Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Family Dining: Food And Drink In The Sopranos – A Gastrocritical Approach, Lisa Davies

Dissertations

This thesis uses gastrocriticism to explore food and drink in the 86 episodes of the long-form narrative HBO television series The Sopranos. Gastrocriticism is an emerging branch of literary criticism that draws on scholarship from a range of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. A deeper understanding of the series was gained by using a structured framework of enquiry to explore narrative, setting, characterisation and genre through the lens of food and foodways. The Sopranos is a story of an Italian-American crime family and food is abundant in the series and bound up with the identity of …

An Investigative Analysis On Female Presence And Highly Ranked Positions In Professional Kitchens In Ireland, Roann Byrne

Dissertations

This study aims to gain an understanding of the state of the cheffing industry currently, to analyse whether there is a lack of women within the industry particularly in positions of high power. This research intends to understand the causes for the lack and showcase possible solutions and recommendations for this. It exists as a role of advocacy; hoping to inspire more people into the career of cheffing, and to retain women within it. It aspires to challenge and thus forth change the narratives that have pushed many people, particularly women, out of this work for so long. This research …

Market Segmentation Of Wine In Ireland: Are We Fostering A Desirable Consumption Culture?, Enea Bent

Dissertations

The aim of this research is to evaluate the wine sector in Ireland and its impact on the wine consumption culture that is being promoted here as a result. With supermarkets leading in terms of sales, this study evaluates the product offering of the various types of retailers and the attainability of the same to different demographics of consumer. A high level of government intervention in the industry is highlighted throughout the study, the intention and subsequent successes and failures are examined. A comparison to the rest of Europe and the United Kingdom is carried out to understand Ireland’s position …

From Alsace To America: The Development And Migration Of Ashkenazi Jewish Cuisine From Its Origins In Eastern France, Angela Hanratty

Dissertations

This research examines the historical development of a distinctly Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine from its roots in the Alsace region of France, through the Jewish settlements in Eastern Europe, and the mass immigration to America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The aim of the research was to come to an understanding of how global perception of what is considered to be quintessentially Jewish food (as evidenced in American Jewish delicatessens, Jewish homes, and in popular culture) has been shaped by developments in Alsace. Long standing views were held that Ashkenazi food developed in Eastern Europe, specifically Poland and the former …

Exploring Food Traditions Within The Four Quarter Days Of The Irish Calendar Year, Caitríona Nic Philibín

Dissertations

This study explores food traditions in the four quarter days of the Irish calendar year. Imbolg or St. Brigid’s Day, Bealtaine, Lughnasa and Samhain mark significant moments in the agricultural calendar. Food traditions, customs and practices relating to these days are recorded in the abundant resources of the collections in the Folklore Department, University College Dublin. However, to date, with few exceptions, little food specific research has been carried out on these collections. This thesis aims to begin to fill that gap whilst highlighting many opportunities for further research. Throughout this process we witness the illumination of a rich food …

From The Dark Margins To The Spotlight: The Evolution Of Gastronomy And Food Studies In Ireland, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Books/Book Chapters

For many years, food was seen as too quotidian and belonging to the domestic sphere, and therefore to women, which excluded it from any serious study or consideration in academia. This chapter tracks the evolution of gastronomy and food studies in Ireland. It charts the development of gastronomy as a cultural field, originally in France, to its emergence as an academic discipline with a particular Irish inflection. It details the progress that food history and culinary education have made in Ireland, suggesting that a new liberal / vocational model of culinary education, which commenced in 1999, has helped transform the …

New Beginnings In Reading (Irish) Literature: A Gastrocritical Look At George Moore's 'Home Sickness' And Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, Anke Klitzing

Conference papers

This chapter showcases gastrocriticism as a new beginning in literary theory and criticism, offering new readings of (Irish) literature. Gastrocriticism is an emerging form of literary criticism focused on human relationships with each other and to the natural world through food. It is informed by the concepts and insights of gastronomical scholarship and Food Studies and pays particular attention to the role food and foodways play in literary writing. The texts investigated here explore new beginnings themselves. In George Moore’s ‘Homesickness’ (1903), an emigrant on a return visit from America must decide between a farmer’s life in Ireland and his …

Along The Tevere: A Gastro-Historic Portrait Of The Region, Anke Klitzing

Articles

In June 2009, a group of masters students from the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy spent nine days visiting the lands of the Tevere river, travelling from its springs on Monte Fumaiolo in Emilia-Romagna to Rome by way of Umbria and the Lake Trasimeno. This article is a gastro-historic portrait of the lands of the Tevere, linking contemporary social, cultural and economic activities around food and tourism to the rich and long history of the region and highlighting persistent patterns, continuity and change.

