Relish, Condiment, “Kitchen”: Bastions of Irish Food Practice for Fourteen Hundred Years

In his 2016 book “Early Irish Farming”, Kelly notes that we are blessed with a large amount of information about the food eaten by the early Irish and how it was cooked. He relies on that which resides in the Old Irish texts, especially the law-texts and sagas. Kelly’s sources make it clear that our core staple diet was bread and milk, supplemented by \u27tarsunn\u27 or “annlann” (Irish for relish, condiment), later known as “kitchen”. But what constituted a relish not only varied over the centuries but also according to who was doing the eating, so that in a rigorous penitential diet demanded by the monasteries even milk was classed as a relish while during the famine it was dictated by whatever was available. Later on, evidence of “kitchen” demonstrates that no cuisine or foodway is isolated – there are continual influences, some obvious, some very subtle, but they are there, and should be recognized for the richness that they bring. This is an attempt to show how “kitchen” reflects the movement of people but yet is a constant in the Irish culinary psyche over hundreds of years