Tag Archives: Ireland

Culinary History, Food and Drink, Global Exchange, Summer 2026

Arizona Mesquite Cornbread: An Irish and Native American Connection

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By Amber Sampson

Butter, corn, and mesquite: these are the ingredients that make up the recipe reflecting my family’s Irish immigration, culinary adaptations, and native food traditions in our Arizona home today. Specifically, the invention of this recipe was shaped by my culinary background: as a Chef living and working in Phoenix, Arizona, cornbread is a staple on many menus. Sweet from local honey, and zesty oranges, the base recipe for this cornbread was baked regularly to accompany bean stews in my childhood home. 

When my academic career grew outside of the kitchen and into my food anthropology and replication archaeology work, I began incorporating more native ingredients into each dish. As a result, I acquired a new respect for nutritious nixtamalized corn products and the history of native foods in America. Nutty and smokey mesquite flour, foraged from the trees shading my kitchen, easily found a home in this recipe. Finally, through work with the Phoenix Irish Cultural Center and McClelland Irish Library, and my grandparents’ meticulous genealogy efforts, I understood how the local high quality Shamrock butter, from another Irish immigrant family, was tied directly to my Irish ancestors’ brave and butter-filled past. 

Now distinctly it’s own, the sweet, smoky, and nutty flavors of my Arizona cornbread connects cultural groups across time and space, allowing eaters to travel through 200 years of culinary change, and taste the preservation of these cultural stories. 

Butter

As a Chef and Cultural Anthropologist, when asked to craft a recipe that reflects the movement of my own ancestral immigrant communities, butter is the baseline, the fat and foundation of the dish. In the 1880’s, butter and a hunger for more brought my family from County Cork, Ireland, to America. Prior to 1880, my Paternal Irish lineage worked in Cork, specifically in the dairy and butter making business. Eventually, when my maternal family immigrated in the 1880’s, they opened and operated a commercial dairy. Buttermakers are in my bloodline and also that of many Irish immigrants as the Cork Butter Exchange, established in 1769, became the world’s largest butter market. Due to its “rigorous grading system,” the Cork Butter Exchange “transformed Irish butter into the first global food brand, with hundreds of thousands of casks shipped globally.” (Source: NPR) Many global eaters knew Irish butter in their kitchens, on their breads, and in their bakes long before they met someone from the emerald isle. 

Cornmeal

To add body to the recipe, I drew inspiration from the important relationship of hospitality between Native communities in the United States and Irish citizens during the potato famine. Walking though the Cobh Heritage Centre in Cobh, County Cork Ireland, one bag of cornmeal nestled in a display, among lists of passengers names and replications of historic shipwrecks stirred my attention. This bag of cornmeal tells the story of commensality across seas, and also of understanding between two groups, who supported each other through suffering. 

By 1845, crops began failing in Ireland due to an infestation of Phytophthora infestans. As a result of the potato blight, by 1852 over one million Irish people had died of starvation or from disease caused by malnutrition; over one million more Irish emigrated to other countries, including my relatives. 

What connects this cornbread to all of these communities? Their shared hospitality. In 1847, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, still reeling from the deadly forced relocation known as the ‘Trail of Tears’, learned of the Great Hunger in Ireland, and Choctaw tribal members collected, “$170 (equivalent to about $5,000 today),” sending their donation and corn with recipe cards across the Atlantic to aid starving Irish families. In reflection, the Choctaw Nation has stated that, “This remarkable empathy—donating aid while facing extreme deprivation—forged an unbreakable transatlantic kinship.”

Grains given were never forgotten, and in 2020, at the height of Covid, citizens of Ireland raised over $1 million in relief funds for food and aid for members of the Navajo and Hopi nations. “Adversity often brings out the best in people,” the Choctaw tribe said in a statement. “We are gratified – and perhaps not at all surprised – to learn of the assistance our special friends, the Irish, are giving to the Navajo and Hopi nations. Our word for their selfless act is ‘iyyikowa’ – it means serving those in need.”

