Ireland has always been a rural country although today only 20% of its land is used for agriculture. The life of the country has always been linked to farming and the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in the XNUMXth century affected this farming life and introduced changes in the Irish diet and ultimately in what we know today as Irish gastronomy. The Anglo-Normans are nothing other than the Normans who stayed to live in England after the Norman conquest led by William the Conqueror, people from Normandy, a French region.
They brought beans, wheat, peas and these ingredients soon became staples of the local gastronomy that the people of Ireland took advantage of to cook more elaborate dishes. Culinary customs were changing and at least the so-called haute cuisine received a lot of French and Italian influence. The potatoThe absolute queen of Irish gastronomy, she only arrived in the country at the end of the 200th century. Originally from America, known there as potato, it took XNUMX years to supplant other traditional crops such as the popular oats. Quickly the Irish began to eat a lot of potatoes and that increased the birth rate and the population, for the first time in their history, expanded.
In 1840 the famous Irish famine when a plague wiped out potato crops. The crops were ruined for two years and more than 1 million people died of hunger. 2 million emigrated. When the plague passed, the potato returned to the fields and the table of the Irish, chemicals began to be used to prevent new pests and since then the Irish are one of the countries that eat the most potatoes.