School: The Vale (An Gleann)
- Location:
- Leiter, Co. Cavan
- Teacher: S. Ó Brolcháin
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 1010, Page 415
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
See copyright details.
DownloadOpen data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Note: We will soon deprecate our XML Application Programming Interface and a new, comprehensive JSON API will be made available. Keep an eye on our website for further details.
On this page
- In olden times the Irish people ate only three meals a day as the Americans and French do now, that was breakfast dinner and supper. Breakfast time was about half-seven in the morning, dinner about mid day and supper was ready when the men came in from their work. Generally the breakfast consisted of good oaten porridge, dinner was potatoes, bacon or fish in the farmers' houses bacon and turnips on some days, herrings on a Friday, Of course the poorer classes did not have the food. Sometimes they had for dinner "Báinne circe" (hens' milk) Báinne circe was made by beating up a few eggs in a saucepan of sweet milk and put on the fire and boiled.
Potatoes were not used at every meal only in the two or three years of the famine or later when a new variety of potatoes came into the country and frourished. Sometimes people sat around the table in the centre in the flour and sometimes there was a fallen table in the kitchen and it would be let down at dinner hour and the family sat around it and took their meal from this table. In harvest time when men would be working hard with the farmers between breakfast and dinner hour the farmer's wife would take a "bannack" or two of oaten bread or more according to the number of men and a "meacan" of butter(continues on next page)