Mesquite

Feeding those in need is tricky during the best of times; in the hot, dry desert it’s even more of a challenge. Mesquite flour, our final ingredient, is milled from the dried wild pods growing on varieties of mesquite trees here in the Southwest. It offers a tasty solution as mesquite trees’ flavorful pods are legumes, in the same biological family (Fabaceae) as beans and peas. While you may not be familiar with the flour milled from these pods, modern gastronomers often utilize mesquite wood for its smokey sweet depth of flavor in barbecuing. In my Irish family’s kitchen in Arizona, mesquite has become more than just the flavoring on a packet of potato chips. It shades our home, and provides sticky sweet summer sap, wood for cold winter bonfires, and pods to make the sweet, caramelly flour in this recipe. 

Phoenix is the traditional homeland of the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash peoples, and as long as folks have called the Sonoran Desert home, parallel evidence showcases the utilization of wild and foraged desert foods, like mesquite. The use of these wild foods and later domesticated crop farming, over 4,000 years of O’odham Agriculture, led to the discovery by Archaeologist Dr. Jonathan Mabry, that Arizona is home to the oldest discovered history of agriculture in the United States. Food crops like mesquite and more became part of the State’s history when in 2016, Tucson was designated as the first UNESCO city of Gastronomy.1

 From an archaeological standpoint, we know from evidence of ancient grinding stones and processing of honey and velvet mesquite varieties that mesquite has long been utilized as a significant dietary staple for Indigenous communities of the Sonoran desert. Some of these grinding stones can even be found on display at the S’edav Va’aki Museum in Phoenix.

Mesquite pods ground into meal. Image credit: Amber Sampson.

In an article written for Archaeology Southwest, preservation archaeologist Aaron Wright describes that, even though native peoples were accomplished agriculturalists, mesquite was one of the most significant dietary staples for Indigenous communities of the Sonoran, Chihuahuan, and Mojave Deserts.”

From a few pods of mesquite one can make a coffee style drink, sweeten breads, and thicken soups, all while adding a warm, nutty, caramel flavor from this drought-tolerant and desert-adapted plant. From a nutritional standpoint, mesquite has a relatively low glycemic index (GI) to most other flours, (25 GI compared to 75 GI for whole wheat flour), is naturally gluten free, and has the potential to benefit in regulating blood sugar levels. Folks in Arizona can purchase mesquite flour directly from Native producers at the San Xavier Co-op and farm. Or try an honorable harvest this summer with tips from Southwest Forager, John Slattery’s 2016 book, Southwest Foraging, on how to best identify, gather, process and use these tasty pods.2 All from one remarkable plant, which has become part of my yearly foraging practice and weekly breadmaking ritual.

Making this mesquite cornbread immediately connects me to the land I call home, the land of the O’odham peoples. Each laborious grind of my mill to make this mesquite flour instills in me a future desire to protect and preserve its ecology, its unique cultural traditions. Mixing corn with butter, reminds me of the past stewards of these ingredients and their hospitality. The adaptations and determination of the Choctaw, the Navajo, the Hopi, the O’odham, and my Irish ancestors, all create culinary memories and moments to reflect and savor in this dish. Baked into each bite, are the bonds of people across time, who’s hunger created something I can only satisfy in my kitchen today. 

Butter, mixed with oranges grown in my Arizona backyard and honey from wild desert flowers all swirl together atop this smokey, sweet cornbread. 

Enjoy my Arizona Mesquite Cornbread with Honey Butter, recipe below.

Amber Sampson is an artistic, creative, passionate, activist, public speaker, researcher, and chef, who loves exploring the world through food. Sampson holds two degrees from Arizona State University, Cultural Anthropology, and Food Systems Sustainability. She is also a trained professional Chef, with a degree in Culinary Arts and Nutrition and a Master’s in Gastronomy from Boston University. She studied food and race at Harvard University, brought ancient bread to life with fellow Anthropologists from Yale, and was awarded the prestigious US Government’s Gilman Scholarship for archeological research with Arizona’s O’odham Nations.

