Analysis: It's shamrock's time to shine, but there are still many historical and botanical puzzles to be solved about that little plant
Ireland's national holiday is an occasion when all sorts of Irish identities are to the fore and performed in an assortment of creative, contrived and intention-filled ways. In the process of identity-formation, food plays an important role in understanding how we see ourselves and how others see us.
But the question of food and identity in Ireland is problematic and complicated. For the week that's in it, here's another knotty question to add to the puzzle: is shamrock a little clover (seamróg) or is it something else? And could you eat it?
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Archives, 11984 episode of Anything Goes on how to tell the difference between shamrock and clover
These questions formed the core of Charles Nelson's 1991 book Shamrock: Botany and History of an Irish Myth. The botanist formerly of the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin explores the botanical and cultural identity of shamrock.
Looking at the early appearances of the word 'shamrock’ in English texts, Nelson draws attention to accounts of eating a plant called shamrock in the works of 16th and 17th centuries English writers on Ireland. In these works, the eating of shamrock is presented not only as a peculiarity of the Irish, but also spotlights the complexities of understanding people and their food choices, and how these choices are treated in histories and historiographies and in myths and hearsay.
Nelson believes that the first mention of the word shamrock in English is in the handwritten pages of The First Boke of the Histories of Irelande by the Elizabethan orator, scholar and Jesuit, Edmund Campion, who landed in Ireland in 1570. His manuscript describes the diet of the Irish in broad and non-contextualised terms: Shamrotes, watercresses, rootes, and other hearbes they feed upon. Otemeale and butter they cramme together. They drincke whea, milke, and bieffe brothe.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ News, shamrock farmers get set for their busiest week of the year
This account passes through the hands of other writers, dramatists and herbalists from the late 16th century through to the 17th century with edits and embellishments along the way. In these various texts, shamrock is equated with watercress and meadow trefoils (which are various clovers). In this second-hand inheritance of information about Irish manners and customs, Nelson believes that ‘there can be little doubt that Edmund Campion was the sole original source for the information on the shamrock employed by authors’ and they had little ‘real inkling of the true nature of shamrock, nor were they aware, it seems, of long-available botanical texts containing other, more accurate accounts about this Irish staff-of-life.’
While the botanical texts referred to by Nelson favour equating shamrock with clover, another reference to the plant in the work of Fynes Moryson brings another possible candidate into focus. In An Itinerary (1617), the writer, traveller and secetary to Lord Mountjoy, who was a future Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, introduces a third contender to the discussion of the ‘true’ identity of shamrock as a food. Moryson provides a link between the plant and its flavour: they willingly eat the herbe Schamrock being of a sharpe taste which as they run and are chased to and fro they snatch like beasts out of the ditches.
If Moryson’s shamrock has a ‘sharp taste’, this eliminates mild and sweet tasting clover, but it could refer to the peppery taste of watercress. He may also be referring to wood sorrel with its distinctive acidic lemon-like taste. Wood sorrel (Oxalis acetosella) is a native plant (in Irish seamsóg) with a distribution range stretching from Europe to parts of Asia.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ lyric fm's Naturefile, how native plants such as bog rosemary, wild thyme, wood sorrel and water mint have long been used for adding flavour to food
It grows luxuriantly in woods and sheltered areas appearing and flowering from April to June with flowers that are typically white with thread-like blue/purple veining. Wood sorrel has trifoliate compound leaves and each leaflet has a well-defined heart shape. In the wild, its presence is believed to indicate ancient woodlands and hedgerows.
As a cultivar and potted plant, wood sorrel is often sold as shamrock in the United Sates, while the wild versions that are found in Ireland are easy to recognise due to its shamrock-like leaf arrangement. It is a striking and delicate plant, almost like a refined and ethereal version of clover, but with a distinctive and pleasantly sour flavour.
From the how-they-see-us perspective, wood sorrel-eating (or watercress or clover) in English writings demonstrated the uncouth nature of the Irish. At a time of conquest and colonisation, these ‘wilde shamrock manners’ as described by John Derricke in The image of Ireland with a discourse of woodkarne (1581) symbolised the uncivilised nature and character of the savage.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Lyric FM's Culturefile, Eleanor Flegg on the story of a table so beloved that it inspired a ballad, 'The Lament On Fletcher's Shamrock Table On Its Departure for The New York Exhibition'
This illustration of difference, played out in simplistic divisions of nature and culture where one was wild and the other was civilised, supported the agenda of the coloniser. A focus on notional and peculiar dietary practices was a relatable way to communicate difference and one that deliberately neglected the devastation, hardship and food shortages created by English troops. In this context, it is likely that wood sorrel was a food of the famished and the dispossessed.
Alongside the 16th and 17th centuries accounts of Ireland, contemporaneous English herbals and culinary literature treat wood-sorrel as an established and useful medicinal and culinary ingredient. In what is taken to be the first scientific herbal, A New Herball (1551) by botanist and physician, William Turner, it is called Alleluia ‘because it appearth about Easter wen Alleluya is song agayn’.
It was an ingredient in green sauces and scholar, gardener and diarist of Restoration England, John Evelyn, includes wood sorrel (and the family of common sorrels) as one of the plants of the kitchen garden. In his 1699 work, Acetaria: a discourse of sallets, he notes the usefulness of wood-sorrel in providing citrus notes to food when orange and lemon were unavailable. He advises that it is ‘never to be excluded’([from the kitchen garden).
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Lyric FM's Naturefile, Anja Murray looks at Ireland's national symbol, the shamrock
From the how-they-see-themselves perspective, wood sorrel and the cultivated garden variety were ingredients associated with the cultured, structured and ordered worlds of science, medicine and, in the case of Evelyn, the culture of well-considered recipe-based cookery that supported a new fashion in promoting the gastronomic merits of vegetables. In this world, wood sorrel was an accepted, valuable and valued ingredient.
In more recent accounts of wood sorrel, the details recorded in the Main and Schools' Collections of the National Folklore Collection provide a more neutral how-we-see-ourselves perspective. Here, the treatment of wood sorrel mixes myth, memory and reported detail of practice that demonstrates a notable inheritance and overlap with earlier descriptions of the plant.
Some of the contributors to the Schools’ Collection remember its famine and war-time food status and there are accounts of its use alongside watercress, charlock and nettles as a substitute food for cabbage in the spring months. Connecting with earlier herbals, hallelujah is given as one of the many local names assigned to the plant because of its appearance around Easter time. At the time these folk accounts were recorded, the culinary and medicinal uses of the plant were assigned to the past. But lingering in these memories was the folk belief that wood sorrel was the true and original shamrock used by St Patrick.
Warning: do not pick or consume wild plants without expert knowledge and guidance, and be aware of the Flora (Protection) Order 2022
Follow the RTÉ Brainstorm WhatsApp channel for more stories and updates
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
