# What was Irish cuisine like before the introduction of the potato?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-irish-cuisine-like-before-the-introduction-of-the-potato/366653
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [July 31, 2006, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-irish-cuisine-like-before-the-introduction-of-the-potato/366653 "2006-07-31T03:33:34Z")
**Posts on this page:** 12
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Pushkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pushkin)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2006, 1:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-irish-cuisine-like-before-the-introduction-of-the-potato/366653/21 "2006-07-31T13:47:13Z")
> [@Una Persson](#):
>
> The book I cited covers that over about 100 or so pages, and while that’s an oversimplification, it’s essentially true
I just got the feeling that the newspaper was trying to excuse the failure to provide for the starving with this fact.
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### Author:  [@Beware\_of\_Doug](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beware_of_Doug)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2006, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-irish-cuisine-like-before-the-introduction-of-the-potato/366653/22 "2006-07-31T13:52:00Z")
> [@astro](#):
>
> Weren’t several coastal Scandanavian groups the same way re fish.
Sardinia turned her back to the sea after several waves of seafaring marauders. For centuries Sardinians wouldn’t go to sea, wouldn’t fish, wouldn’t even _eat_ fish.
But they would eat [this](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=365470). WTF, Sards?
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### Author:  [@fiddlesticks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fiddlesticks)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2006, 2:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-irish-cuisine-like-before-the-introduction-of-the-potato/366653/23 "2006-07-31T14:04:31Z")
In Jared Diamond’s _Collapse_ he mentions that the Greenland Norse did not eat fish (no fish bones found in Norse garbage dumps), despite their ancestral fish-loving roots in Iceland and Norway, and there being plentiful stocks of fish in and around the island. “No one knows why”, but Diamond speculates that something so mundane as perhaps one of the first leaders of Greenland getting violently ill after a fish meal started a tradition where Greenlanders as a group decided fish were “bad”.
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### Author:  [@Ponster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ponster)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2006, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-irish-cuisine-like-before-the-introduction-of-the-potato/366653/24 "2006-07-31T14:27:32Z")
> [@Walloon](#):
>
> Surprisingly, for an island nation, Ireland has never relied heavily on fish for its diet.
Indeed. Most fish is found several miles off the coast and in very deep waters. At the time the typical Irish fishing boat wasn’t able to haul nets in such deep water and wasn’t all that great at coping with bad weather. So many fishermen, stranded on the beach, ended up seling their boats & nets to pay for food.
As is noted in many history books, including the ones used to teach school kids, there was food in the country, some fish, shellfish, corn, meat, but people didn’t have the cash to pay for it.
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### Author:  [@APB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/APB)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2006, 3:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-irish-cuisine-like-before-the-introduction-of-the-potato/366653/25 "2006-07-31T15:27:11Z")
> [@jjimm](#):
>
> See [contemporaneous commentary from Punch magazine](http://vassun.vassar.edu/~sttaylor/FAMINE/Punch/Punch.html) for the conservative POV.
Except that, if anything, those are contemporaneous commentary from a Radical POV. _Punch_ had a distinctly Radical slant in the 1840s and many of the cartoons featured on that page are by John Leech, the magazine’s star cartoonist who is generally considered to have reflected that slant. That is why, as **Pushkin** notes, so many of the cartoons also criticise the government. Moreover, Richard Doyle’s featured cartoons are equally hostile to the Irish and, instead of being a Radical, he was actually a devout Roman Catholic.
As the repeal of the Corn Laws had been as much - or even more so - the proposed whig and Radical solutions as the Peelite one, the sense in England that the Irish were being ungrateful for what had been done for them crossed party lines.
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### Author:  [@ratatoskK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ratatoskK)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2006, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-irish-cuisine-like-before-the-introduction-of-the-potato/366653/26 "2006-07-31T17:29:52Z")
I dimly remember reading (and I may remember incorrectly) that part of the reason why the Irish weren’t big fish eaters was because of restrictions imposed by the English on the Irish using boats??