Using food as a universal language, her research focuses on the anthropological relationship between food and culture. Her work brings present-day relevance to ancient meals, people, and customs, giving others a taste and connection to our delicious past, revealing a more sustainable and understanding future. She has taught at Boston University in the Gastronomy department and worked with the S’edav Va’aki Museum in Phoenix, as the Indigenous Foodways Facilitator, and as the lead coordinator for the Arizona Native Edible Experience. In 2024, Sampson was selected by the US Department of State to be the Arizona representative for the Global Food Security Summit in Washington, D.C. She currently serves on the board of directors for Slow Food Phoenix and lectures with Arizona Humanities on Arizona’s Ark of Taste Foods. You can find Sampson in the warm Southwestern desert of Arizona, teaching culinary, foraging, cooking, researching, gardening, and exploring our tasty past.

  1. Niethammer, Carolyn. 2020. A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ↩︎
  2. Slattery, John. 2016. Southwest Foraging: 117 Wild and Flavorful Edibles from Barrel Cactus to Wild Oregano. Portland, Oregon: Timber Press. ↩︎
Food and Drink, Recipes and Recipe Books, Series: Bread, Series: Irish Studies, Series: Oral History

My Soda Bread

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By Kathleen Lynch

There was something wrong about the package that was delivered to me at work one early spring morning years ago. It was addressed to me, and the return address also had my surname. But I didn’t recognize the name as a family member, and I didn’t know anyone in the town in Connecticut on the address. So I opened it with some sense that this package wasn’t intended for me, and that sense was amplified when I found inside a pair of house slippers, a zip-top plastic baggie that seemed to hold some dry ingredients, a recipe for Irish soda bread, and a note signed “mom.”

Why did some other Kathleen Lynch’s mom send me her soda bread recipe, never mind the slippers? That was the question I asked when I found a phone number online and called to report that this mom’s package had gone to the wrong Kathleen Lynch. In conversation, the mom assured me that she had addressed the package to her daughter correctly, and that said daughter was in Washington for a congressional internship, staying on East Capitol Street. A closer look at the package’s address confirmed that Kathleen was staying right across the street from my workplace, Folger Shakespeare Library, and that the package had been misdelivered, not misaddressed.

I rewrapped the package, added a note of apology, and left it on the doorstep of a townhouse across the street. I must have asked about her family’s soda bread recipe, noting that mine featured raisins to her caraway seeds. The next day, I had a charming note in return, discussing that Kathleen’s grandmother’s approach to soda bread, “equal parts deference and rebellion towards the old way.” What we shared was an appreciation for a simple bread, easily prepared, best eaten warm out of the oven, and laden with memories of our grandmothers, and for me, a recipe I will always call Aunt Pat’s. But were either of our breads true soda breads? I knew both could be dismissed as “tea cakes,” not soda breads. For some, it is an adamantly held distinction.

Intrigued, I wanted to know more about the history of soda bread in Ireland. In particular, I wanted to know if the oral history was true that I had heard many decades ago when I spent a year at university in Cork: the British government denied yeast to the Irish. In any Irish cookbook I pick up now, I read the headnote to breads to see if they introduce the history. Though Colman Andrews prefaces his Country Cooking of Ireland with “A Note on Geopolitics,” addressing the still contested terminology for national boundaries and county names, it does not address the specific trade regulations or coercive practices that framed rural subsistence diets. In My Irish Table, local chef Cathal Armstrong calls these “quick breads,” and notes that “yeast would have been too expensive for people in the countryside in the time of the British occupation” anyway.

Multiple editions of Aunt Pat’s soda bread recipe. Credit: author.

 

Whatever the longer history of Irish hearth-based home cooking of breads in ‘bastibles’ or cast-iron, three-legged pots, the soda bread recipe took its recognizable shape in the mid-nineteenth century with the introduction of baking soda into Ireland. Combined with sour milk or buttermilk, this agent worked to create “a very light and palatable leavened wheat bread that can easily be produced at home,” as Regina Sexton reported in A Little History of Irish Food. And as Armstrong adds, “most households in Ireland have their own recipe for quick breads passed down through the generations.”  In stressing ease and simple ingredients and tools, these authors all lightly skirt the question of impoverishment in old Ireland. For the spread of this breadmaking through Ireland also tracks the years of famine, death, sporadic relief efforts (including by English Quakers), the introduction of maize meal by the British government to offset the failing potato crops, and mass emigration.

