From oyster middens and boiling pits to buttermilk, the potato and the creamery: 14 moments in the story of what Ireland ate, and 9 traditional dishes, each taken from the articles linked under it.
Timeline
8000–4000 BC· Mesolithic Shellfish, hazelnuts and boar. Ireland's first people were hunter-gatherers who mostly settled near water. Shell middens, mostly oyster and limpet, show shellfish mattered; hazelnuts turn up in large amounts, and wild boar is the staple meat in bone assemblages. Honeybees were probably not yet present.
4000–2500 BC· Neolithic Farming and dairying arrive. Cereals (especially emmer wheat, with barley), cattle, pigs, sheep and goats came in with farming, and eating of marine foods fell sharply. Dairying is called 'very influential'. Oats found at sites of this date appear to have been wild, not yet cultivated.
Bronze Age· Prehistoric The fulachtaí fia. Crescent-shaped mounds of burnt stone, fulachtaí fia, came to prominence in the Bronze Age. Ireland has more of these sites than anywhere in Europe. The usual reading is that stones were heated and dropped into water-filled troughs to boil meat, often at large gatherings.
7th–8th centuries· Early Christian Food written into the law. Much of what is known about early Irish food comes from law texts and poetry written down from the 7th and 8th centuries. They set out which foods each grade of society was entitled to as a guest: the lowest free commoner could expect barley, oats and dairy, the next grade baked bread as well, while wheat and rye were for the upper ranks. Refusing a pregnant woman any food she craved was punishable. The Bechbretha, the 'bee judgements' of the mid-600s, treat a bee swarm as capable of trespass.
12th century· Anglo-Norman Rabbits, pheasants and pulses. The Normans brought rabbits, fallow deer and pheasants, possibly pike, and possibly cider-making. Peas, beans and lentils, grown since early medieval times, became common with them, partly through crop rotation that helped wheat.
second half of the 16th century· Tudor The potato reaches Ireland. Irish cuisine says the potato came to Ireland in the second half of the 16th century, first as a garden crop. History of the potato dates its arrival in the British Isles to between 1588 and 1593, and reports that Basque fishermen carrying potatoes as ships' stores brought it to western Ireland, where they landed to dry cod. Tradition credits Sir Walter Raleigh with planting the first potatoes at Myrtle Grove, his house at Youghal, soon after 1586; the Great Famine article gives this only as what he is 'often credited' with, and it is not proven.
18th century· Georgian The potato becomes the food of the poor. After the Tudor conquest much land went to grain and beef for market, and potatoes were widely adopted in the 18th century as the crop the labouring majority could afford. An acre of potatoes and one cow's milk could feed a family, monotonously but adequately. The spread was down to landless labourers renting tiny plots. Much of the potato crop was grown in lazy beds, spade-dug ridges up to about 2.5 metres wide; there is archaeological evidence that Irish farmers used the method long before the potato.
31 December 1759· Georgian Arthur Guinness takes St James's Gate. Arthur Guinness, who had started brewing ales in Leixlip, signed a 9,000-year lease at £45 a year for an unused brewery at St James's Gate, Dublin.
1808–1840s· Pre-Famine The Lumper. The Irish Lumper was probably well known when first recorded in a survey of County Clare in 1808; an 1835 writer called it a 'coarse species' and in 1837 it was recommended as stock feed for its enormous yield. It grew on poor, wet ground and became the main variety in the west and south. A disproportionate share of the crop was Lumper, so there was little genetic variety to resist disease. By 1840 the poor, about three-quarters of some nine million people, lived mainly on potatoes and buttermilk.
1845–1852· Famine The blight and the Great Famine. Potato blight struck in 1845 and the crop failed again in 1846 and 1848. More than three million people depended wholly on the potato. About a million died and a million more emigrated. The 1851 census commissioners had counted 24 earlier failures of the crop going back to 1728. See our Famine page for more. Read more →
1880s· Victorian Town grocers, and the first chipper. Chickens were not kept on a large scale until town grocers in the 1880s let people trade eggs for other foods. The first fish and chips in Dublin were sold in the 1880s by Giuseppe Cervi, from San Donato Val di Comino in Italy; the Dublin phrase 'one and one' is said to come from his wife Palma's 'uno di questa, uno di quella'.
1889· Victorian The first co-operative creamery. The first co-operative creamery was set up at Dromcollogher, Co. Limerick, in 1889. The Dromcolliher article credits Horace Plunkett's initiative; the IAOS article says Plunkett was involved in the second, at Ballyhahill in 1891. The site is now the National Dairy Co-operative Museum.
1894· Victorian The IAOS and the creamery movement. Plunkett founded the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society in 1894 to teach farmers to form and run co-operatives. Creameries were its greatest success, and the movement laid the foundations of the Irish dairy industry, later including firms such as Avonmore and Kerry Group.
late 20th century· Modern A new Irish cuisine. From the last quarter of the 20th century chefs built a new cuisine on traditional ingredients: fish, shellfish, soda bread, farmhouse cheeses and the potato. Myrtle Allen of Ballymaloe is named as an early protagonist. Brown soda bread with smoked salmon had reappeared on luxury hotel menus in the 1960s.
