Memory Ireland: Volume 2: Diaspora and Memory Practices

17. Cooking at the Hearth: The “Irish Cottage” and Women’s Lived Experience

224 17 Cooking at the Hearth The “Irish Cottage” and Women’s Lived Experience R HON A R ICH M A N K E N N E A L LY The traditional Irish cottage is an enduring icon that represents varieties of Irishness to varieties of observers. The subject of poems and travelogues, postcards and photographs, it has been monumentalized in such commemorations as the Hunger Memorial in New York City, used as a signature for Irish pubs in the United States and elsewhere, and kitsched up in the creation of countless souvenirs. As a prime symbol of the Emerald Isle, the humble cottage belongs to the same heavy-lifting category as the much-maligned, yet (by many) much–beloved shamrock. The proliferation of Irish-cottage-as-icon is complemented by the work of archaeologists, folklorists, and cultural geographers, for example, who study this architecture in the Irish landscape as extant evidence of Irish housing past and present. It should be clarified that, having been used disparagingly by outsiders, the word “cottage” has historically carried negative connotations for its occupants (Kinmonth 1993, 210n3); this connotation further differentiates the icon and the actual dwelling, more objectively defined by scholars as “rectangular, one room wide, single storey, whitewashed and This essay is dedicated to the memory of Jim and Norah Barry Morrison, whose traditional Irish home in East Cork was the site, beginning in 1978, of some of my richest experiences of Irish daily life. I am grateful to Sara Spike for her editorial assistance and research skills, and for the funding granted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Cooking at the Hearth 225 thatched” (Mullane 2000, 75). This chapter engages with the icon and the dwelling in its role as the key focus of everyday life for generations of Irish women. It was taken for granted that keeping the hearths and homesteads of the nation clean, and the families that occupied them fed and cared for, was the responsibility of the woman of the house, the bean a ’tighe. This role, obligatory in terms of both religious and secular ideologies of the time, implicated her in the construction of Irish individual and community identity . As George Russell (AE) exclaimed in a 1906 Irish Homestead article, “It is in the cottages and farmers’ houses that the nation is born. . . . If you aim at a civilization of a high and noble character, you must begin at the hearth” (qtd. in Lane 2003, 168). Emanating from the hearth (in Russell’s perception ), and ideally from one’s own farm, was a daily menu of “wholesome porridge , milk butter, eggs, or bacon” (and potatoes, surely!), foods that have had abiding resonance in the Irish gastronomic repertoire (Lane 2003, 168). A particular aspect of the daily life that was, and continues to be, represented in the iconography of the “Irish cottage” are the food-related activities undertaken by women in traditional Irish dwellings. In this chapter, a study of cookbooks from the mid-to-late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries tracks how their employment of the Irish-cottage-as-icon trope sheds light on expectations regarding women’s roles and identity. At the heart of this work is a challenge to two general assumptions about Irish food culture that find their most cogent expression in historian Hasia Diner’s book Hungering for America. The first is the idea that Irish food culture carries intrinsically negative connotations. Diner writes: “The Irish experience with food—recurrent famines and an almost universal reliance on the potato, a food imposed on them—had left too painful a mark on the Irish Catholic majority to be considered a source of communal expression and national joy” (2001, 84). This statement suggests that, in Ireland, the possibility for individuals (especially women) to be credited for the joy, comfort, succor, or “communal expression” that they did in fact create through food has been compromised by the overarching negative cultural implications of food as a concept. Diner’s second assumption suggests that, in Ireland, food-related activities offered little in the way of self-fulfillment as a creative undertaking. She writes, whereas “neither the potato diet nor the Famine (or continuous 226 Memory Practices famines) alone determined Irish food practices, together they combined powerfully to repress an expressive culture based on food” (105). If so, then the conditions of the traditional Irish dwelling as an environment for meal...