Bricriu's Feast An Inquiry into the Diet and Cooking Techniques of the Early Medieval Irish

By Morgan Smith

A thorough look at what the Irish of the early medieval period would have eaten. This is an extensively researched work and a comprehensive analysis of the ingredients, cooking methods, and social factors that made up an ancient culture’s approach to that most basic building blocks of a society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morgan Smith
• Release date: Dec 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463242988

Morgan Smith

Morgan Smith has been a goatherd, an artist, a landscaper, a weaver, a bookstore owner, a travel writer and an archaeologist, and she will drop everything to go anywhere, on the flimsiest of pretexts. Writing is something she has been doing all her life, though, one way or another, and now she thinks she might actually have something to say.

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Briciu’s Feast

Briciu’s Feast

an Inquiry into the Diet and Cooking Techniques of the Early Medieval Irish

Morgan Smith

Morgan Smith

Travelling Light

Copyright © 2004 Morgan Smith

All rights reserved.

Dedication

This work is dedicated to Pat, who lived through two years of late dinners, no use of the dining room, mountains of unwashed clothes, and a very distracted wife muttering Where did I put that paper on Irish laws? in the middle of the night; and also to the kindness of all the scholars who shared their work and their insight. Most especially, I would like to thank Professor Fergus Kelly, who gave me so much useful advice when I needed it most. Any errors, misinterpretations and wild generalizations are mine alone.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

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History 1

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Methods of Research 4

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Beef, Barley and Beer 8

Meat, Poultry, Game and Fish 9

Butchery and Preservation 15

Grain 16

Vegetables, Nuts and Fruits 19

Dairy and Related Foods 23

Herbs and Flavourings 25

Beverages 26

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Celtic Cowboys: Farming and Food Production in early Medieval Ireland 29

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Burnt Mounds and Cauldrons of Plenty: Cooking and Food Processing 35

Meat 36

The Daily Grind: Bread and Porridge 40

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The Hero’s Portion: Irish Society and Food 49

Feasts, Famines and Fasting 53

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The Halls of Mead Circling: Some Final Thoughts 59

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Appendix A - 1 63

Appendix A - 2 64

Appendix A - 3 65

Appendix A - 4 66

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Appendix B 67

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Bibliography 69

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Web Sources 75

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Notes 81

Introduction

No one in the modern world can have failed to have noticed how intrinsic food is to culture.

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From the procurement and production of the basic ingredients to the processing and consumption, tood defines us. In abundance or in scarcity, what, where, when, and how we eat says more about us than we generally notice.

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It’s never just about staying alive. Both the political and the social are represented at every meal.

Archaeology as well as history has not, until very recently, had much to say about food. Like clothing and other parts of domestic life in human societies, it has been treated more as an amusing footnote than a topic of serious study.

Who ruled whom, and to what extent those rulers affected the big historical questions, not to mention what interpretation best served to bolster the current social attitudes, seemed far more serious to those digging into the past. Cooking meals, like so many other small and mundane tasks that people were forced to do simply to stay alive, seemed trivial – almost frivolous – when compared to building monuments or overrunning another culture and wiping it off the map.

For preliterate societies, the problem has been compounded, because some tools for technical examination were lacking – it’s only in the last few decades that the ability to scientifically analyze residues on pots and cooking vessels has been within reach.

But as the field has expanded and new technologies invented, both the interest in how people actually lived, as well as the ability to see more clearly what those lives revolved around, food and food culture has become a more serious arena. How earlier societies used the land and the resources, and how they coped in times of famine, as well as the beliefs and attitudes that they brought to bear on these subjects is now a far more integral part of the academic field.

I came to all of this the way many other researchers have: through a kind of back door that began with two fascinations: the early medieval cultures of northern Europe, and a lifelong interest in textiles and clothing of the past.

Those interests led to wider ones. It began to dawn on me, along with everyone else, that domestic life more generally might hold keys to understanding deeper things about a culture. At the time, I was working with some early Irish sources, trying to correlate the descriptions of clothing in the Sagas with what the contemporary tools of Late Iron Age Ireland might have been capable of producing, and, in spare moments, I started noting down references to food as well.

Gradually, this mild interest turned into an obsession. It took over a lot of my free time, and most of the dining room, as books and journals got piled up on whatever available surface I could find. Eventually, I realized that while I perhaps now knew some things about the subject, I would need to write it all up to find out what I did know.

Ireland was, in the early medieval period, a complex world, with some unique qualities. Nowhere is that more noticeable than in the domestic sphere, where both laws and customs had been growing for centuries in a sort of semi-isolation from the social structures that had overrun most of Europe.

It was also a preliterate society in the Iron Age, and even after conversion to Christianity, the culture retained a strong affinity to oral traditions.

Consequently, the material I was working with was diffuse and confusing, and covered some very strange territory.

In an attempt to simplify this a little, I narrowed my scope to the Early Medieval period, defining it as primarily the 4th through 8th century AD, as the country became Christianized.

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It was a problematic definition: with so little source material available, I had had to expand my research into other parts of Britain, and include the Welsh, the Scots and other Celtic tribes of the Continent in my thoughts, and this led inevitably to Roman and other influences, as well as reaching back into earlier times. How much and in what ways those influences