Introduction This book is the most ambitious and comprehensive academic study of the history of food and drink in Ireland that has ever been published. It is admirably long term in its scope, beginning with the Mesolithic inhabitants of the island and stretching right up to the Irish restaurant scene of the early twenty-first century. It is also interdisciplinary, the outcome of collaboration between archaeologists, historians, natural scientists, a sociologist if you include me, and, yes, cooks. It is curious that the historyoffood, drink andcooking remained for avery long time*and emphatically not only in Ireland*the domain of enthusiasts and mainly amateur historians. Cookery books were among the earliest to appear in most of the vernacular languages of Europe during the decades after the invention of moveable-type printing. These, and the manuscript sources that preceded them, did not escape the attention of antiquaries and bibliographers. For example, as early as 1780, Samuel Pegge published his edition of The forme of cury, containing recipes from the court of King Richard II of England (137799).1 In 1790, the Reverend Richard Warner republished that manuscript, along with several others from the late Middle Ages, in his handsome folio Antiquitates Culinariae.2 Still more were collected in Frederick Furnivall’s Early English meals and manners.3 Similar manifestations of interest are evident in several other European countries, especially in France, where national pride in la cuisine française is clearly evident from the mid-seventeenth century. Georges Vicaire’s Bibliographie Gastronomique of 1890 runs to almost a thousand pages and includes books in a number of European languages.4 In the twentieth century, one thread in food studies was work by historically orientated nutritionists and nutritionally orientated historians. Examples include Histoire de l’alimentation et de la gastronomie by the French medical man Alfred Gottschalk, The Englishman’s food by Sir Jack Drummond and his wife Anne Wilbraham, who were nutritionists by training, and Plenty and want by the nutritionally expert social historian John Burnett.5 And a final * doi: 10.3318/PRIAC.2015.16 1 Samuel Pegge (ed.), The forme of cury (London, 1780). 2 Richard Warner, Antiquitates Culinariae, or Curious tracts relating to the culinary affairs of the Old English (London, 1790; facsimile edn London, 1981). 3 Frederick J. Furnivall (ed.), Early English meals and manners (London, 1868). 4 GeorgesVicaire, BibliographieGastronomique(Paris,1890;facsimileednLondon,1978). 5 Alfred Gottschalk, Histoire de l’alimentation et de la gastronomie depuis la préhistoire jusqu’à nos jours (2 vols, Paris, 1948); J. C. Drummond and Anne Wilbraham, The Englishman’s food: a history of five centuries of English diet (London, 1939); John Burnett, Plentyandwant:asocialhistoryofdietinEnglandfrom1815tothepresentday(London,1966). Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 115C, xixix # 2015 Royal Irish Academy thread worth mentioning is that of the ‘scholar-cooks’*cookery book writers whose pursuit of recipes is grounded in serious historical research and whose writings, in my own experience, often contain insights worthy of historical investigation. Prominent examples from Britain are Dorothy Hartley, Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and Alan Davidson, all of whose works also exhibit substantial literary quality.6 The scholarly investigation of old recipes continues, as can be seen in Madeline Shanahan’s study of Irish manuscript recipe books in this volume.7 This is only to hint at what was already an extensive literature. Yet, although such trends rarely have a precise beginning, the academic study of the history of food and drink may be said to have commenced its ‘take off into selfsustained growth’ following Fernand Braudel’s celebrated call, in the Annales in 1961, for a ‘history of material life and biological behaviour’.8 This was especially influential because the leaders of the Annales School of historians from Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre onwards encouraged collaboration with social scientists, and their journal was read by anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists as well as historians. At least partly as a result, by the 1980s the growing body of research in the history of food and eating had spilled over into more theoretically orientated writing in anthropology by*notably*Mary Douglas, Jack Goody, Sidney Mintz and Marvin Harris, and in sociology by Anne Murcott and (if modesty...