I still don’t know the documented history of yeast in Irish baked goods. None of Sexton’s historical recipes in her “Cereals” section include it. I do understand how the oral history holds open the wounds of oppression. At the same time, I see welcome new cooking traditions taking hold in Ireland. They are based on the riches of land and seas, and often influenced by the work of the Allen family at Ballymaloe House and Cookery School in County Cork. Each of the authors above gives credit and expresses gratitude to that family. These new traditions speak powerfully to the work of nourishment and healing that food can do.

Slices of soda bread. Credit: author.

 

Memories are slippery things, formed and reformed over time and across experiences. In looking for a printed copy of “Aunt Pat’s” soda bread, I had to consider if I shouldn’t start calling this “Aunt Maureen’s” recipe, given that Aunt Pat—my mother’s sister—told me once that she adopted her recipe from Aunt Maureen—my father’s sister. So maybe it’s a Lynch recipe rather than a Gibbons one. On finding multiple printed copies of a recipe I haven’t consulted in years, I was also taken aback that Aunt Pat listed shortening as the fattening agent. That doesn’t make the bread any more satisfying to a purist, but it holds the memories of poverty closer. Or does it only speak to its time? Kathleen wrote to me that her mother made so many substitutions in the name of a healthier loaf that the “result was a dry, unpredictable rock.”

If in its purest form, soda bread does without even sugar and butter, is that not also a reminder of resourcefulness of the subsistence farmer? If Kathleen and I and all the sisters and daughters of our economically-deprived foremothers add those embellishments for a richer loaf, don’t we do it to carry forward traditions rather than be bound by them? In sitting down to a cup of tea and a slice of steaming hot soda bread with generous dabs of butter, don’t we keep their memories alive?

Irish Soda Bread

  • 4 cups flour
  • ½ cup sugar
  • 1 tsp. salt
  • 2 tsp. baking powder
  • ½ cup butter
  • 2 cups seedless raisins
  • 1 ½ cup buttermilk (or substitute whole milk with 1 tbsp. apple cider vinegar per cup milk)
  • 1 egg
  • ½ tsp. baking soda

Simmer raisins in pan of hot water. Mix and sift flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder. Work in butter with fingertips until it resembles coarse corn meal. Stir in drained raisins. Combine buttermilk, egg, baking soda. Stir buttermilk mixture into flour mixture until just moistened. Do not overmix. Bake in greased medium baking dish at 375 degrees for 40 to 45 minutes.

I think of this as my Grandma Gibbons’ soda bread recipe, and I’ve adapted it from the recipe my Aunt Pat contributed to her garden club cookbook years ago. But Aunt Pat tells me she took it from my Aunt Maureen on the Lynch side of the family. So I pass it along from both the Gibbonses and the Lynches of County Mayo.

About

Kathleen Lynch researches and writes about the Protestant spiritual autobiography and the communities of devotion that gave rise to them. She is the executive director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She tweets @thatklynch. Her only regret about a year spent in Cork, Ireland as an undergraduate is that it predated the opening of the butter museum there.

Family and Household, Food and Drink, Knowledge Transmission, Manuscripts, Medicine, Networks of Knowledge, Posts, Remedies, Series: Newspapers and Advertisements

‘The Cholera Manuscript’: A collection of recipes and cures from Co Limerick

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By Dorothy Cashman

Several years ago a manuscript collection of recipes came up for auction in Dublin. At the time, Ireland was in the throes of an IMF bailout and funding across all cultural institutions was grinding to a halt. This was the background to my suggestion to the National Library of Ireland that they should consider purchasing this manuscript to add to their collection.

