This delightful book provides a fascinating and totally engaging insight to the culture of Irish food. Over the centuries food in Ireland has done much more than simply nourish the body; it has through time soaked up mythological and folk belief, inspired song and verse, dictated the pattern of the working day and helped to celebrate the myriad of religious and secular festivals. While this book does include recipes, its overriding objective is to set Irish food in its unique cultural context. It goes without saying that food cannot be viewed in isolation from culture, and the foods we eat, and the ways in which we prepare them, are products of our cultural identity, and say just as much about us as our language, our music and general disposition. Over the millennia, food in Ireland has done much more than simply nourish the body: it has through time soaked up mythological and folk belief, inspired song and verse, dictated the pattern of the working day and helped people to celebrate the myriad of religious and secular festivals.