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Irish Food History: A Companion edited by TU Dublin’s own Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman featured heavily in an episode of Nationwide, broadcast on RTÉ One on 30th June 2025 and available now on the RTÉ Player. The book explores Ireland’s culinary heritage from the Ice Age to the contemporary food scene and was recently named Best Culinary History Book in the World at the 2025 Gourmand Awards. The book also won the Bookselling Ireland Food & Drink Book of the Year at the 2024 An Post Irish Book Awards.
The episode, which delved into the rich history of Irish food, featured interviews with both editors of the book, who discussed Ireland’s culinary heritage and the journey of bringing the publication to life. Also featured was Gary Thompson, Data Architect and culinary history student at TU Dublin, who offered insights into the evolution of Irish cookbooks. The interviews were filmed on location at TU Dublin’s Grangegorman campus, including Grangegorman Library. TU Dublin Library Services were delighted to welcome the team from Nationwide to Grangegorman Library for a morning of filming.
During their interview, Mac Con Iomaire and Cashman highlighted the fact that the book is available to anyone to read online. The e-book version of Irish Food History: A Companion was published by the EUt+ Academic Press, a publishing venture from the European University of Technology, hosted at TU Dublin, which publishes electronic materials at no cost to author or reader. According to Science Europe, “Diamond Open Access journals are community-driven, academic-led, and academic-owned publishing initiatives. Serving a fine-grained variety of generally small-scale, multilingual, and multicultural scholarly communities, these journals and platforms embody the concept of bibliodiversity.” Developed as a pilot in 2022 and 2023, the press has published six titles so far from across the nine members of the European University of Technology.
With the print edition published by the Royal Irish Academy, Irish Food History: A Companion
The electronic version of Irish Food History: A Companion is available to read and download at: https://doi.org/10.21427/5why-0k87.
Print copies are available to borrow at Park House Grangegorman Library.