The evolution of the Irish banquet
From 11-course feasts featuring tongue and caviar to cured salmon and strawberries and cream – but never shellfish – our State dinners have undergone an interesting transformation in the past 100 years
THE televised lavish State banquet for the late Queen Elizabeth II during her historic visit to Ireland in 2011 very likely was the first time hundreds of thousands saw the extent of the Irish hospitality offered to distinguished foreign guests.
As it happens, though, the menu served on that memorable night — when Banríon Éilis offered a toast as gaeilge — was modest compared with the scale of entertaining at a time we consider to be most frugal in our history, the early days of statehood in the 1920s and the isolationist, self-sufficient 1930s.
The British monarch, along with President Mary McAleese and other guests, sat down to four courses — cured salmon, beef, strawberries and cream, and an Irish cheese plate. Decades earlier, they could have expected a great deal more. Food historian Dr Elaine Mahon, a lecturer in gastronomy and food studies at TU Dublin, trawled through the archives and found that, between the signing of the Treaty and the Emergency, up to 11 courses often was the norm.
At one dinner, the menu featured oysters served on crushed ice, with brown bread and butter, lemon quarters or shallot sauce, followed by cream of chicken soup, salmon Maître d’Hôtel (a savoury butter containing chopped parsley and lemon juice, served in liquid form in a sauceboat or solidified, in rounds or slices), côtelettes of foie gras (croquettes made with foie gras and diced truffles, formed into the shape of lamb cutlets, coated in egg and seasoned breadcrumbs, and fried in butter), spit-roast leg of lamb served with a salade russe (small dice of carrots, turnips, French beans, peas, truffles and mushrooms, tongue and
ham, lobster, gherkins, fillets of anchovies and capers coated with mayonnaise and garnished with beetroot, eggs and caviar), followed by an iced Mont Blanc as the sweet entremets (sweet brioche soaked in kirsch syrup, garnished with ice-cream, whipped cream and chestnut purée), asparagus croustade (asparagus on puff pastry) as the savoury entremets, and finished with fruit and coffee.
Presumably, waistbands were a little more generous back then.
Dr Mahon’s research for her PhD forms a chapter in Irish Food History: A Companion, an online resource and forthcoming book edited by Dr Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman, which in 28 chapters, split into six sections, covers how we ate from pre-historic times to today. Dr Mahon points out that much of the etiquette was inherited from the departed British administration.
‘Once independence came, the Irish government had to set up its own protocols for receiving important guests,’ she says. ‘The Department of External Affairs staff already knew an awful lot of the basics. There would have been people who had a good education, who would have travelled, and a lot of the examples were taken from abroad, usually from the likes of
Paris, the United States or Germany.
‘I actually found that the Government was entertaining on the same scale, in the same manner, at the same level, as its international counterparts.
‘It was really lovely to come across, because there has always been that kind of idea that there was nothing going on in Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s, and that it was a very boring, quiet place to be in and rather miserable. It was anything but, really.’
Spending was tight during the administration of William T Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal between 1922 and 1932, with just £97 shelled out, roughly €7,638 in today’s money. By the end of the 1920s, that had risen to £1,700, or about €140,000 now.
Dublin Castle was in use as a courthouse, while the Four Courts were being repaired from the damage inflicted by bombing during the Civil War, and Áras an Uachtaráin was still the home of the governor-general until 1932, so much of the entertaining took place in hotels and restaurants, including the Shelbourne, the Russell and the Metropole.
‘Despite stated policy and a modest budget, the Irish Free State Government undertook a range of high-level entertainment between 1924 and 1931, consisting of lunches, dinners, receptions and garden parties, and hospitality was extended to guests from the four corners of the globe,’ Dr Mahon
THE STYLE OF COOKING WAS HEAVILY INFLUENCED BY FRENCH HAUTE CUISINE
writes. ‘Justification for entertaining “distinguished visitors” varied. Particular note was taken of those whose impression of Ireland had the potential to influence the international community, or to establish links with other countries — and was offered as a means to cement relationships, reward friendships and to establish new connections.’
The most significant of these was the State banquet held in honour of United States Secretary of State Frank B Kellogg — no relation to the cereal family — during the first official visit to the Irish Free State in August 1928, and a year before he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The style of cooking was heavily influenced by French haute cuisine, in the style of the famous chef Georges Auguste Escoffier, and menus usually consisted of an hors d’oeuvre followed by soup, a fish course, an entrée, the remove, the roast, sweet and savoury entremets (small dishes between larger courses), and finished with dessert and coffee.
The wine choices, usually ordered at half a bottle per guest, most often were French or German too, and included the likes of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge and Veuve Cliquot Champagne, Liebfraumilch and St Émilion grand cru, while port and liqueurs such as Cointreau rounded out the alcohol choices. ‘A lot of the hotel and restaurant head chefs were foreign-born, and they trained young Irish chefs who were coming into the profession, and who would go on decades later to run their own kitchens,’ Dr Mahon says, citing Dr Mac Con Iomaire’s parallel research.
