves.
No, the name hunter-gatherer does not imply that 50% of the calories were obtained from plants.
I linked to an article explaining that point, which includes the source and evidence.
Especially during the deep glacial periods of the ice age, which was most of the last 1 million years, humans sustained themselves almost entirely on meat.
Most hominids during most of this period lived outside Northern Eurasia and would have had ample motivation and opportunity to eat plant foods. If you were talking about Neanderthals you would have a point.
Yeah, when we talk of traditional societies eating meat, it wasn't just ribeye and potatoes. Liver, bone marrow, brains -- all of that was consumed and these contain a lot of nutrition that you don't replicate with a steady diet of filet mignon. It's a shame how Americans no longer eat liver.
"They did eat meat, of course, though the reliance on milk meant that beef was a rarity"
I find that hard to believe. Cows need to be pregnant to milk. Roughly half of their calves would be male. Which were primarily valuable as meat. Further, cows produce more milk than their calves require, which means calves could be matured.
Beef was probably proportionally as prevalent as diary.
You can only mature the calves if you can spare the milk, and you get a lot more calories from just drinking the milk.
A cow produces roughly 40 times more calories worth of milk over its lifetime than you get from the beef from one animal. There's no way it would be similarly prevalent unless they were raising herds specifically for beef.
> You can only mature the calves if you can spare the milk, and you get a lot more calories from just drinking the milk.
Perhaps in the short term. But after 10 weeks calves exclusively eat grass. And after a year on grass the riginal 10 week dairy calorie investment is dwarfed by the beef fat calories produced.
I think it comes down to land costs and labour costs. Most Irish land is only suitable for livestock. Rough grassland is cheap. And hand milking is labor intensive. The Dexter cattle breed originated in Ireland, is suitable for both dairy and beef, and is tough enough for harsh conditions. Scaling up on beef male cattle makes sense if the grassland is available.
Male cattle were castrated and used as draught animals ("oxen") in many European societies.
Either way, dairy cattle and draught cattle would get butchered and eaten at end of useful life, unless they died of disease. And there was also plenty of cattle raised for food in the areas that had the land for it.
Rich people ate the beef. Usually the normal folks would eat less desired cuts.
Overall, ranching and dairy are almost always two different businesses with different factors.
Chicken and eggs are similar. Traditionally, young chicken was rare as the economics of a traditional farm were such that eating chickens were akin to killing the golden goose. Likewise, keeping beef cattle around consumes a lot of grass that could have made butter.
Another factor to consider that as the British took over, their inheritance laws took over, so farm plots would get divided over time. Large herds became increasingly difficult.
That would give you the rare meat. No one claims they were vegetarians.
But, if they killed and eate 0.5 young males per cow per year, that would make the meat available once per year per cow. They could dry it or make sausage or whatever, but that does not make it a lot.
The claim people take offense for is specifically about beef - not about pork.
But really, at least based on what my grandmother said, meat was luxury item once a week thing. Cooked in away that uses it to the max. They were relatively well off small farm family, they were not poor. The traditional food I read about when I read about historical lifestyles was also largely non-meat. (Not to be confused with vegetarian, like bacon etc was part of it)
The eat meat everyday thing we have going on was not a thing in the past. It requires huge amount of animals being raised and killed, meat to be stored in freezers and so on.
Is that true? I know nothing about the dairy industry, but human wet nurses aren't constantly pregnant so they can do their job, as I understand it production's just a gradual response to the 'request'.
It appears you may be right to some extent, but a bit of reading indicates dairy farmers to to have their cows birth a calf every one year to 400 days.
Older practices may vary, haven’t looked in to that.
Honest question, not meaning to be offensive or hurtful at all. I know how raw the wounds of the famine are etc.
How do historians objectively - provided there is one - view the British empire's involvement in Ireland over much of the last millennium? Was it particularly repressive vis-a-vis other medieval empires in their dominions/spheres of influence?
To help answer your first question, I would recommend reading Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. by K. W. Nicholls (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/471778201) and A New History of Ireland, Volume II and III (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/495293791 and http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/299242437 respectively). As for your second question, I am not an expert enough to answer because I tend to study the earlier period before the Norman invasion.
Not an exact answer, but I heartily endorse the /r/AskHistorians/ subreddit for these types of questions. It is moderated quite differently from the rest of Reddit, and questions like this are answered in-depth. There are several threads on the Irish Potato Famine that may answer a subset of your question.
It was colonialism, with all of the attributes associated with it. Irish were seen as a lesser people and various phases and the machinery of empire acted appropriately.
IMO it is a similar story to India in many ways. The Brits leveraged and undermined the existing power structure and extracted value at whatever cost deemed appropriate. Was there some “benefit”… at some level yes. Were there atrocities and disgusting levels of suffering without the consent of the governed? Yes.
There is a very interesting podcast on the Irish/Indian overlap. The Irish themselves are not spotless but there was some support. This duo does well researched stuff and helps a lot if you are interested in Brexit and NI.
https://www.theirishpassport.com/podcast/ireland-and-india-a...
TIL about "bog butter" and half a dozen other culinary terms that I've never heard of. Maybe for good reasons we don't make these food anymore? (banbidh, old curds, real curds, bainne clabair, sowens, flummery, etc)
A _lot_ of these things sound like various kinds of cottage cheese, yogurt and cultured butter. I would guess we _do_ make things they might recognize, just with modern standards of cleanliness.