Commensality And Connection: How Shared Food Experiences Connect Characters In Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials, The Book Of Dust And ‘Lyra’ Stories, Susan Anna Grace

Articles

Commensality is an inherently social activity that shapes society and enacts social dynamics. Consequently, these shared exchanges can reveal much about the society and the individuals who engage in the act. This thesis explores commensality in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, The Book of Dust Series and companion texts to the novels. The research investigates how commensal exchanges create and maintain connections between characters across the collection. In doing so, it considers how literary characters differ from real-life humans and how the existing body of knowledge on commensality can be applied to literary figures. A qualitative approach was …

My Palate Hung With Starlight: A Gastrocritical Reading Of Seamus Heaney’S Poetry, Anke Klitzing

Articles

Nobel-prize winning poet Seamus Heaney is celebrated for his rich verses recalling his home in the Northern Irish countryside of County Derry. Yet while the imaginative links to nature in his poetry have already been critically explored, little attention has been paid so far to his rendering of local food and foodways. From ploughing, digging potatoes and butter-churning to picking blackberries, Heaney sketches not only the everyday activities of mid-20th century rural Ireland, but also the social dynamics of community and identity and the socio-cultural symbiosis embedded in those practices. Larger questions of love, life and death also infiltrate the …

The Contribution Of P. G. Wodehouse To The Field Of Gastronomy Through His Character, The French Chef, Anatole, Elizabeth Wilson

Dissertations

In her paper ‘A Cultural Field in the Making: Gastronomy in 19th-Century France’, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson argues that the field of gastronomy came into existence in the middle of the nineteenth century in France. This field of gastronomy was constructed from two elements, the significance that gastronomy, defined at the time as a structured set of culinary practices, had attained in France by the nineteenth century, but also, the contribution of writers of culinary discourse who wrote about this gastronomy. These writers came from different disciplines and included the realist fiction writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), whose work Ferguson describes …

Dining Out, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Books/Book Chapters

Dining out during the 1980s in Ireland could be summarised gastronomically by prawn cocktails, Chicken Maryland, Black Forest gateau and bottles of Blue Nun or Mateus Rosé. All this changed with the Celtic Tiger when the Irish public was introduced to Caesar salad, tomato and fennel bread, tapenade and Chardonnay. From 1989 to 1993, Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud was like a lone beacon of consistency in the Irish edition of the Michelin Guide. However, in 1994, five Michelin stars were awarded on the island of Ireland. Change was afoot. Many young Irish chefs and waiters emigrated during the 1980s although some, …

Calculating Restaurant Failure Rates Using Longitudinal Census Data, J. J. Healy, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Articles

Failure rates in the restaurant industry are popularly perceived to be far higher than they actually are. This paper calculates failure rates in the Irish Food and Drinks Sector (IFDS), for the first time, using longitudinal census data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in Ireland, which follows the European statistical classification of economic activity (NACE). The results are compared with previously published literature on restaurant failure rates in the United States of America. This study also compares IFDS failure rates with other industry sectors in Ireland (construction, manufacturing). Drawing on Stinchcombe’s ’liability of newness’ theory, the informal fallacies theory …

Report On The Oxford Symposium On Food And Cookery 2018, Anke Klitzing

Reports

The annual Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery brings together food scholars from different disciplines, but predominantly in history and humanities. However, while continuing its tradition of more than 30 years in food studies, this international gathering also looks to the future, with several activities in the realm of Digital Humanities linked to the conference and its participants.

Iehca Summer University On Food And Drink 2018 Report, Diarmuid Cawley, Sylvia M. Grove, Kaian Lam

Reports

The Institut Européen d’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Alimentation (IEHCA, European Institute for the History and Cultures of Food) was established in 2001 by the French Ministry of National Education, Higher Education and Research in partnership with the Centre-Val de Loire region and the University of Tours. As a scientific and cultural development agency, it seeks to encourage university research and teaching in connection with “food cultures and heritages” in the humanities and social sciences. The university serves as a key platform for the discussion of new research in Food & Drink Studies. In 2018, 20 researchers from a wide …

Orality In Joyce: Food, Famine, Feasts And Public Houses, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Books/Book Chapters

Some common themes within the history of food and literature include starvation, famine, gluttony, feasting, commensality, hospitality, religion, gender, and class, and indeed food also functions as a complex signifier of national, racial, and cultural identity. Despite the growing international scholarship of food in literature (Bevan 1988; Schofield 1989; Ellmann 1993; Applebaum 2006; Piatti-Farnell 2011; Gilbert and Porter 2015; Boyce and Fitzpatrick 2017; Piatti-Farnell and Lee Brien 2018), until recently, Ireland appeared “as only the smallest of dots on the map of high gastronomy” (Goldstein 2014, xi). Most international collections discuss the canonical Irish writings of James Joyce and of …

Tradition And Novelty: Food Representations In Irish Women’S Magazines 1922–73, Marzena Keating, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Articles

Based on a qualitative content analysis of selected Irish women’s magazines, this paper provides a brief overview of Irish food culture from 1922 to 1973. It illustrates how selected texts from women’s magazines, mainly recipes, food columns, practical suggestions for cooking and housekeeping, as well as articles on food topics mirrored social, cultural, economic, and religious characteristics of a particular period. The paper discusses various culinary trends apparent in the content and style of cookery pages focusing on a paired category of novelty and tradition adapted from the quantitative research conducted by Alan Warde.

