It would be a hundred years before the rot was correctly identified as a fungal infection; in the meantime, the British blamed the disease on Irish laziness—their shameful dependence on the single, easy crop. The Peel administration sent cornmeal to Ireland as emergency relief, which the Irish soon came to hate—as well they might, since, as sole sustenance, it gave them pellagra. Whether intended or not, the emergency measures worked to the advantage of the landed; by the time the worst had passed, well over a million Irish poor had died or fled. Many things vanished entirely, like the art of Irish wine and cheesemaking, and, worst of all, the heart was cut out of the living rural culture.
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“And all you have for your labour is the potato?” “That’s all, ma’am, that’s all; and it’s many of us that can’t get the sup of milk with ’em, no, nor the salt; but we can’t help it, we must be content with what the good God sends us.”
It was nearly three o’clock when I reached my destination, and made my way to the cabin through a muddy lane. There were two pigs, two dogs, two cats, and two batches of chickens just introduced upon the theater of action, enclosed in a niche in the wall, a huge pile of potatoes had been poured upon the table for the workmen and children, a hole in the mud floor served for the pigs and poultry to take their “bit,” wooden stools and chairs to sit down upon, and a pot not inferior in size to any fire’s made up my environment…. When my thoughts were a little collected, I said, “Well, my boys, the lumpers I see are ready.”
— Asenath Nicholson,Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger (1847)
On May 16, 1844, a solitary woman stood on the deck of the steamer Brooklyn as it set sail from New York City to Ireland. She was nearly fifty, a widow, living in Manhattan on a small income, keeping herself busy with various good works (a disciple of Sylvester Graham, she opened a Graham Temperance Boarding-House and wroteNature’s Own Book, which advocated a militant, nuts-and-berries vegetarianism). Her name was Asenath Nicholson, and she was about to produce one of the great travel narratives of her century, Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger, or Excursions throughIreland in 1844 and 1845 for the Purpose of Personally Investigating the Conditions of the Poor. We shall simply call itIreland’s Welcome to the Stranger.
The book’s full title tells much. She had become shocked and disturbed at the condition of Irish immigrants—half-starved and in total poverty—who were fleeing the Famine. She visited them in their New York City garrets and cellars, and decided—as far as I can discern, completely on her own—to go to Ireland and investigate conditions there for herself,
to sit down in their cabins, and there learn what soil has nurtured, what hardships have disciplined a race so patient and so impetuous, so revengeful and so forgiving, so proud and so humble, so obstinate and so docile, so witty and so simple.
Contemptuous of the popular Irish travel narratives of the time, where all was viewed through the reverse telescope of affluence, she determined to go to the Irish poor in their very hovels and to eat, live, and sleep with them there. And this is exactly what she did; more even, perhaps, than she planned. Unwilling to carry any but the smallest amounts of money on her person and not understanding the (at best) erratic nature of transcontinental mails, she often found herself dependent on the generosity and compassion of the people she had come to help. She would travel miles on foot through the worst imaginable weather, with only a penny to her name, hoping that an expected letter containing funds might be waiting for her at her next destination. There often wasn’t, and she had to either walk on or back, this time with nothing in her pocket.
I wish there were space here to do credit to this wildly eccentric and wholly admirable woman, who against all advice climbed mountains on her knees so as to see the view, wandered in the most dangerous of places in the dead of night because she was bored or disgusted with her lodgings, and hobnobbed with paupers, convicts, and—to her fellow Protestants, far worse—Catholic priests. She came away full of admiration for some of them, and dared to write about it. What she has given our narrative is an observant and sympathetic view of Irish cottage life, tempered by a vegetarian sensibility that saw nothing strange—only admirable—in a potato-based diet. Through her eyes we are able to penetrate to a deeper level of empathetic insight into the intimate relationship between a foodstuff and those who depend on it for their very lives.
One of her many descriptions of meals shared in the cabins of the Irish poor begins when she is caught in a raging storm on foot on the road to Galway and realizes that she simply cannot go on.
