According to American householders, the incompetence of the Irish servant reached its fullest expression in the kitchen. Her specialties: blackened steaks, scorched coffee, gummy puddings, leaden pastries, and broken china, only the most expensive pieces. This ceaseless griping was in part a matter of prior experience—or, rather, the lack of it. Most nineteenth-century Irishwomen arrived in the United States with very limited culinary skills. If they were country people, as many were, they knew how to cook over an open peat-fire but had never used a stove, or even seen one. Indoor plumbing was equally alien, not to mention the foods themselves. Beyond boiling, they had scant knowledge of culinary technique. It was a cruel irony that “domestic cook” was one of the few jobs Americans were willing to grant them.
Living and working among the native-born, observing their domestic habits at very close range, the Irish servant received a crash course in the food culture of middle-class America. At the most nuts-and-bolts level, she was tutored in the mechanics of the American kitchen. For the Irish, that included how to operate a coal-burning stove, a contraption most had never seen before. More abstractly, she was introduced to American food traditions and assumptions. She learned, for example, what to feed a growing child (cheap cuts of beef and lamb, “mild” vegetables like peas and carrots, home-baked brown bread), what constitutes a nourishing breakfast (porridge, mutton chops, fish steaks), what foods should be served at a ladies’ luncheon (raw oysters, bouillon, lobster, sweetbreads in pastry), and what to cook for the Thanksgiving table (more oysters, roast turkey, chicken pie, creamed onions, mince pie, pumpkin pie). When she quit her job to marry and start a family, the typical pattern among Irish servants, she brought her knowledge of American food ways into her new life, applying it, piecemeal, to her own cooking.
Joseph Moore began his working life in America as a waiter, another job that often fell to immigrants or people of color. At some point, he also worked as a barkeep. Not only immigrants, but poor and working-class New Yorkers rarely stayed in one job for very long. Rather, they bounced from one to the next, following the changing demands of the city’s job market, which rose and fell according to the season. In the winter months, for example, when construction slowed, work was scarce for bricklayers, carpenters, and other laborers. For waiters, it was just the opposite. Winter was their boom season. But in the oppressive summer heat, when upper-class New York escaped to the shore or the mountains, city restaurants lost their clientele and waiters lost their jobs.
From the early nineteenth century onward, immigrants have played a vital part in feeding America. Working in jobs traditionally rejected by the native-born, they have peddled fruit, vegetables, fish, and thousands of other edible goods. They baked bread, slaughtered livestock, brewed beer, dipped candy, waited on tables, and cooked family suppers, to give just a few examples. Some of those immigrants—the Germans, for example—left a well-defined culinary footprint. On landing in New York, German immigrants established groceries, delicatessens, beer halls, lunch rooms, bakeries, and butcher shops, a kind of parallel food universe set apart from the city’s existing network of food purveyors and trades people. All of this food-based activity satisfied the distinct culinary needs of the German community. At the same time, the shops and eating places, the sausage stands and sauerkraut vendors, were points of culinary transmission, places where a native-born American could sample his first grilled bratwurst, or pretzel or glass of lager. The Irish, however, never established that parallel universe. Instead, much like Bridget and Joseph, they carved out a place for themselves in the existing culinary institutions of nineteenth-century America, a pattern that was rooted in their own culinary past.
When the potato, a New World food, first landed in Ireland at the end of the sixteenth century, the Irish larder was varied and nourishing, especially compared to the rest of Europe. At that time, the Irish diet was based on grain, mainly wheat, barley, and oats. Dried and ground into meal, these grains were baked into flat, dense griddle cakes, or boiled into a porridge called “stirabout.” Dairy was another cornerstone food. The Irish drank buttermilk and skim milk, while butter was so plentiful it was eaten in chunks, the way we eat cheese. For protein, they had fowl, mutton, beef (both salted and fresh), bacon, ham, salmon, herring, eel, trout, and shellfish. Their gardens were planted with turnips, peas, beets, cabbages, and onions. The sea was another source of vegetable matter, supplying the Irish with mineral-rich water plants. Over the next few centuries, the Irish larder contracted sharply, and as it did, the potato moved from the sidelines to the center of the Irish diet, a shift linked to much broader changes in the political landscape.
Though English interference in Ireland dates back to the twelfth century, in 1649 Oliver Cromwell and his army changed the course of Irish history. In the summer of that year, Cromwell was dispatched to Ireland to suppress a Catholic rebellion, killing thousands of civilians in the process. To complete his program of retribution, Cromwell confiscated Catholic-held land, redistributing it to his Protestant supporters. From this point forward, English absentee landlords dominated the local economy, while the Irish were reduced to tenant farmers.
