Commonplace Volume 5 Issue 1

Hello! It’s been some time since I’ve last written, and this is the first mail most of you will have from Commonplace’s new home on Beehiiv. Life over the winter was dominated by (first) a hustle for new work, and then getting down to actually doing it. But this year is off to a good start, with a new item in my slowly growing collection of mid-20th century Irish cookery stuff.

This is a mid-20th-century Irish cookbook (the donor prefers to remain anonymous, but should know that I am delighted with it).

This is a kind of publication that doesn’t really exist anymore: a government-produced set of recipes which was intended for teaching purposes, but recognised within the text itself as having wider application. Essentially, it’s a school book that was expected to see plenty of further use after school. This particular copy is rather battered, has inkblots on the cover, and a number of inserts of magazine clippings and hand-written recipes. Interestingly, there are no direct annotations, and there’s no name on it. There are also advertisements in its pages, which seem strange to the contemporary eye.

What’s immediately fascinating is that this is a wartime publication. For a variety of reasons, World War II does not loom as large in the Irish consciousness as it does in the UK, so the vast majority of wartime stuff I’ve seen before has been British.

This particular edition is from 1944, and Dorothy Cashman notes that it was re-printed many times (possibly every year?) between 1922 and 1959, so it would have been a widely recognised publication. It doesn’t seem to have survived nearly as well as the later All In The Cooking, though - there’s not a single copy to be found on eBay, for instance.

I’m particularly interested in advertising for products that were not then actually available.

While there was no rationing in Ireland, there were definitely supply issues - this jelly, and margarine, and various other goods were hard or impossible to come by. My father, who was born in 1943, has distinct memories of encountering pineapples (his older brother, in the Merchant Navy, brought back a suitcase of them around 1948) and oranges (which came from a shop in Enniscorthy where his father, my grandfather, worked).

I remember noting with interest when I was working on my undergrad thesis, which dealt with food production and consumption on an estate which bordered Northern Ireland, that there was zero mention of food being smuggled or distributed in the North. I’m pretty sure it was moved across the border, and that nobody paid any official attention to it.

There are some magazine clippings in this, which will in theory allow me to attach dates to the later usage of the book.

I cannot for the life of me find any trace of where the clipping above came from. Language use makes me guess 1960s, if it’s Irish, maybe late 1950s if it’s British. If I had to guess, I’d say British.

Brenda Costigan, though, was a food writer for the Irish Independent for 40 years, and retired in 2012 (she’s still writing and indeed publishing). So that means that the earliest this particular clipping can have been from is 1972. That’s a rather spectacular breadth of time for a not-much-than-a-pamphlet paperback to have been in use.

And there are also handwritten recipes on loose leaves of paper, such as this one for “bee candy”.

This is a stuff for feeding to bees, as far as I can make out, so the owner of this book must also have kept some. It’s interesting that the recipe is in here, rather than in a beekeeping book.

There’ll be more about this and similar books in future, I reckon. I’d like to get hold of more editions of it, too, particularly the earlier ones. The National Library has a few from different years: 1925, 1928, 1930 and 1941, so I can go and have a look at some of those. And I should write up some of the other bits of mid-century cooking ephemera I already have.

[Support Drew’s writing via Patreon, and see some of the general background of life! Or throw a coin in the hat via Ko-Fi.]