Several things stood out about it, not least a nota bene attached to a recipe for White Current Wine, which for obvious reasons had particular resonance, and lent a touch of gallows humour to the initial reading of the contents (Fig. 1).[1] There was very little to grasp onto in terms of family history, other than an assertion that a block of the recipes were taken ‘from Lord Buckingham’s cook’, that reference to Mrs Hawksworth in the nota bene and the name ‘C. O’Carroll’ on the inside flyleaf. A trade label indicated that the slim book had been purchased from James Draper of Crampton Court in Dublin, bookbinders and paper merchants who coincidentally were appointed stationers to the Bank of Ireland in 1802.[2] The auctioneer verbally indicated that the manuscript was from Co Limerick.

National Library of Ireland, MS 42,105 .

The entries span twenty years, 1811 to 1831. The reference to Lord Buckingham’s cook, John Simpson, has added resonance for Irish readers, historically and in the present. Lord Buckingham, the first marquess, was twice lord lieutenant of Ireland, briefly in 1782/3 and subsequently from 1787 to 1789. In this latter period he created, by royal warrant, the Order of St Patrick.[3] The great ballroom of Dublin Castle was renamed St Patrick’s Hall at the time of the first investiture and is known as such to this day. It is the setting for the Irish State’s most significant ceremonial occasion, the inauguration of the President of Ireland, and where Ireland’s most honoured visitors are entertained.

Buckingham was also connected to Ireland through his marriage to Mary Nugent, daughter of the 1st Viscount Clare, and died two years after this manuscript was commenced, predeceased by a year by his wife. There is no reference to the fact that the recipes are from John Simpson’s published cookbook itself,[4] from which one could infer that the reflected glory from the provenance of these recipes arises as much from the fact of Lord Buckingham being the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland as it does from being a marquess on a distant shore.

Mrs Hawksworth, the other name accorded some weight by the scribe (Fig. 2) may be traceable to John Hawksworth, agent to Lord Castlecoote. One of the estates held by a junior branch of the Coote family through to the early twentieth century was in the townland of Mountcoote, Co Limerick, lending some credence to the intimation that the manuscript was of Limerick origin.  Interesting and amusing as the interjections and references to John Simpson and the chief bookkeeper of the Bank of Ireland were, it was the unusual assembly of four remedies for cholera that caught the attention, to the extent that I mentally referenced the collection as ‘the cholera manuscript’ thereafter.

National Library of Ireland, MS 42,105

Anglophone Ireland was an avid consumer of household and childcare books produced in Britain. There was also a healthy Irish market in reprinting popular British books; the copyright laws did not extend until the turn of the nineteenth century. Information of a domestic nature contained in gazettes, magazines, circulars and other printed material was quickly absorbed into the narrative in Ireland and this collection is evidence of this, notably so in the entries regarding the deadly disease. Cholera morbus is recorded as arriving in Limerick in June 1832.[5]

Tellingly, the recording of the first cure for cholera is located between a cure dated April 1831 and another dated August of the same year. This predated the spread of the disease from Britain to Ireland, indicating a heightened awareness in Ireland of impending disaster. This first entry is a close unattributed transcription of one appearing in The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany of 1831.[6] By March 1832 the disease had struck Belfast and Dublin, and between April and June it was ‘wrecking destruction in Ennis, Limerick and Tullamore’.[7]

Subsequent entries concerning cholera are positioned some time after October 1831, indicating perhaps a growing sense of panic in the household. The first of these, an ‘effectual cure for the cholera’, is transcribed as published in both The Lancet and The Isis: A London Weekly Publication.[8] The second is a cure ‘sent by Dr Shanfer from Warsaw to the Prussian Government’, while the final one is via the ‘Hon. Mrs Knox’, attributed to the Asiatic Journal ‘published nearly two years ago’. The disease having progressed through the country, normal domestic life resumes with the next entry, to take out stains or spots upon silk.

