Irish Food History: a companion is an academic and comprehensive look at the history of food in Ireland. Edited by Dorothy Cashman and Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, it’s nominated for TheJournal.ie’s Best Irish-Published Book of the Year. Here, the authors share a chapter from the book:

FOOD PERMEATES EVERY aspect of life and society, from birth to death — from the new-born’s first suckle to the food traditions associated with Irish wakes and funerals.

Essential for survival, it has historically proven academically elusive, hidden in plain sight. Entangled with the domestic and the feminine, it was perhaps traditionally regarded as too mundane and too quotidian for consideration.

Yet, consider what can be revealed by applying the ‘food lens’ to something as fundamental as our sense of place, our basic grounding in townland and byway. Consider the etymological richness of ‘Bóthar’, the Irish word for road (from ‘bó’—cow), defined in width by the length and breadth of a cow, a signifier of the long affair of our bovine past; extending also to our ‘buachaillí’ (boys) and ‘cailíní’ (girls), meaning, respectively, cowboy or herd boy and little........

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