Irish Food History with Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman

Well, I suppose in some ways it was a COVID project.

But then going back further, it probably has a, you know, a gestation period of probably 20 years or 25 years even, you know.

So we, around what was the Dublin Institute of Technology, it's now Technological University Dublin.

We, around 25 years ago, we started to teach food history, a subject called gastronomy to undergraduates.

It was a program in culinary arts, which was probably the first ever real honours culinary arts program that had food and cooking all the way through the four years of it.

And that melded liberal arts education with vocational education.

So as part of that then, I think I attended the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in the year 2000 for the first time.

And I found my tribe, you know, I had been a chef before.

an educator up to then, but then I got really interested in food history.

It was over in Oxford that I bumped into, to Dorothy a few years later.

And then Dorothy came and she did her, she did a master's in, in, it was in food product innovation and, and, and our culinary innovation and fruit product development.

But the reason she did that module or did that master's is because there was a subject called gastronomy on it.

You know what I mean? She ended up then doing her master's thesis and I supervised her master's thesis.

And then she went on and she did a PhD on the culinary manuscripts of different culinary manuscripts in Ireland, but particularly one particular one that had a whole you could say a whole archive around it so that you could really get deep into it so so we got you know we got to know each other we got to like each other we got to work well with each

other we got to

you know as you said in your introduction we we co-founded the dublin gastronomy symposium in in 2012 and you know we'd work together on various things so when i came during covert when i came to think about this idea about identifying all the experts in various fields and asking them to give us a chapter each.

I had reached out to Dorothy first to ask her, as an expert in her field on culinary manuscripts, would she do a chapter for us? And then I asked her, actually, by the way, would you co-edit it with me? And she said she would.

So I think that's really how it got going.

I don't know, Dorothy, if you want to add in anything extra there.

no no that that about sums it up yeah but we didn't know we didn't well maybe you did know and just didn't tell me completely what was in your head but we didn't quite realize how big a project it was going to be and the the way academics welcomed it they were delighted to be able to come from their particular spheres of expertise to this area of food history and to know that they were kind of in the hands of food historians as well.

Well, I suppose in some ways it was a COVID project.

But then going back further, it probably has a, you know, a gestation period of probably 20 years or 25 years even, you know.

So we, around what was the Dublin Institute of Technology, it's now Technological University Dublin.

We, around 25 years ago, we started to teach food history, a subject called gastronomy to undergraduates.

It was a program in culinary arts, which was probably the first ever real honours culinary arts program that had food and cooking all the way through the four years of it.

And that melded liberal arts education with vocational education.

So as part of that then, I think I attended the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in the year 2000 for the first time.

And I found my tribe, you know, I had been a chef before.

an educator up to then, but then I got really interested in food history.

It was over in Oxford that I bumped into, to Dorothy a few years later.

And then Dorothy came and she did her, she did a master's in, in, it was in food product innovation and, and, and our culinary innovation and fruit product development.

But the reason she did that module or did that master's is because there was a subject called gastronomy on it.

You know what I mean? She ended up then doing her master's thesis and I supervised her master's thesis.

And then she went on and she did a PhD on the culinary manuscripts of different culinary manuscripts in Ireland, but particularly one particular one that had a whole you could say a whole archive around it so that you could really get deep into it so so we got you know we got to know each other we got to like each other we got to work well with each

other we got to

you know as you said in your introduction we we co-founded the dublin gastronomy symposium in in 2012 and you know we'd work together on various things so when i came during covert when i came to think about this idea about identifying all the experts in various fields and asking them to give us a chapter each.

I had reached out to Dorothy first to ask her, as an expert in her field on culinary manuscripts, would she do a chapter for us? And then I asked her, actually, by the way, would you co-edit it with me? And she said she would.

So I think that's really how it got going.

I don't know, Dorothy, if you want to add in anything extra there.

no no that that about sums it up yeah but we didn't know we didn't well maybe you did know and just didn't tell me completely what was in your head but we didn't quite realize how big a project it was going to be and the the way academics welcomed it they were delighted to be able to come from their particular spheres of expertise to this area of food history and to know that they were kind of in the hands of food historians as well.