A chara, – Rosita Boland’s interesting account from Larousse Gastronomique 1926 (November 10th) reminded me of my grandmother’s recipe book. Mrs Beeton’s Every-Day Cookery (1861) also contains recipes for larks and a long list of possibilities for calf including calf brains fried, calf brains with black butter sauce, fried calf feet, boiled calf head, calf head pie, and a host of other recipes ensuring all parts of the animal were used.
Certainly some people ate well in both France and Ireland in the mid-19th-century.
I was struck to read an account of the food habits of the ordinary Irish people by Francisco De Cuellar, a survivor of the Spanish Armada in 1588, in an article “Leitrim 1600-1641’’ by Domhnall Mac an Ghalláglaigh. It reads: “They eat but one meal in a day and that at night: their usual food is butter and oaten bread; their drink is sour milk, having none other they do not drink water which is best of all. On feast days they eat some half-cooked flesh without bread or salt, such being their custom’’.
The eating habits of ordinary people throughout history were rarely recorded but an insight into past lives of both the rich and the poor can be very illuminating. – Is mise,
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NIALL O’REILLY
Kerrouet, France.