In despair I stood; when looking to my left I saw at a distance a cabin, and a little girl standing in the door. She was gazing at me, as I supposed, from idle curiosity, and, as the last alternative, I hesitatingly turned towards the dreary abode. “Welcome, welcome, stranger, from the stawrm; ye’re destroyed. I told the little gal to open the door and stand in it, that ye mightn’t think we was shuttin’ ye out in the stawrm; we’ve got a good fire and plenty of turf; and though the cabin is small, and not fittin’ for sich a lady as ye, I’ll make it better than the mad stawrm without; and I’ll soon heave over a pot of potatoes, and get ye a sup of milk, and I wish my wife was here. I’m but a stranger; but here sence Monday.” All this passed before I had time to tell my country, pedigree, or business in Ireland. A huge pile of blazing turf soon dried my clothes, and I was sitting “high and dry” against the heels of a coach horse, who was taking his lunch from a pile of straw at the foot of a bed. In an hour the potatoes were ready, and the kind little girl brought me a broken soup-plate with two eggs on it, and a “sup of milk.” The eggs I gave to a coachman who had dropped in to exchange horses, and took some salt and my tea-spoon, which I carried in my pocket; and upon a stool by the side of the pot, on which a basket was placed containing the lumpers, I ate my supper with the family and coachman, not only with a cheerful, but a grateful heart.
Very likely, the house is built of stone and the roof of thatch. There is a fireplace and possibly a chimney—otherwise, the smoke simply makes its way out the door. The floor is dirt and the room almost empty of furniture: there are some stools and a bed. Against one wall is stacked a pile of cut turf or peat. We already understand what the host means when he says that “I’m but a stranger; but here sence Monday”—he has been off working somewhere distant and just recently come home.
Before we discuss the meal, a word should be said about the presence of the horse. Asenath Nicholson discovered that the Irish gave house room to a wide range of animals, not only what we call house pets—dogs and cats—but goats, chickens, geese, cows, horses, and pigs. This was not out of the ignorance of poverty; they genuinely enjoyed their company.
The English were particularly shocked by the presence of the pigs, but the truth is, given the chance, pigs are cleanly animals, and smart—they can learn their place:
The family pigs snored snugly in their cribs, and, in all justice, I must say that these pigs were well-disciplined, for when one of them awoke and attempted to thrust his nose into a vessel not belonging to him, he was called a dirty pig, and commanded to go to his own kettle, which he did as tamely as a child or a dog would have done.
Another pig encounter occurred when she spent the night atop a pile of oat straw in a spare room. At cockcrow, a side door to the outside flew open with a bang, and in walked
a majestic pig, weighing three hundred-weight, and moving towards my bed, elevated his nose and gave me a hearty salute. I said “Good-morning, sir,” and he turned to the oaten straw and made himself busy, till the mistress entered, and I asked her if she would do me the favour to lead out my companion. She heeded it not, but walked away. In a few moments she returned, and a little more entreatingly I said, “Madam, will you be so good as to take out this pig?” She was angry at my repeated solicitations, but finally took away the pig into the kitchen, with a mutter, “what harrum?” and violently shut the door.
What I love is that the good woman, instead of shooing the pig back
outside to the yard, takes the monster back into the kitchen with her.
No discussion of such a meal can begin without noticing what is prominently missing: a table. Tables are not universally absent in her visits to the cottages, but one learns from Claudia Kinmonth inIrish Country Furniture: 1700–1950 (see pages 269–72) that they were a relative rarity and often viewed as an encumbrance. The focal point of Irish cottage life was the hearth: a turf fire provided heat, light, and company. It was the custom of household intimates to sit before it. As anyone who has regularly eaten before a fireplace will know, in such a situation a table only gets in the way, and consequently, even in prosperous rural Irish households, a table for eating was often seen as affectation and out of place.