A bad situation now grew worse. A quickly growing population, combined with economic pressures of the landlord system, forced the Irish to live off smaller and smaller plots of land. With their farms shrinking, the Irish increasingly turned to the potato as their primary food source. As they knew from experience, the potato was relatively easy to grow, even in poor, rocky soil, but above all, it provided more life-sustaining calories per square acre than oats, barley, or any other crop. (They also knew that the potato plant was particularly sensitive to moisture and frost, but they conveniently brushed aside these less attractive qualities until it was too late.) So, by the late 1700s, the once-varied Irish diet was severely streamlined. The average farmer now consumed roughly seven pounds of potatoes a day, skim milk or buttermilk, and, occasionally, as Sunday treats, oat porridge or bacon and greens. The reliance on potatoes became even more pronounced over time. In the decade before the famine, potato consumption rose to twelve pounds a day for men and ten for women, supplying the farmer with most if not all of his calories.
The rural Irish lived on potatoes, but to earn rent money, they put aside a small patch of land for raising chickens, ducks, and turkeys, selling the eggs and, eventually, the birds as well. Some families kept a cow, churning butter from her milk, which they also sold, and keeping the by-product, buttermilk. But the farmers’ most valuable asset was a more rotund and short-legged creature. Touring the Irish countryside, travelers to nineteenth-century Ireland reserved a page or two in their journals to marvel over the deference which rural families extended to their pigs. The following account comes from a particularly observant German visitor, Johann Kohl, who crisscrossed Ireland in the 1840s:
Nothing offers so striking a contrast to the meager, ragged wretchedness of the Irish peasant than the creature with which he shares his home—I mean his pig…. He feeds it quite as well as he does his children, assigns to it a corner in his sitting-room, shares his potatoes, his milk, and his bread, and confidently expects the pig will in due time gratefully repay.6
That moment came when the coddled pig, “so oily, so round, so paunchy,” was brought to market and sold, the profit going straight to the landlord’s pocket. Half-jokingly referred to as “the gentleman who pays the rent,” it was no wonder the pig was treated with such reverence. The family’s survival depended on him.
On the larger estates, the Irish continued to grow their traditional cereal crops and to raise livestock, but not for home consumption. Rather, both were exported to foreign markets, including the United States, along with butter, ham, bacon, and other edible goods. So, while most of Ireland survived on a single food, warehouses in the major port cities were culinary treasure houses. Struck by the discrepancy, Herr Kohl, our German tourist, offers the following description of the wharf district in Cork:
This city is well-known as the princ
ipal port for the exportation of raw produce of the whole of Ireland…. In the neighborhood of Cork are some of the greatest dairies in Ireland. Kerry and other cattle-grazing districts are also not very distant; so that here the largest quantities of butter, bacon, hams, meat, and cattle are brought together…. The quays of Cork present much that is interesting in all these varieties of merchandise, especially the embarkation of livestock, pigs, oxen, cows, etc…. One ship is being laden with firkins of butter for foreign lands, where Ireland must be thought one of the richest countries in the world, or she would not export those whole cargoes of fat.7
Contrary to popular conceptions of premodern Ireland as a food-starved nation, it was, in fact, exceptionally rich in edible resources. The peasantry, however, was excluded from the feast.
The Irish boiled their potatoes in large three-legged pots that stood over an open peat-fire. In between meals, women used their potato pots (in the west of Ireland, they were known as “bilers”) for washing. After the meal, it was a trough for the family pig, who received the peels. Filled with brown bog water and placed outdoors, the biler doubled as a looking glass. To strain their potatoes, women used an oval-shaped basket called a “kish.” Plates and cutlery were unheard of. Instead, women spread the potatoes on a table, if the family had one, and if not, on a clean patch of floor. In the absence of eating utensils, family members deftly peeled away the skin with their fingers to reach the steaming interior. Irish cooks satisfied their family’s craving for variety with a category of food known as “kitchen,” which was any fatty or highly seasoned morsel eaten along with potatoes, “to give the meal savor.” The most elemental form of kitchen was an infusion of black pepper and water, consumed as a beverage. Some forms of kitchen—salt fish, bacon, pepper—required money. Other forms were free. Along the coast, Irish cooks gathered shellfish and various kinds of seaweed, which they dried, adding it to the potato pot as a seasoning.
The Irish referred to the famine of the 1840s as “the Great Hunger,” to distinguish it from the many smaller “hungers” that had preceded it. The Irish historian William Wilde, father of Oscar Wilde, prepared a report for the 1851 Irish census on the many famines, crop failures, and related disasters in Irish history culminating in the Great Famine. Among them was the devastating cold snap of 1739–40 that caused nationwide destruction as the tubers froze solid into the ground. In fact, the verse that opens this chapter was written to commemorate the terrible loss of human life that followed.
No other immigrant arrived in the United States with a culinary tradition as skeletal as the Irish. By the time of the Great Famine, three centuries of the landlord system had stripped it down to a single carbohydrate and a handful of condiments. Where Germans and Italians and Jews worked hard to perpetuate native food ways, the Irish peasant had little to preserve. Other immigrant groups used their native foods to establish a collective identity in the New World. Not so the Irish. As Hasia Diner points out in her landmark book Hungering for America, the Irish found little to celebrate in the foods of their homeland. Rather, they turned to religion, music, drama, and dance, among other cultural forms, to assert their identity and connect themselves with the past and with each other. The one exception in all this, as Diner points out, was alcohol, mainly Irish whiskey. A symbol of Irish sociability and Irish independence, whiskey was the immigrant’s only source of consumable pride. Still, the foods of home, no matter how meager, could haunt the immigrant—especially at life’s most critical moments. The following encounter with a dying Irish seamstress was recorded by a New York charity worker in the 1860s. The woman, abandoned by her husband, lived with her two children in a tenement on the west side of Manhattan. “I was called in the other day and held a long conversation with her,” the charity worker begins:
She has no more fears, or anxieties, she is not even troubled about her little one. God will care for her…. She spoke of her many trials and sorrows—they were all over, and she was glad soon to be at rest.
