Tastes of Home in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ireland: Food, Design, and the Refrigerator

Abstract

This article focuses on promotional incentives to embed new technologies—represented in this case by the refrigerator—and modern kitchen design in mid-twentieth-century Irish homes to consider how taste might have stimulated the trajectory through which these incursions of modernity ultimately became normalized in the Irish domestic foodscape. Strategies that called upon taste both as a gustatory experience and as a quality associated with some sanctioned manifestation of architecture and design were employed and became interdependent in these projects. Three examples derived from Irish popular culture—a full-scale model kitchen created for exhibition purposes, an advertisement that appeared in a weekly magazine, and a selection of cookbooks—are examined to investigate how the introduction of refrigerators in the domestic foodscape might have affected changes in taste and foodways. The rationale for studying tastes of home in this way is to underscore the efficacy of thinking about both direct as well as more remote stimuli for changes in food habits and practices, some of which are to be found outside predictable production, distribution and consumption systems.