The National Library purchased the manuscript at auction. It fits neatly into their collection as being representative of what appears to be the narrative of one of the ‘less grand’, if not minor households in Ireland. Although relatively anonymous, it is noteworthy with respect to all of its quirks and sotto voce commentary, and recording of the passage of the dreaded cholera through the medium of possible cures.  Sufficiently noteworthy that they decided that it (MS 42,105) would be the first of the household manuscripts to be digitized. [9]

[1] The Irish state stepped in to secure Bank of Ireland in the form of a state guarantee in 2009.

[2] Mary Pollard, A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade 1550-1800 (London: Bibliographical Society, 2000), 168.

[3] The highest chivalric order for Ireland, established February 1783. The last peer appointed was in 1922. Since the foundation of the Irish state the order is officially dormant, as it was never abolished.

[4] John Simpson, A Complete System of Cookery (London: W. Stewart, 1806)

[5]Historical Records of the Existence and Progress of Cholera in the City of Limerick During the Months of May and June (Limerick: Edward Deane, 1832).

[6] The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany, Vol. 5 New Series May-August 1831, (London, Parbury, Allen, and Co.)  The recipe appears to have been copied from Thomas J. Graham, M.D., Modern Domestic Medicine, A Popular Treatise, (London: published for the author, 1827).

[7] T. De Bhaldraithe, ed., Cín Lae Amhlaoibh  (Cork: Mercier Press, 1979), 135. Sligo town suffered the highest number of fatalities in Ireland or Britain, fifteen hundred in a six-week period.

[8] The Lancet, 1831-32 (London, Mills, Jowett, and Mills), 216; The Isis: A London Weekly Publication,[iv] ed. Eliza Sharples, 1832, No 5, Vol. I, 74.

[9] The manuscript is un-paginated, the first cure for cholera morbus may be found on page sixty-four of the digitized copy. In its collections the NLI has the most extensive collection of archival material relating to Irish culinary history in public ownership, and the author would like to record her gratitude for their unfailing support in this regard.

Food and Drink, Medicine, Modern, Remedies

Nursing and Nutrition: Treating the Influenza in 1918-9

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By Ida Milne

Monster representing the influenza virus. E. Noble, c. 1918. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

This season’s higher than normal influenza cases has inevitably drawn comparisons with the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, the worst in modern history.  It killed more than 40 million people, according  to the World Health Organisation.  It punctured medical doctors’ newfound confidence in the power of bacteriology to fight infectious disease. In Ireland, it killed at least 23,000 people (the number of certified deaths from influenza and excess pneumonia) and infected about 800,000 people, one fifth of the population. Entire communities fell silent as it passed through.

Laboratories churned out vaccines, but the general consensus was these vaccines, made from bacteria suspected to cause influenza like illness such as Pfeiffer’s bacillus (haemophilus influenza), were ineffective.   Physicians threw everything in their medical bag at it, trying desperately, and in vain,  to find a cure for a disease they found baffling. Ultimately, doctors came to realise that the most effective treatment was good nursing – which included nutritious food – and strong liquor.

From a school journal The Clongownian, 1919. By kind permission of the editor, Declan O’Keeffe.

There was little consensus amongst the medical profession on what medicine worked best. Some suggested quinine and grains of aspirin to reduce fever and grains of opium for sleeplessness.  Calomel (mercurous chloride)  was liberally prescribed, as doctors then were very keen on keeping the bowels open.  Strychnine, which we tend to view now as the villain’s poison of choice in James Bond movies, was injected as a stimulant.

D.W. McNamara, a young house doctor in Dublin’s Mater Hospital during the crisis, later wrote that one of the popular treatments in the hospital was an injection of camphor in olive oil, which he described as ‘the very nadir of therapeutic bolony’. Instructed by his seniors to use it, he felt guilty that he had inflicted further pain and suffering on the very ill.  Some doctors, especially his older colleagues, favoured brandy or whiskey ‘in heroic doses’.  Alcohol had, he considered, a good deal to recommend it, as it was ‘probably no less worthless than any of the other nostrums, and at least its customers had a merry spin to Paradise’.

