Food Rules and Rituals - Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023 - Mark McWilliams
‘Perfectly Civilised and Proper’: The Social and Cultural History of Blood as Food in Ireland
Food Rules and Rituals - Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023 - Mark McWilliams
Kate Ryan [+]
Description
The presence of blood as food in the cultural and social history of Ireland is a prism through which shifts in competing worldviews can be observed. In the practice, preparation and consumption of blood as food, it has been a food of high value and good economic sense, but also isolated by colonial propagandists to ridicule and intentionally misrepresent as a weapon of suppressive control. Blood, or black, pudding, the most familiar form of blood as food in Ireland, was once governed by a set of rituals and rules designed to bring a sense of community to its preparation through the formation of a seasonal meitheal. Roles were clearly delineated: men were responsible for slaughter and butchery, and women food preparation and preservation. Children were involved, minimally, to observe the rituals of pig slaughter and pudding making, learning through observation and communality. Blood pudding making was traditionally the output of women’s work on subsistence farms, the sale of which generated income and a way for women to assert autonomy in a patriarchal culture. Contemporary production of blood pudding is removed from the domestic sphere and the work of women into the commercial sphere and the work of men, a contextual change that enabled the elevation of blood as food from the ordinary to the extraordinary. In doing so, embedded, ruralised rituals around blood pudding making began to demise: the gathering of the meitheal, the communal experience, exchange of knowledge and recipes, the sharing of food, and feasting together. The present day ‘up sell’ of blood-based food products as a healthful ‘super’ food run concurrently with global issues of food poverty, wasteful systems of food and climate change. Such considerations have been re-labelled for modern times, but their essential messages of good food, good economy and food as a valuable resource would be recognisable to those who once relied on blood as food as an important part of a diet centred on self-sufficiency and good domestic economy.