Grass grows ten months of the year in Ireland, and dairy was at the heart of the early diet. Bread and milk were the staple "for millennia", eaten with an anlann, a relish of vegetables, salted meat or honey. Some of the Old Irish words the sources give:
bánbia · 'white foods': milk, butter, curds and cheese
táth · pressed curds
tánach · hard cheese
mulchán · skimmed-milk cheese
milseán · a sweet drink of milk or soft curd heated with butter
englas · milk diluted with water
menedach · grain kneaded with butter into a paste
brothchán · the monks' gruel of meal with water or milk
Source: Irish cuisine ↗, which also notes bog butter, buried in bogs to keep and ferment.
Traditional dishes
Soda bread. A quick bread of flour, bread soda, salt and buttermilk; the acid in the buttermilk reacts with the soda to raise it. Irish flour, from soft wheat, did not rise well with yeast, which is why bread was long baked flat on a griddle. In Ulster the wholemeal kind is 'wheaten' and 'soda' means the white loaf; in the south wholemeal is 'brown bread'. The soda farl belongs in an Ulster fry. On dating: the Barmbrack article says bread soda was not widely available in Ireland until the early 19th century; the Soda bread article gives no date for its arrival in Ireland.
Boxty(bacstaí). A potato pancake of grated raw potato, always fried, associated with Leitrim, Mayo, Sligo, Fermanagh, Longford and Cavan. Boiled boxty dumplings ('hurleys') were a Halloween dish in the north midlands. A version is described in an 1854 Dublin University Magazine. The rhyme: 'Boxty on the griddle, boxty on the pan; if you can't make boxty, you'll never get a man!'
Colcannon(cál ceannann). Mashed potato with cabbage (or kale), butter and milk; P. W. Joyce defined it as 'potatoes mashed with butter and milk, with chopped up cabbage and pot herbs'. The name probably means 'white-headed cabbage', though its origin is unclear. Eaten on St Patrick's Day and St Brigid's Day; the song 'Colcannon' was first recorded in 1913.
Champ(brúitín). Mashed potato with scallions, butter and milk, popular in Ulster with a well of butter in the middle; called 'poundies' in places and 'cally' in Dublin. It was served at Samhain, and by tradition a portion was left with a spoon at the foot of a hawthorn for the fairies.
Coddle(cadal). Dublin's leftover dish of sausages, rashers, potato and onion, braised in its own stock. It is reputedly a favourite of Swift and Seán O'Casey, and turns up in Joyce. Many enthusiasts regard browning the sausages as a cop-out.
Irish stew(stobhach Gaelach). Mutton or kid, potatoes, onions and water for the purists; carrots, turnips and barley for others. Mutton was used because sheep were kept for wool and milk, so only old animals went into the pot. The article says the stew seems to have been recognised by about 1800.
Barmbrack(bairín breac). A speckled loaf of sultanas and raisins, at the centre of the Halloween fortune game: the ring means a wedding within the year, the pea no marriage that year, the coin wealth. Commercial bracks have been sold since the late 19th century; today's still hold a ring, but food safety rules keep the other items out. Halloween customs →
Black pudding. Blood sausage made with grain, usually barley. By the 19th century its making was linked with big pork-market towns, Cork among them; Cork also has its own variety, drisheen. Early Irish law texts mention a sausage or pudding called indrechtán, and bleeding cattle and mixing the blood with milk and butter was not uncommon.
White pudding(putóg bhán). Suet, oatmeal and onion in a casing, the simpler form known in Ireland, Scotland and the west of England; Irish white pudding also has a good deal of pork or pork liver and pork fat, and is a fixture of the Irish breakfast.
Quick answersWhat did the Irish eat before the potato?
Grains, especially oats, as porridge and flat oatbread, and dairy: milk, butter, curds and cheese, the bánbia or 'white foods'. Wheat bread was a luxury of the upper classes. Pork was probably the most common meat, and beef was boiled in a cauldron or roasted on spits.
Did Walter Raleigh bring the potato to Ireland?
That is the tradition: that he planted the first potatoes at Myrtle Grove in Youghal soon after 1586. It is not proven. Wikipedia's history of the potato dates the potato's arrival in the British Isles to 1588–1593 and also reports that Basque fishermen brought it to western Ireland.
What was the Lumper potato?
A high-yielding but coarse, wet variety, recorded in Co. Clare by 1808, that came to dominate the crop of the west and south before the Famine. With so much of the crop one variety, there was little resistance when blight arrived in 1845.
Where was the first co-operative creamery in Ireland?
At Dromcollogher (Dromcolliher), Co. Limerick, in 1889. Horace Plunkett went on to found the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society in 1894.