Krikorian, S. (2013). 'A La Table Des Élites. Les Repas Privés En France De La Régence À La Revolution'., Elaine Mahon

Articles

Book review / Compte rendu of Sandrine Krikorian, 'A la table des élites. Les repas privés en France de la Régence à la Revolution' (2013).

https://www.brepolsonline.net/toc/food/13/1-3

‘Ireland On A Plate’: Curating The 2011 State Banquet For Queen Elizabeth Ii, Elaine Mahon

Articles

State dining has been shown to define the social, cultural and political position of a nation’s leaders (Albala, 2011; Baughman, 1959; Strong, 2003) and has been used by rulers for centuries to display wealth, cement alliances and impress foreign visitors (Albala, 2007; De Vooght and Scholliers, 2011; Young, 2002). This paper will show how the state banquet for Queen Elizabeth II was carefully curated to represent Ireland’s diplomatic, cultural and culinary identity. As the first visit by a reigning British monarch since Ireland had gained independence from Britain in 1922, the state visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland in …

Austerity In 21st. Century Dublin: Has Recession Altered Our Relationship With Food Purchasing And Preparation?, Diarmaid Murphy

Dissertations

The current global recession has affected almost all countries whose economies adhere to free-market principles and are involved in international money markets. Ireland, along with the majority of its European trading partners both inside and outside the eurozone has seen a sharp fall in the standard of living of its citizens in the years since the financial crisis emerged (2007 to present). In common with the almost universal international paradigm, Irish citizens have had drastic austerity measures imposed upon them. In Ireland’s case, the underwriting of private banking debt and its subsequent conversion to sovereign debt served to contract the …

Royal Pomp: Viceregal Celebrations And Hospitaity In Georgian Dublin, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, Tara Kellaghan

Articles

During the successive reigns of the Hanoverian kings in England (1714-1830), a total of thirty-seven different viceroys were sent to Ireland as representatives of the British Crown (Table 1). The position of viceroy (also referred to as lord-lieutenant) was awarded as a matter of political exigency, but the viceroy’s role was one of social as much as political significance. The viceroy and his vicereine played the roles of the British monarchs in absentia, and the Protestant minority ruling class, often referred to as the Ascendancy, expected the viceregal court at Dublin Castle to not merely mirror, but to outshine that …

The Current State Of Cooking In Ireland: The Relationship Between Cooking Skills And Food Choice, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, John Lydon

Articles

This research investigated the attitudes of Irish people to food to ascertain whether the acquisition of cooking skills influences food choice. Caraher et al. (1999) report on the state of cooking in England noted that changing lifestyles has had a significant impact upon the demand of food offerings and on the variance of domestic cooking skills. Caraher et al. (1999) found that cooking skills play an important part in healthy eating as a vehicle for lower-paid people to achieve a healthy diet and is an essential life-skill. While these discourses advance, the deficiency of inherently Irish empirical data contributed to …

Irish Corned Beef: A Culinary History, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, Pádraic Óg Gallagher

Articles

This article proposes that a better knowledge of culinary history enriches all culinary stakeholders. The article will discuss the origins and history of corned beef in Irish cuisine and culture. It outlines how cattle have been central to the ancient Irish way of life for centuries, but were cherished more for their milk than their meat. In the early modern period, with the decline in the power of the Gaelic lords, cattle became and economic commodity that was exported to England. The Cattle Acts of 1663 and 1667 affected the export trade of live cattle and led to a growing …

Ireland, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Books/Book Chapters

This book section provides a history of food in Irish culture from the early beginings to the present day.

Leitrim Chefs Produce Lavish Irish Banquet At Oxford Symposium, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, Pádraic Óg Gallagher

Articles

Description of Irish Banquet given at Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2010 by Irish chefs with Leitrim connections.

The Language Of Food: A Review Of The 2009 Oxford Symposium On Food And Cookery, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Articles

This article reviews the 2009 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, which was held in St. Catherine's College, Oxford. This year's theme was Food and Language and over forty papers were delivered to and audience of over two hundred leading food writers, historians, scientists, anthropologists, linguists, culinary students, and general food enthusiasts.

The Potato In Irish Cuisine And Culture, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, Pádraic Óg Gallagher

Articles

This article will discuss the introduction of the potato from its South American origin into Irish cuisine and culture. The authors will outline the stages of devopment from introduction to acceptance as a winter vegetable, to widespread acceptance, moving on to overdependence and leading to subsequent famine. The article will discuss the varieties of potatoes used, the methods of production at different levels of society, and a number of quintessentially Irish potato dishes including boxty, champ, and colcannon, which will be compared with similar potato dishes in other cultures.

Pierre Rolland, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Books/Book Chapters

Biography of Pierre Rolland, French chef and key figure in the development of Haute Cuisine in Dublin through his position as award winning head chef in the Russell Hotel, Dublin.

Zenon Geldof, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Books/Book Chapters

Biography of Belgian Chef / Restaurateur Zenon Geldof with information of the Geldof family involvement in the history of Dublin Restaurants.

Kenneth George Besson, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Books/Book Chapters

Biography of Ken Besson with information on his father Paul Besson and the Royal Hibernian Hotel, Russell Hotel and Bailey Restaurant which they owned and ran in Dublin.