Memory Ireland: Volume 2: Diaspora and Memory Practices

16. Food, Immigrants, and the Irish Diaspora

209 16 Food, Immigrants, and the Irish Diaspora H A SI A DI N E R Mary Butler played a small part in the early-twentieth-century crusade to revive authentic Irish culture, as imagined by the nationalist movement. In a pamphlet addressed to the women of Ireland, she crafted a list of fifteen ways that they might foster true Irishness in their homes. “Make the home atmosphere Irish,” she admonished Ireland’s mothers, by making “the social atmosphere Irish.” As wives and mothers, she cajoled, they must insist that children be given Irish names, learn the Irish language in school, listen to Irish music, and enjoy Irish dance as performers and spectators. She based this all on a single, overriding principle: “Consistently support everything Irish, and consistently withhold your support from everything un-Irish” (O’Day and Stevenson, 13). By addressing women this way she situated the movement for political and cultural nationalism squarely in the home. It too should serve the struggle against colonial rule. Not one of her fifteen tips to enhance a distinctive Irish domestic culture involved the world of food. She considered no traditional recipes, food-ways, food names, or food practices as instruments for building Irish identity. Mothers, she advised, should take their Irish-named children to learn Irish traditional dance, set to distinctive Irish music. Their mouths should become adept at speaking the Irish tongues, but their mouths need This chapter is based on arguments and examples more fully explored in my book Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 210 Memory Practices not consume food linked to the Irish past, nor ought their tables be graced by foods embodying the idea of an Irish nation.1 From the other side of the Atlantic, at roughly the same time, the same Irish silence about food begs for interpretation. Two examples from the 1890s demonstrated the ways in which the Irish as a worldwide people disassociated food from identity.2 In 1896, Irish New Yorkers banded together as the Irish Palace Building Association. They wanted to construct an Irish edifice in New York City, a structure to house the county associations, a palace where Irish New Yorkers could meet and socialize with each other, and through which they could represent themselves in the city’s multiethnic landscape. The plans called for “drill rooms and administration quarters” for organizations, as well as an auditorium, several ballrooms, a fully equipped gymnasium, a labor bureau, a library with books from and about Ireland, a training school, and meeting rooms (unidentified clipping, 8 Nov. 1897, Dillon Papers, 6844/111, Trinity College Dublin). In May 1897, the “patriotic daughters of Erin” staged a giant fair to raise funds for the ambitious undertaking. At the fair, the thirty-two county associations set up booths that sold crafts and other objects distinctive to the places in Ireland from which the visitors or the parents had come. Music 1. In this chapter, I am limiting my discussion to Irish Catholics. They not only made up a small percentage of those Irish women and men who left for the United States after 1820, but the peculiar history of the potato in Ireland, the cycle of yearly famines brought about by its cultivation, and the devastating impact of the “Great Famine” of the late 1840s had a differential impact on the Catholic majority and the Protestant minority in Ireland. A study of Protestant, in particular Ulster foodways, in relationship to and contrast with that of the Catholics to the South would be helpful. So too a study of Ulster foodways in America would be an important contrast. For one insight into how the “Scotch Irish” ate and the impact of their foodways on American cooking, see Fisher 1989. 2. There is to date no similar study of Irish food culture, by itself or in comparative terms, in Great Britain, Australia, Canada, or elsewhere. Given, however, the preponderance of the material in and about Ireland and the disinterest of the Irish (until the end of the twentieth century) in using food to express identity, I will assume that Irish immigrants to those other places did not behave any differently than their sisters and brothers elsewhere. Further research could surely prove me wrong, and it would be a welcome addition to the literature. Food, Immigrants, and the Irish Diaspora 211 flooded the...