Cooking equipment

Very little is currently known about the processes of cooking or food technology in sixteenth-century Ireland. The absence of surviving recipe books, household accounts, probate inventories and physical evidence of everyday domestic utensils makes it extremely difficult to assess what changes, if any, occurred in Irish kitchens in this period. Contemporary references to cooking practices are plentiful but largely unhelpful, being intended to denigrate the practices of both the ‘wild’ and ‘English-Irish’, whose cooking practices, according to Moryson, had ‘little by little been affected with Irish filthiness’. Nevertheless, it is possible to piece together at least some aspects of the material culture of food preparation in this period, and to compare them with contemporary practices in England.

Documentary evidence suggests that in the wealthier households, cooks in Ireland, as elsewhere, had a significant range of cooking paraphernalia at their disposal – and this gives us some indication of the type of cookery carried out and also of the methods of provisioning a large household in the sixteenth century. An inventory of the household at Castleisland, County Kerry, for example, shows that like most large households in this period, the castle was still very self-sufficient. The presence of items including meal and malt sieves, tubs to make cheese in, milking pails, butter churns, garden seeds, seed barley and so on, indicate that most of the household’s basic provisions were produced on site. Other items, too, were produced at home. The inclusion of mustard seeds, a quern with which to grind them, and mustard pots show that the household produced their own mustard rather than buying ready-made. This was not necessarily because ready-made mustard was not available locally. The Willoughbys at Wollaton Hall, whose dietary practices were investigated recently by Dawson, also produced their own mustard, in addition to buying a pre-prepared variety. Mustard was a very common accompaniment in England and was frequently served with preserved fish, which was eaten during Lent.

In terms of preparing food, the kitchen at Castleisland appears to have been equipped in a similar manner to a comparable sixteenth-century English kitchen. A mortar and pestle, for example, was used to pound herbs and spices and to mix together various ingredients.