Nor was such a table needed. The centerpiece of a cottage’sbatterie de cuisine was a huge cast-iron pot: huge because it had to cook very many potatoes indeed (twenty pounds of them or more were easily required for a meal); so huge that it regularly performed the duties of a table itself. Depending on the season, a child was sent either to dig up the potatoes from the ground or to gather them from under the bed. Sometimes they were scraped (notpeeled, an act that slices away too much of the nutritious layer next to the skin), but often they were not. They were scrubbed clean of dirt and put into the pot; the pot was put directly on the fire and the potatoes were boiled until they were done.
When they were tender, someone held a shallow wicker basket called a skib (from the Gaelicsciobóg ) over a hole in the floor and the potatoes were poured out. The potato water, when cooled, was—with the peels and any leftovers—for the pig. The other, human, eaters gathered on their stools around the skib, which was set down before the fire on top of the now empty pot. In the poorest households, the buttermilk, if there was any, was likewise shared from a single mug.
The potatoes must be eaten from the hand, without knife, fork, or plate; and the milk taken in sups from the mug. I applied my nails to divesting the potato of its coat, and my hostess urged the frequent use of the milk.
As we shall see, the Irish have always been particular about how their potatoes are cooked; Irish cookbooks still have much to say on so simple-seeming a matter as boiling them.43This particularly extends to the flavor of different varieties, and Nicholson’s reference to “lumpers” shows that we are in the presence of dire poverty. Those who could afford to planted such low-yield but flavorful varieties as “apples” and “minions.” Lumpers were large and prolific rather than choice; a companion variety, “cups,” was described in an American seed book of the time as “strongly flavored when cooked. Unfit for table use.”
Salt was a valuable commodity and kept carefully in a salt-box hung beside the fire. This had a sloping lid that lifted up to allow the cook easy access and then fell shut again to keep out smoke smut and dust. When there was a table, salt would be sprinkled on it for pressing the potatoes in; when there was no table, it was put into a common bowl.
This act of seasoning was known as “kitchening,” a word used as both verb and noun to describe the sparing addition of some savory element to a basic food like bread or porridge or potatoes, and that accompaniment itself. A pinch of salt was a basic kitchening, but a good meal offered that plus a drink and a bite of something else—the “sup” and the “bit.” When there was none of either—and sometimes no salt, as well—the meal was jokingly called “potatoes and point,” a dish for which there was no recipe in cookery books because—as Thomas Carlyle well knew—the phrase meant not a dish but theabsence of one.
A meal of potatoes and point meant that the eater was to take his or her potatoes and just point at the sup and the bit; it was not for them. Sometimes the pointing was metaphoric—in the sense of the old proverb “Hunger is the best kitchen”—because there was literally nothing else to eat at all.44At other times, as another old saying had it, one was to “Dip in the dip and leave the herring for your father.” Here a savory broth of boiled salt herring was provided for dipping the potatoes into, but only one person got the piece of fish that had seasoned it.
In more prosperous times, however, the sup was a mug of buttermilk and the bit a mouthful of something savory: a strip or two of bacon, some salt fish, or perhaps a boiled egg. On a special occasion, if some fresh milk was to be had (and could be spared), the sup and bit might all be mashed up with the potatoes into a single dish. Indeed, since a pile of boiled potatoes can hardly be called adish, we come to what is possibly to many Irish the basic, essential dish of their cuisine, a comfort food that any lover of potatoes can see their way fit to eating as a humble but filling and tasty supper. Asenath Nicholson encountered it at Mendicity, a Dublin poorhouse where paupers picked oakum to earn two meals. The breakfast was stirabout;
the dinner, potatoes and some kind of herbage pounded together, well peppered, put into barrels, shovelled out into black tins, and set out upon the floor—there were no tables.
