Customer Reviews

Land of Milk and Honey: The Story of Traditional Irish Food and Drink

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Brid Mahon, a folklorist who has also written a memoir of gathering tales "While Green Grass Grows," obviously is steeped in the lore and stories that attest to the varieties of food & drink in both ancient and more recent Irish times. She veers, however, from her focus: half of the book's a recounting of whenever eatables & drinkables pop up in mythological and historical records; half a miscellany of how such foods and drinks were gathered, kept, and consumed. I was expecting more depth about how, say, mead was invented, but in that account all Mahon really noted were occasions of its consumption. The book's rather scattershot, but nonetheless enjoyable. Each chapter contains literary and popular citations for food & drink and while brief, the book's sufficient to whet your mental and perhaps physical appetite for a story too often neglected: how the Irish kept themselves going for centuries by imaginatively (or perhaps not always!) surviving on the bounty from land and, less often than might be expected, the sea.

One example: I tried, as one suspicious of most vegetables (having grown up with typically boiled foodstuffs!), to convince my more food-loving wife that Mahon, by quoting "potato and other vegetable" meant at a meal potato therefore was a vegetable, but she did not fall for this--although I was raised to think that not only potatoes but corn counted for the veggie!