Eat This Podcast
Talking about anything around food

Shop front of the Chinese takeaway in Dublin with the word Sunflower and Chine symbols in yellow on a brown background. Inside the takeaway you can see two customers and a bright green neon strip. There are reflections in the window.

The contents of a spice bag, showing chip, onions, green peppers and bits of presumably chickenIn 2008, the legend goes, staff at a Chinese takeaway in Dublin cooked themselves up a special treat after hours. Nothing too fancy, but tasty enough that soon their friends wanted the same. One thing led to another and today you can find something similar not only across Ireland but as far afield as New Zealand.

That after-hours dish became the spice bag, and in many ways the story of the spice bag is the story of assimilation, innovation and widespread adoption that can be told about so many “immigrant” foods. The spice bag emigrated, came back home, and found new modes of expression among communities who took the same basic essentials on which to layer their own particular tastes of home.

Notes

  1. I met John Mulcahy at the Food and Drink as Education Conference, which he helped to organise.
  2. John Mulcahy’s paper “A is for Aircháelán”: the case for compiling a compendium of food in Ireland offers a taste of the breadth and depth of information he has compiled.
  3. Here is the transcript.

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Marieke Hendriksen, in our recent conversation, told me how her new junior researcher had “got an allergic reaction and ended up in A&E” as a result of eating too much fermented food. In the past, Marieke added, “because people ate so many fermented foods, they must have had a higher histamine tolerance.” That rang a […]

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