School: Ballyhurst, Tipperary (roll number 4562)

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1. Food in Olden Times (continued)

   

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   a day and usually oat meal porridge with a pint of their own skimmed milk. There were no creameries there years ago. The men went to work in the fields at daybreak and came into their breakfast after sometime. That meal consisted of either potatoes or porridge. The year of the famine people lived on yellow meal porridge and butter milk or skimmed milk. At time people would boil milk into curds and whey and when cows calved they would boil the beastings until it got thick, flavour with salt and then put it in wooden noggins and eat it with a spoon all sitting around the fire. Tea was only used on Easter Sunday and Christmas Day very little bread with their own flour and very dark in colour and so hard it would break ones teeth it was baked on an open fire or a large flat iron called a griddle. Never covered as there was no oven pot. There were many old customs some still live on. Yet eating many eggs on Easter Sunday is not now carried out because people use them everyday. Large bon fires and big gatherings on St Johns Eve are fading but a great many spill fowls blood on the threshold on St Martin's Eve. Fire brands are still used that is an iron frame with three legs about a foot long, very useful to leave a pot or a fry pan on when cooking. A pot can be hung on a crane and let up and down as required. When baking a cake an oven pot is hung on the crane by pot-hooks and covered with a lid to fit on which lighted wood or turf is put cabbage turnips or parsnips are usually cooked with bacon.

   

   Transcribed by a member of our volunteer transcription project.

   History Edit

   Topics

   1. products
      1. food products (~3,601)

   Language

   English

   Collector

   May Ryan

   Gender

   Female

   Age

   13

   Address

   Camea, Co. Tipperary

   Informant

   Mrs Ryan

   Gender

   Female

   Age

   46

   Address

   Camea, Co. Tipperary