‘So, later in the 1930s, when [Eamon] De Valera is hosting dinners, you see the like of saumon de Lucan, salmon of Lucan, on the menu. You get these kinds of dishes that are named after a place, which again is in the French tradition.’
When De Valera became taoiseach, Dublin Castle once again became the venue for State dinners.
‘He was firmly, and publicly, reappropriating the building that had symbolised British presence in Ireland for so long,’ Dr Mahon writes. ‘The castle began to be used for official events, starting with the State reception during the Eucharistic Congress of 1932.’
This led to a situation that shows the power of the Catholic Church at the time. ‘The state reception nevertheless took place under the direction of the Archbishop of Dublin, Edward Byrne, who was the official host of the Congress and of the
Papal Legate, Cardinal Lorenzo Lauri,’ Dr Mahon explains. ‘The reception was not an Irish State occasion in the same sense as the banquet and reception for Frank Kellogg, where Cosgrave had been convenor as well as host.
‘Archbishop Byrne’s office had made it clear that hospitality offered by the archbishop took precedence over that of the State. A government function was most welcome, his office conveyed, but would have to take place in accordance with the archbishop’s wishes and after any event held by him. Certain characteristics of the reception, such as the playing of the Papal Hymn and the absence of any Presidential Salute reinforce this, as do other aspects such as the seating arrangements, all of which were subtle displays of the precedence of the Catholic Church over all present, including the Irish Government.’
The first solely State reception in the castle was held on St Patrick’s
Day 1933, in honour of the diplomatic and consular corps, with 500 guests invited. For the first time, and by no means the last, the catering was outsourced to JE Mills, the premier company in its field, though dishes were named less specifically geographically, just as Limerick ham or Irish lamb.
Only in the 1950s does more local provenance again become a feature on menus, with the likes of Achill smoked salmon. There isn’t so much a real focus on requesting Irish goods or Irish ingredients, though of course they would have been locally sourced. Only exotic foodstuffs such as foie gras and fruits would have been imported.
With a change of governorgeneral in 1932 came the chance to accommodate him beyond the Viceregal Lodge, now the Áras.
‘In August 1933, De Valera
ALL THE INGREDIENTS HAD TO COME FROM THE ISLAND OF IRELAND
decided to host a reception there in honour of the delegates of the Fifth Biennial Conference of the World Federation of Education Authorities,’ Dr Mahon writes. ‘While this might be considered another means by which De Valera was reappropriating symbols of British rule, it also made sense to hold the reception there given the capacity of its grounds.
‘The cost of preparing the lodge and gardens for the party was estimated at £213.10 [approximately €20,500]. One thousand chairs were hired, a temporary bridge was built to facilitate access from the south entrance, duckboards were laid for guests’ carriages, and mats were placed at strategic points to prevent the heels of ladies’ shoes going through gaps in the floors.
‘It was a considerable amount of work, and the expense involved in opening the lodge for a single day was ultimately deemed too costly to repeat. It was not used again until it became the official residence of the first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, in 1938.’
In the 1940s, the Department of
External Affairs (now Foreign Affairs and Trade) moved to its current home in Iveagh House on St Stephen’s Green, where it built up an impressive wine cellar.
Perhaps the most famous State dinner held there was in honour of US president John F Kennedy in
June 1963, just months before his assassination that November.
That is the point at which Dr Mahon’s research ends, and because of it, she was invited to last year’s Kennedy Summer School in New Ross.
‘It was the 60th anniversary of the visit and I was invited to curate the speaker’s meal, in this case EU commissioner Mairead McGuinness,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t an exact copy, because it was buffet style, and it was the end of August for us, where the dinner was in June, so seasonality is always a bit of an issue. Interestingly, though, the JFK menu was rather similar to the one served to Queen Elizabeth in 2011.’
There are, of course, many issues in play when deciding on menus for foreign guests.
There are the usual concerns — some guests might be completely vegetarian, or not eat specific meats for religious reasons. Others might be having two or more meals in a single day, so duplication is avoided. And shellfish never features at all in the bigger banquets.
Nowadays, the food is an advertisement for Ireland itself. ‘The whole idea of the menu for the queen, cooked by Ross Lewis, was that all the ingredients had to come from the island of Ireland, it had to showcase the very best Irish ingredients, and the main course had to be beef,’ Dr Mahon says.
‘The only difficulty with that menu was that we don’t make our own sugar any more, and we don’t grow vanilla, so those were the two exceptions that had to be made in terms of the accessing of all of the ingredients on the island.
‘There’s no doubt that we have extraordinary beautiful ingredients and, in the last ten or 15 years, people who have had fabulous training as chefs in Ireland and did some time abroad have now come back and are doing amazing things with food. We’re really very lucky with the food culture we have.’
With the number of courses much reduced, it must be said that State entertaining has become a lot healthier over the course of a century too.
Dr Mahon’s book, based on her PhD, is called The Minister Requests The Pleasure: Diplomatic Dining And State Entertainment By Irish Ministers For External Affairs, 1922-1963, and will be published by Peter Lang International Academic Publishers in Oxford
THE JFK MENU WAS SIMILAR TO THE ONE SERVED TO QUEEN ELIZABETH