We asked about her food. She said she could not relish many things, and she often thought if she could only get some of the good old plain things she ate in Ireland at her brother’s farm she should feel so much better. I told her we would get some good genuine oatmeal cake from an Irish friend. Her face lighted up at once, and she seemed cheered by the promise.8
For our New York seamstress, the very plainness of Irish home-cooking becomes its salient virtue. The same culinary aesthetic is at work in the fiction of Seamus MacManus, an Irish-American writer popular in the early twentieth century. The following excerpt comes from Your self and the Neighbours, a sentimental look back at the simplicity of Irish domestic life:
Oatmeal stirabout with lashings and leavings of buttermilk for breakfast, and for dinner a pot of fine floury potatoes, that when spread steaming on the table, were laughing thru their jackets to you to come on. Sometimes Molly could afford you even a fine bowl of buttermilk to kitchen the potatoes, and always plenty of salt, and pepper too.9
Even buttermilk! And plenty of salt! MacManus is clearly playing on the meagerness of the Irish larder, showing his American readers how little Molly had to work with, and yet how satisfying mealtime could be. The “laughing” or “smiling” potato, an oft-used expression in nineteenth-century Irish literature, hints at the deep affection the Irish reserved for their most important food. For most, a steady regimen of potatoes and buttermilk was oppressively dull—a “diet fit for hogs” is how one Englishman described it. But the Irish attachment to potatoes endured, even after the Great Hunger, when the food they relied on had betrayed them so cruelly, and continued among Irish immigrants in the United States.
Though food in the United States was more varied and abundant than it had been in Ireland, hunger was still a daily presence. After all, the bounty of the American market extended only to people with work, which, in bad times, could be elusive. Alice McDonald emigrated to the United States around 1866, during the rocky economic years directly following the Civil War. In a letter to her mother, Alice sums up her troubles. (The spelling and punctuation are her own.)
I take this opportunity of writing these few lines to you hoping to find you all in good helth as this leves me in at present…I wish I nevr came to New York it is a hell on earth…times is bad here for the last to years flour is 16 Dollars per barel beef 35 per pound…Butter by retell is seventy cents per pound you may think how the money has to go.10
Their dream of a better life gone sour, struggling immigrants had nothing to look forward to, so they looked back instead, savoring the foods of a former existence. Mary Anne Sadlier, born in Ireland in 1820, was a popular nineteenth-century author of didactic or instructional novels for immigrant readers. This is how one of her characters, a near-destitute immigrant, compares America’s scarcity to the good foods he remembers in Ireland:
Things are not so plentiful here…We haven’t the big fat pots of bacon and cabbage, or broth that a spoon would stand in; no, or the fine baskets of laughing potatoes that would do a man’s heart good to look at.11
The hulking pots of cabbage and bacon may have never existed in precisely the way he remembers. In all probability, they were three-quarters empty, but in his memory the hungry immigrant was free to embellish his culinary past, filling the pots and thickening the broth. Cabbage and bacon and boiled potatoes were poor people’s food, according to some, but to this homesick immigrant they represented the height of abundance.
The above excerpts notwithstanding, references to food in early Irish-American writing are extremely hard to find. Like many immigrants, the Irish never imagined that their daily diet was worthy of documentation, and as it happens, the rest of America seemed to agree. Their potato-based cuisine was far less intriguing to outsiders than Italian pasta or German sausage, and journalists largely ignored it. As a result, the Irish immigrant kitchen is a world largely closed to us. However, a quantitative picture of the Irish-American cook can be found in the multiple cost-of-living studies published in t
he first decades of the twentieth century. Several were conducted by the United States Department of Labor to help establish fair working wages. The question of household budget and how it was dispensed was also taken up by academics of the era, including a sociologist named Louise B. More, who organized a detailed study of how working-class New Yorkers earned and spent their money. Over the course of two years, she followed two hundred families living in Greenwich Village, an ethnically diverse neighborhood with a hefty percentage of Irish. Her report, Wage-Earner’s Budgets, provides us with a rare glimpse of Irish-American home-cooking a generation after the Moores.
According to More, the Irish-American housewife controlled the family purse strings, spending more on food than any other item, including the rent. The study also tells us exactly how she stocked her kitchen. Here, for example, are the weekly food expenses for a family of ten:
Milk, 2 bottles a day: $1.25
Eggs: 50
Three cans of condensed milk for tea (“and to spread on bread when the children have no butter”): 27
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