What is your favourite food? Where do you think the ingredients to make it come from?
Some foods were named after the place that produces it.
Dublin Bay Prawns are famous, even though they are not found in Dublin bay. Wicklow and Kerry lamb and Galway oysters are other names you will see on menus. What is your local place famous for?
Traditional foods
Traditional Irish foods began to be seen as old-fashioned when new processed foods became available in the 1960s. Nowadays, many people are interested in the way their grandparents lived and the foods they ate. For example, in our grandparent's time, bread was baked at home and the vegetables that were eaten were often grown in their own gardens. Bacon and cabbage was a meal that was once very popular in Ireland.
Nowadays, traditional Irish food can be found side by side with Italian, Chinese and other ethnic food on supermarket shelves and on restaurant menus. Traditional food often takes a little longer to produce and prepare than convenient ready-made food but it is usually good for you. Traditional methods of cooking use less salt and less fat and contain less additives.
When you are shopping look out for traditional foods like farmhouse cheeses, stone ground cereals, like porridge and oatcakes, soda bread and cockles and mussels. Champ, colcannon, drisheen, boxty and Dublin coddle are still made in parts of Ireland.