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Potatoes were introduced into this country in 1587. After their cultivation became general they became a national food—in the 18th and early 19th century practically the sole food of the peasants. They were invariably “boiled in their jackets.” Those living by the sea preferred to boil them in sea-water. There are old people in County Down today who talk of the “good old days” when this was done. No matter how “floury” the potatoes are, if boiled in sea-water the skin does not crack, and so none of the mineral content is lost. However, well-salted fresh water has much the same effect. This is how the country-woman boils her potatoes to-day…. Perhaps the most popular potato dish is champ. It is a favorite Friday dinner for those who keep Lent, and a popular dish with all old-fashioned folk.
— Florence Irwin,The Cookin’ Woman
Now another remarkable woman enters our narrative. Florence Irwin was born in Ireland in 1883, and, as she explains with typical economy and vigor, as a young woman, after studying “Cookery, Laundry Work and Housewifery,”
I went straight to County Down, as Itinerant Cookery Instructress under the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland, spending 6 to 8 weeks in each centre, which might be in a small town, a village, or just a populous town-land. I carried round with me a “Mistress” American stove and equipment for taking practical classes of 20–24 women, or children sometimes, for cookery, laundry-work, and dressmaking. This work I did from 1905–1913. My adventures were many.
The fruit of this work was her 1937 cookbookIrish Country Recipes, which a decade later was republished in expanded form asThe Cookin’ Woman. With its sympathetic evocation of rural Irish life and its wealth of authentic country recipes with their carefully written instructions, it is the best of all Irish cookbooks and possibly the best loved of them—certainly it remains in print there to this day. Irwin had a deep respect for her clients and an enviable natural rapport in her dealings with them. The book is full of mutual appreciation that can be at once funny and touching; she always knew that she was learning as much from them as they were from her.
Indeed, you can be lulled easily by her self-deprecatory ways for a long time before you realize that only a woman of great and independent spirit could have so resolutely shrugged off the culinary snobbery of her time and profession not only to recognize the value of the country dishes that she encountered but to make the effort to write them down, and so save for the record humble food that has been pushed to the back of the cupboard in most other Irish cookery books. About champ, the amalgam of all the basic elements of Irish cuisine—potato, milk, butter, and the taste for wild greens—she is positively eloquent.
In a farmhouse, two stones or more of potatoes were peeled and boiled for the dinner. Then the man of the house was summoned when all was ready, and while he pounded the enormous potful of potatoes with a sturdy wooden beetle his wife added the potful of milk and nettles, or scallions, or chives, or parsley, and he beetled it until it was smooth as butter, not a lump anywhere. Everyone got a large bowlful, made a hole in the center, and into this put a la
rge lump of butter. Then the champ was eaten from the outside with a spoon or fork, dipping it into the melting butter in the center. All was washed down with new milk or freshly churned buttermilk.
Champ is the name of the dish in Northern Ireland; in Eire itself it is known as cally, poundies, or stampy. Most if not all of these names derive from the thorough drubbing required to make it. A beetle was a thick wooden pestle that in Irish households was used for, among other things, softening straw before it was twisted into rope, thumping the dirt out of the laundry on washing day, and mashing potatoes in the big iron pot. This approach was necessary given the enormous amount of potatoes then consumed at a meal; for us, a sturdy potato masher is more than sufficient.
In contemporary Irish food writing, champ is more and more presented as a side dish, an elaborated mashed potatoes. For Florence Irwin, on the other hand, there is no question but that champ is a meal in itself. Not only does a piping hot bowl of it make a delicious, filling meal, but to prepare it this way is to begin to understand that, like all basic peasant dishes, champ is a strategy as much as a recipe. Irwin gives recipes for five “separate” versions—champ made with nettles, scallions, chives, parsley, and peas—but this is because she wants, in her typically careful fashion, to call attention to the different cooking of the greens. However, she concludes her recipe for pea champ with the following observation:
The main thing about champ is it must be kept very hot while being made and served on very hot plates, and accompanied with good butter, and milk or buttermilk to drink. I have known of carrot, cabbage, and even lettuce being made into champ in the same way.
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