Yet after reading Irish Food History: A Companion, published last September and edited by Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman, I found much more to savor beyond the pint and potato. Featuring 28 essays from renowned scholars, this 800-page volume traces Irish food history from the Neolithic period to the present. 

This St. Patrick’s Day, we’re raising a glass with a resounding “Sláinte!” and reflecting on these fascinating food facts from the Emerald Isle.

As early as the Bronze Age, communities in Ireland began filling wood, clay, or bark containers with butter and burying them in peat soil. Researchers are still debating the raison d’être of bog butter (also known as “ancient” or “fossil” butter), but theories include attempts to deepen the butter’s flavor, to mark property boundaries, or to serve as an offering for fertility and community survival.

Medieval Ireland was ruled by a number of local kings, each governing a territory (known as a tuath) spanning approximately one-sixth of a county. Banquets were often hosted by over-kings (rúiri) who presided over entire counties, which was reflected in the seating arrangements. In the legendary feasting hall on the Hill of Tara, guests sat in literal tiers according to status. Servants, for instance, sat on the ground with their backs against the knees of noble guests. In the center of the hall ran a long spit for roasting meat, with each guest receiving a specific cut according to their rank.

If there’s one beloved critter in medieval Irish culture and lore, it’s the bumblebee. Christian monasteries depended on smokeless beeswax to light their sacred rituals, which likely accelerated domesticated honey production. By the eighth century, pure raw honey (rather than honeycomb) was an essential accompaniment to bread and even appeared as flavoring for the king’s milk in the 11th-century satire Aislinge Meic Conglinne.

People have been drinking wine, mead, and beer in Ireland since the Bronze Age. The medieval Ulster Cycle of stories features copious accounts of drinking, with wine offered to princes, mead to nobles, bragget (a honeyed beer) to knights, and ale to the lower classes. Whiskey arrived later, first taken as medicine and eventually (by the 15th century) as a party drink. In 1608, the first license for whiskey production was issued from the British Crown to Thomas Phillips, who started Bushmills Distillery.

According to recipes, menus, and newspaper ads, 18th-century Irish cuisine was defined by both abundance and scarcity. While the poor subsisted on buttermilk, oatmeal, bread, and potatoes (introduced in the early 17th century), the gentry and aristocracy benefited from a growing agricultural system and an expanded international trade, which translated into highfalutin foods such as roast mutton, stewed apples, and chocolate—all washed down with imported brandy, rum, and coffee.

Daniel O’Connell is best known for his fight to win Irish Catholic representation in British Parliament, but he was also an enthusiastic gourmand whose personal tastes shaped his politics. His rise to power paralleled his growing appreciation for fine food, and he often dined in elite households on turbot, madeira wine, and wild game. But O’Connell also fought passionately to feed others less fortunate. In the 1830s, he distributed his personal stores of beef, bread, and seeds to the poor, and lobbied to reform the British-controlled land management system that led to the Great Hunger.

In the 17th century, rural families baked their bread, which was often made from oats and barley, on flat stones in front of the hearth, resulting in loaves akin to griddle cakes. In the 1840s, once wheat flour became more affordable and commercial baking soda was widely available, soda bread baked in iron pots became a staple. The beloved loaf is still cut into four portions, or “farls,” a callback to those hardy pucks of yore. 

Following the Great Hunger (1845–1852), many Irish people emigrated to England and the United States. Around that time, the advent of telegraphs, railway networks, and steamships made it easier and more affordable to send food packages abroad. Particularly around Christmas, Ireland’s national postal service was often overrun with cards and packages; in one curious example, a Dublin grandmother was known to ship her Christmas puddings to family in Britain, who returned the favor by sending an oven-ready goose to her doorstep.

The study of place-names, also known as toponymy, reveals linguistic evidence of Irish diets incorporating everything from honey and game to wild garlic, watercress, hazelnuts, and seaweed. Many counties, towns, and streets are named for foodstuffs: There’s a Buttermilk Lane in Galway, for example, and the village of Carriganimmy (“Rock of the Butter”) in Cork. Potatoes have a particular lexicographic power, with 72 different words for the tubers at every stage of cultivation, storage, preparation, and consumption, all varying based on local dialects and traditions.

Irish storytellers are exceptionally good at making you hungry while spinning tales. The poet Seamus Heaney wrote of memories of home-churned butter from his childhood in Derry, describing the butter as “coagulated sunlight.” A memorable sequence of James Joyce’s Ulysses features the iconic Dublin pub Davy Byrnes, where Leopold Bloom orders an odorous Gorgonzola cheese sandwich. And in the 11th-century satire Aislinge Meic Conglinne, an exorcism requires teasing a demon with morsels of roasted meat dipped in honey.

A self-taught cook ahead of her time, Myrtle Allen bought the Ballymaloe Estate in Cork in 1948 and in 1964 converted its dining room into a now-iconic restaurant featuring the farm’s harvest. At the time, women in Ireland were constrained by a “marriage bar” requiring public sector (and many private sector) employees to give up their jobs once wedded. Yet Allen was a visible leader of the country’s gastronomic revolution, and when she received her Michelin star in 1975—just two years after the marriage bar was disbanded—it represented not only a victory for Irish cuisine, but for Irish women everywhere.