Seems more like issues with production and markets. When my parents were growing up on a farm they made butter and sold it at market, but the creme freshe which was a byproduct of the whole process was considered to have no value and they cooked with it because it could not be sold. Now creme freshe is considered a luxury gourmet ingredient for fine cooking and commands a premium. Food fashions vary wildly.
I imagine the need for bog butter probably declined, in particular due to the advent of refrigerating things.
It turns out that burying things in the fairly cool, temperature-stable, low-oxygen ground is fairly decent at preserving things. Kimchi in Korea was traditionally produced in this manner.
I want to seen an article like this for every food culture that is now heavily associated with foods from the Americas. Italy without tomatoes? No chilis? No beans? No corn? Etc. No potatoes means no vodka for the Russians.
The Portuguese brought chillies to India from SA, before which they used black pepper for (obviously milder) heat.
That was a bit of a 'mind blown' moment for me when I saw it on Raja, Rasoi, aur apni Kahaaniyaan (kings, kitchens, and their stories^) - quite a nice food/history/culture programme, each episode being a different region in India.
(^to save someone pointing it out, it's actually 'king, kitchen, and his [or its] stories', I just thought that sounded more awkward, and confuses my description of it being a different region, sometimes king, food, culture etc. each episode.)
Gastropod had a great episode about potatoes that touched on this and a lot of the myths / great man of history stories about the introduction of the potato into Europe. Worth a listen if you’re into food, history, and related topics https://gastropod.com/this-spuds-for-you/
> In 1690, one British visitor to Ireland noted that the natives ate and drank milk "above twenty several sorts of ways and what is strangest for the most part love it best when sourest." He was referring to bainne clabair, which translates as "thick milk," and was probably somewhere between just straight-up old milk and sour cream.
Today, "bainne clabair" ("soured milk" according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clabber_(food)) is called clabber. It's basically a kind of very acidic yogurt made with mesophilic (room temperature) fermentation by the lactic acid bacteria that are naturally present in raw milk. You just leave a jar of raw milk out for the night and in the morning, you enjoy your clabber.
Or get food poisoning, if you're unlucky :P
Edit - you can also make clabber, more safely, with kefir and pasteurised milk. Kefir normally makes a kind of very runny yogurt but, depending on the milk, you can get a very firm yogurt instead. In my experience, non-homogenised milk of good quality (preferrably from grass-fed cows) and, interestingly, UHT milk, clabber well. UHT milk kind of makes more sense: it's already undergone the heat treatment necessary to make yogurt and all it's missing is the acid produced by lactic acid bacteria. Normally, this is done relatively quickly by thermophilic bacteria (Lactobacilus Bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus) at 45 degrees C, but a longer fermentation at room temperature with mesophilic strains can have the same effect. I, anyway, have made plenty of kefir-clabber this way, and also a few cheeses. If you collect the clabber and drain it in a cheesecloth, you can then form it and even age it. I've aged a couple of (tiny) wheels for up to four months and they were not bad, just a bit strong.
Fun Irish fact: pubs in Ireland are closed on St Patrick's Day.
There's also a variety of delicious, regional potato based products that, until very recently, you won't have found anywhere else but in Ireland. The way boxty is made for instance, is crazy to me.
You may be surprised to learn that all the pubs in Ireland used to be closed on St. Patrick's Day, which is now by and large considered a drinking holiday.
Up until the 1970s, Irish law prohibited pubs opening on March 17 as a mark of respect for this religious day. It was feared that leaving the pubs open would be too tempting for some during Lent and would lead to a disrespectful amount of drunkenness on this most solemn day.
Your fun fact is hilarious from an American perspective. It’s the biggest day for bars and pubs in the US and it’s not close.
It’s funny how Irish culture in America seems so different from its motherland counterpart. Same or more so for Italian. No judgements either way. Just interesting how diaspora cultures evolve
Only a guess but this would likely have been because St. Patrick’s Day is a “holy day”. People attend church (lots still do although in the last couple of decades it’s declined massively) and closing pubs would be in line with how some other “holy days” are treated. An example of this is Easter in Northern Ireland. There are still some relatively strict licensing laws over the Easter weekend (although these are about to modernise) with pubs shit for large parts of it.
> Your fun fact is hilarious from an American perspective. It’s the biggest day for bars and pubs in the US and it’s not close.
Must be a regional thing. Its not like that where I live, and a quick search suggests both New Years Eve and Thanksgiving Eve are busier days (which matches my experience).
This whole thing is nonsense - pubs aren’t closed. And most people aren’t anywhere near a race track on St. Patricks’s Day. Unless they’re in Cheltenham, which is in a different country.
This reminds me of that thing where people read the newspaper & say "wow, I can't believe they got $MY_AREA_OF_EXPERTISE so wrong" but then turn the page & take in other stories as if they were gospel truth.
Next time someone tells me a fun fact about another country I shall remember the 'closed pubs' of Ireland on Paddy's Day!
An historical fact is just a fact. There is not point in being outraged by the truth that Irish (as many other places) eat lots of some particular food.
FWIW, in nearby Scotland "neeps and tatties" (turnips & potatoes) is still the canonical accompaniment to haggis.