Joe McNamee: How historic recipes can teach us so much about Ireland's past

Tracing the evolution of the Irish peasant’s diet over the centuries serves up the grievous impact of Ireland’s colonisation almost literally on a plate.

A gingerbread loaf recipe at National Library of Ireland. The NLI boasts an archive of over 300 cookbooks and 100 hand-written recipe manuscripts.

Did you ever wonder what kind of sandwich Gavrilo Princip polished off in Moritz Schiller’s Sarajevo delicatessen before he walked outside and assassinated the passing Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, in 1914, whose deaths were the catalyst that triggered the First World War?

I have always been fascinated by history, even though rote learning of dates and other ‘vital facts’ during my school days too often numbed that part of me that found history so interesting in the first place. Back then, history was ‘important figures’, mostly men, and ‘major’ historical events, mostly battles/wars, the Irish curriculum yet to truly engage with social history.