A training school for rebels: Fenians in the French Foreign Legion

In 1920, six years before Hollywood made the film Beau Geste, Bray and Arklow doubled for North Africa in another, less famous silent film about the French Foreign Legion made by the Celtic Cinema Company, entitled Rosaleen Dhu. Based on a story by John Denvir, the film tells the romantic tale of an exiled Fenian who joins the Legion and later marries an Algerian woman, only to discover that she is the heiress to a large Irish estate. Such escapism was probably welcome in 1920 as the War of Independence entered its bloodiest phase, but, in the best tradition of film-making, the tale was, in fact, ‘based on a true story’. During the nineteenth century a considerable number of Irishmen served in the Légion Etrangère, and a number of them were indeed members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In 1851, seven years before the IRB was established, one of its founders, Thomas Clarke Luby, set out for France, intent on joining the Foreign Legion in order to learn infantry tactics. The Legion had temporarily suspended recruitment at the time, however, and so his ambition was frustrated. This is the first known instance of Irish separatists identifying the Legion as a training school for rebels, though the idea of going abroad to acquire military experience was then current. The Cork Fenian J. F. X. O’Brien took part in William Walker’s 1855 filibuster in Nicaragua for much the same purpose

‘Dying Irish’: eulogising the Irish in Scotland in Glasgow Observer obituaries

The Glasgow Observer newspaper, founded in 1885 by and for the Irish community in Scotland regularly published both lengthy and brief funereal and elegiac obituaries of the Irish in Scotland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They marshal an impressive, emotive and oftentimes contradictory body of evidence and anecdote of immigrant lives of the kind utilised, and as often passed over, by historians of the Irish in Britain. They contain, however, a unique perspective on the march of a migrant people bespoke of their experiences and, perhaps more importantly, the perception of their experiences in passage, in the host society and ultimately in death. Moreover, the changing sense of Victorian sensibilities over the solemnity, purpose and ritual of death into the Edwardian era finds a moot reflection in the key staples of Irish immigrant obsequies with their stress on thrift, endeavour, piety, charity and gratitude. This article explores Glasgow Observer obituaries from the 1880s to the 1920s to see what they say about the immigrants, their lives, work and culture, the Scots, migration itself, the wider relations between Britain and Ireland, and the place where Irish and British attitudes to death meet in this period. It does so by drawing upon recent sociological perspectives on obituaries and their relationship with the formation and articulation of collective memory

Recognizing Food as Part of Ireland’s Intangible Cultural Heritage

Drawing on evidence from across a range of disciplines (literature, folklore, history, sociology, etc.), this paper explores the lack of an iconic link between Ireland and food, explaining the reasons why Ireland and food are not immediately linked in the popular imagination. It argues for recognition of foodways as a significant element in Ireland’s intangible cultural heritage. It highlights and interrogates constructs, such as ‘national’ and ‘regional’ cuisines, charting the growing scholarship around Irish food history from the ground breaking work of A.T. Lucas and Louis Cullen to a recent emerging cluster of doctoral researchers. The paper identifies the potential in ideas of the Annales School for the study of Irish food history. Finally, it argues for a serious engagement with Irish language sources claiming that this Gaelic heritage can provide a competitive advantage in a new age of innovation and creativity

Identified by Taste: The Chef as Artist?

This article discusses the role of taste among the senses using fictional depictions of taste, including Proust’s madeleine episode; Suskind’s Perfume: the story of a murderer; Esquivel’s Como aqua para chocolate; Harris’s Chocolate and Blixen’s Babette’s feast. The discussion also provides three historical case studies which highlight how an individual chef was identified against the odds by the individualistic taste of his or her cooking

Ireland

This book section provides a history of food in Irish culture from the early beginings to the present day

Interview with Andrew Dalby

Andrew Dalby (born 1947 in Liverpool) is an English linguist, translator and historian and author of numerous articles and several books on a wide range of topics including food history, language, and Classical texts. Dalby studied Latin, French and Greek at the Bristol Grammar School and University of Cambridge. Here he also studied Romance languages and linguistics, earning a bachelor\u27s degree in 1970. Dalby worked for fifteen years at Cambridge University Library, eventually specialising in Southern Asia. After his time at Cambridge, Dalby worked in London helping to start the library at Regent\u27s College and on renovating another library at London House (Goodenough College). He also served as Honorary Librarian of the Institute of Linguists, for whose journal The Linguist he writes a regular column. He later did a part-time PhD at Birkbeck College, London in ancient history (in 1987–93), which improved his Latin and Greek. His Dictionary of Languages was published in 1998. Language in Danger, on the extinction of languages and the threatened monolingual future, followed in 2002. Meanwhile, he began to work on food history and contributed to Alan Davidson\u27s journal Petits Propos Culinaires; He was eventually one of Davidson\u27s informal helpers on the Oxford Companion to Food. Dalby\u27s first food history book, Siren Feasts, appeared in 1995 and won a Runciman Award; it is also well known in Greece, where it was translated as Seireneia Deipna. At the same time he was working with Sally Grainger on The Classical Cookbook, the first historical cookbook to look beyond Apicius to other ancient Greek and Roman sources in which recipes are found. Dangerous Tastes, on the history of spices, was the Guild of Food Writers Food Book of the Year for 2001. He lives in France with his wife. He has two daughters and his latest book is co-written with his daughter Rachel, who lives in Greece, and is published by Reaktion Books.https://arrow.tudublin.ie/oxfor/1001/thumbnail.jp

Theodora Fitzgibbon

This is a biography of the internationlly renowned Irish food writer Theodora Fitzgibbon