Semiotics, sex, hunger, tripe and Guinness

Tickling the Palate
Gastronomy in Irish Literature and Culture
Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Eamon Maher (eds)
Peter Lang, 235 pages, €35

The book is divided into three sections: Literary Representations of Irish Gastronomy, Culinary and Dining Traditions in Ireland and Drink and Be Merry – Beer, Pubs and the Irish Psyche. The essayists approach the study through semiotics, sociology and tourism studies.
The ‘plain’ food of Ireland is contrasted by Dara Goldstein in his absorbing Foreword with the sophisticated French-influenced dishes associated with The Anglo-Irish elite. And Dorothy Cashman in her essay The Culinary World of Maria Edgeworth also shows the ascendancy class as always looking to England for cuisine models. This deferring to England was not without snobbery with Edgeworth commenting on the pretentious Irish meals of the upwardly mobile as nothing to the dinners of les nouveaux riches at Liverpool and Manchester; and the same fastidiousness was later evident in middle class people such as the Morkan sisters in Joyce’s The Dead.
An increase in affluence and travel and a decline in religion (no more enforced fasting) led some people to a hedonistic approach to food. This Babette’s feast type of eating, extolled by the oft-quoted Joyce, paralleling his logorrhoea, contrasted with that of his disciple Beckett in his pared-down prose and frugal eating habits. The latter habit echoes perhaps the working-class view that (Rhona Richman Kenneally suggests it is famine-induced) food was not a luxury to be indulged in but a no-nonsense basic requirement of survival.
Eugene O’Brien in his semiotic essay Bloom’s Day and Arthur’s Day brings Walter Benjamin into the fray to add weight to the discussion. But his hailing of Arthur’s Day as an institution on a par with Bloomsday was premature, as Arthur’s Day has now been discontinued, perceived by the powers that be as an excuse for drunkenness.
Michael Flanagan’s The Representation of Food in Popular Children’s Literature invokes English models and his imagination appears to have run away with him when he suggests that iced buns are almost sexual objects for Billy Bunter. More relevant than the cited Enid Blyton’s Famous Five or the works of Dickens to illustrate the frugality of poverty-driven eating habits of early twentieth century Dublin life would have been to refer to the books of Irish writers such as James Stephen’s The Charwoman’s Daughter or his searing and empirically-written short story Hunger.
Much is made of Guinness with visiting dignitaries to the country such as President Obama being asked to sample the brew. Are Irish dignitaries to the USA asked to sample Budweiser? Such parish pump parochialism is just one step above portraying the Irish in the clichéd manner of buffoons and drunkards.
Ham sandwiches are cited as working class fare in the stories of John McGahern. But the non-mentioned corn beef sandwich with margarine instead of butter was a clearer demarcator of class, like the penny looking down on the halfpenny, in fifties Dublin —butter had risen to three shillings from two shillings a pound in 1951.
It is an exaggerated claim by Tony Kiely whose essay, Reflections on the Culinary Practices of Dublin’s Working Class Poor in the 1950s, is the kernel of the book, that Dublin ‘could be considered the gastronomic capital of the British isles’ on the basis of merely two haute cuisine restaurants— Jammet’s and the Russell, and across whose thresholds the poor never ventured.
The hyped ‘sacramental’ preparation of a pint of Guinness served by a ‘curate’, is highlighted by Eugene of O’Brien as he quotes master brewer Fergal Murphy: ‘You never look down at a pint of Guinness… bring the glass to your lips and not you to the glass…’ Such alchemy is also felt in the churning transubstantiation of milk into butter by Sarah in Sebastian Barry’s Annie Dunne from Kenneally’s essay.
More people engaged in physical work in the past in contrast to the frequently sedentary work practices of today where there is greater awareness of health issues. Then, people heaped their meals with an -abundance ¬¬of sugar and salt paying scant regard to enhancing cholesterol levels from fries, red meat and full fat cheeses. Surprisingly, for an island, there was little consumption of fish, maybe because of its long association with religious penance.
There were few fridges in the 50s which meant that food had to be used on the same day, and going to the shops was an almost daily practice. The frequent and precarious dependence on absent earners and providers— nearly half a million people emigrated in the 50s— and large families encouraged by the Catholic Church, resulted in many mouths to feed. A housewife had to develop an art of ‘making do’; little was wasted: the various parts of sheep and the pig, tripe, tongue, crubeen and even the tail together with the bulking ability of bread—the staple diet, were used; coddles and stews with leftovers constituted frequent meals. All of this improvisation became a daily mindset and was time consuming.
With TV programmes bizarrely gripping the country now and elevating some chefs to celebratory status, and with holidays abroad and immigration from different ethnicities and the accessibility of the Internet, the spice of culinary difference appears to have vanished. There is increasing homogenisation with the globalisation of markets. And efforts to revert to authenticity are, Marjorie Deleuze argues, merely, as with Irish pubs abroad, ‘a reimagined “authenticity” destined for tourists’.

Published in Books Ireland, November/December 2014. Issue No. 358