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### Author:  [@Walloon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walloon)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2006, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-irish-cuisine-like-before-the-introduction-of-the-potato/366653/27 "2006-07-31T17:47:30Z")
From _The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845-1849_, by Cecil Woodham-Smith:
> [@](#):
>
> The primitive boats and curraghs in which the Irish fished, combined with the hazards of the ‘tremendous coast’ [the southwest, west, and northwest coast] made regular fishing difficult; the Irish fishermen could never go out in bad weather, and was often kept on shore for weeks at a time. He then depended for food on his potatoes — though the seas might be teeming with fish, they were inaccessible to him. . . .
>
> The difficulties which had prevented a fishing industry from developing remained: the poverty of the country, the want of proper boats, the remoteness from a market, the dangers of the ‘tremendous coast’ in the west. In many places trawling was declared to be impossible, owing to the rocky and foul nature of the sea bottom; in others . . . for part of the season the fishermen had to row twenty-five miles to the fishing grounds; the weather was unreliable, and small boats, curraghs especially, laden with their catch were difficult to bring in when the squall blew up. Fish-curing stations could not operate economically when the supply of fish was not regular, nor did it prove easy to dispose of the finished product; a number of stations had cured fish left on their hands.
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### Author:  [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2006, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-irish-cuisine-like-before-the-introduction-of-the-potato/366653/28 "2006-07-31T18:19:18Z")
> [@WhyNot](#):
>
> I had a pub meal which included 5 forms of potatoes: whipped potatoes on top of the cottage pie (which contained chunks of potatoes), and on the side boiled potatoes, baked potato wedges and chips, as well as sweet potato wedges, which almost count.
That sound you hear is my stomach growling. I’m 1/16 Irish, and I looooove potatoes…
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### Author:  [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2006, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-irish-cuisine-like-before-the-introduction-of-the-potato/366653/29 "2006-07-31T18:56:31Z")
> [@Una Persson](#):
>
> what citation are you relying upon that the above is true?
Is it fair to demand a citation for a comment that begins:
> [@jjimm](#):
>
> I’d imagine …
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### Author:  [@Mk\_VII](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mk_VII)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2006, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-irish-cuisine-like-before-the-introduction-of-the-potato/366653/30 "2006-07-31T19:15:07Z")
> [@Szlater](#):
>
> Is it true that the British government of the time was so enamored with the free market, and obsessed with letting the ‘hand of the market’ solve every problem, that they believed the famine would also be solved by market forces?
I’ve heard similar comments about Katrina on other message boards; “Everytime government intervenes in this sort of thing it only makes things worse…it encourages people to look to the government to solve their problems for them, instead of standing on their own two feet…private charities should be left to solve the problems…if they were too stupid or helpless to leave New Orleans in time it’s their own fault…”
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### Author:  [@Una\_Persson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Una_Persson)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2006, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-irish-cuisine-like-before-the-introduction-of-the-potato/366653/31 "2006-07-31T20:05:38Z")
> [@acsenray](#):
>
> Is it fair to demand a citation for a comment that begins:
I’m not demanding a citation as you put it, I’m interested if there’s more basis to the statement. Some may get their nipples hard over contests to see who can be right the most times or get the highest post count; I just wanted to know was if there was a source of the conjecture, for the sake of learning, especially as I do a bit of research in food and cooking history as a hobby.
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### Author:  [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)
#### Post date: [August 1, 2006, 7:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-irish-cuisine-like-before-the-introduction-of-the-potato/366653/32 "2006-08-01T07:48:16Z")
It was indeed speculation, but I’ve since found [this](http://www.dochara.com/eat/history/before-potato.php):
> [@](#):
>
> Vegetables were not cultivated at all in Ireland until around the 8th century, before that wild leaves, roots, berries and fungi were eaten. When they did arrive, the main vegetables grown were carrots, parsnips, celery, turnip, cabbage and onion.
The rest of the article is also very pertinent to the OP, since it’s called “Food and Eating in Ireland before the Potato”, although it lacks detail, and disagrees with us about the fish and seafood thing.
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