The demand for whiskey was so strong that some flu-stricken communities wrote to the Chief Secretary’s office to see what could be done to improve supplies. Non-prescription medicines were in high demand. As well as compounding regular medicines, pharmacists worked long hours to prepare huge quantities of tonics, cough medicines and poultices. The poultices were usually a mixture of boiling water and ground linseed, reputed to aid decongestion, enclosed in cloth and placed on the chest or throat.[1]

Journalists passed on tips on cures to their readership. The Irish Independent related that Major R. T. Herron, Medical Officer, Armagh Union infirmary, had suggested gargling with a solution of permanganate of potash as a useful preventive measure. Sir R. Winfrey, MP, a qualified chemist, recommended a prescription of thirty drops pure creosote, half-ounce rectified spirit, three-quarter ounce liquid extract of liquorice, two drachms salicylate of soda and twelve ounces of water, with the recommended adult dosage of two tablespoonfuls three times daily.[2]

While good nursing with bed rest, plenty of liquids and nourishing food offered a better chance of survival than medication, this was not always possible when every member of the family was sick. In some areas, the Women’s National Health Association, the St Vincent de Paul and neighbours set up community nursing schemes and community kitchens to cook and deliver nourishing soups and stews to those too weak to care for themselves. Local farmers often donated vegetables and meat.

Sinn Féin’s Dr Kathleen Lynn, who opened a hospital to treat influenza sufferers and vaccinate people, suggested that sufferers should be given milk, barley water and egg flip, while those in good health ought to fortify themselves with butter, eggs, fresh meat, vegetables and porridge.

Many newspapers reported that people were carrying handkerchiefs doused in eucalyptus oil in front of their mouths as a preventive measure.  Macnamara considered this practice about as effective against influenza as ‘a black beetle would be to halt a steamroller.’

Advertisement in Abel Heywood and Son’s Influenza: Its cause, cure and prevention, 1902. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Beef extracts Bovril and Oxo were in heavy demand, and production was sometimes halted when they ran out of bottles when sales went up. Beef extract or tea was understood to strengthen the body as a defence against infection. Goodbody’s Flour Mills in Clara, Co Offaly supplied Bovril to their 300-strong workforce  during the pandemic.

Manufacturers changed their regular advertising to offer their product as a useful treatment. Readers of the Enniscorthy Guardian were urged to ‘pour a little Cousin’s lemonade into a saucepan and warm it, to provide the perfect drink for influenza sufferers.’ A pharmacist in Gorey, Co Wexford, advertised his cod liver oil emulsion as offering  protection from influenza.  Purveyors of snake oils – the cure-all nostrums – swiftly added curing influenza to their list. Such claims preyed on the general fears created by an untreatable mass disease.

The use of whiskey as a treatment crops up frequently in written records and oral histories I captured from survivors or families of sufferers. Raphael Sieve, whose family lived in south Dublin at the time, told me that his father kept his teenage brother constantly mildly drunk with whiskey at the time, until he pulled through. When I presented this idea in a paper, a medical doctor suggested that there might be good science behind it.  He said that the reason that young healthy adults may have suffered more than normally in this flu was because of cytokine storms, where the immune system overreacts. He thought that small regular doses of whiskey might help prevent this.

One survivor I interviewed, Tommy Christian, from Boston, Co Kildare, was administered gruel, a type of watery porridge, which he said ‘had an awful lot of responsibilities’, a hint perhaps that it was intended to open his bowels. His family put a poultice made of linseeds and hot water wrapped in cotton on his chest, another common treatment. Tommy had his first taste of whiskey, in a hot toddy – made from sugar, whiskey and hot water – as that five-year old flu sufferer, a taste he said he continued to enjoy for the rest of his life.  Despite being extremely ill in 1919, he lived to his 99th year. Proof that the old remedies can sometimes be best?

Editor’s Note: Ida Milne’s book on the influenza epidemic in Ireland comes out in May 2018 and can be ordered through Manchester University Press.

[1] Telephone communication with a family member of Phillip Brady, who worked as a pharmacist at Kelly’s Corner, Dublin, during the epidemic; further details with author.

[2] Irish Independent, 4 March 1919.