Cooking

COOKING

Cooking was often done outdoors in a fulacht fia and many of these date from the Bronze Age.

A pit lined with wooden planks was filled with water which was brought to the boil by adding stones heated in a fire nearby.

Meat, wrapped in straw, was cooked in the water which was kept simmering by the addition of more hot stones when required. The straw kept the meat clean and allowed it to float so it was more easily recovered from the hot water and stones.

Beside some of the stone circles, archaeologists have found cooking sites called fulach fia. At the fulach fia, the people filled up a small hole with water and boiled the water using large hot stones from a nearby fire. Meat was wrapped in straw to keep it clean as it boiled in the water.

The term fulachta fiadh means ‘cooking places of the wild’ or ‘cooking places of the deer’. Several hundred of these horseshoe-shaped mounds are found in the Burren uplands, dating from roughly 5,000 years ago. Varying somewhat in size, shape, and distribution (in clusters of one to eight), they are composed of discarded charcoal and heat-fractured limestone that was once used to boil water for cooking or bathing in a lined central trough

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Task 1 : Click on the link above and answer the following questions

1. What does the term 'Fulacht Fia' mean?

2. What was it?

 3. How was it used?

Task 2 : Watch the video above, draw the Fulachta Fia and say how it was heated and how the meat was cooked

A wood-lined trough was dug in the ground and filled with water- this was the Fulacht Fia. Beside the trough, a fire was lit and stones heated in the fire. These stones were then thrown into the water. Once it was hot enough, meat could be boiled in the water. The broken, used stones were hurled off to one side and formed, over the course of some years, the distinctive horseshow mound. These fulacht fian are very common in Ireland, particularly in the south-west. Experiments have shown that the water can be brought to the boil in 30 minutes by this method, and a 4.5kg leg of mutton was successfully cooked in just under 4 hours. Geoffrey Keating, an historian writing in the 17th century, has first-hand accounts of this method of cooking being used in Ireland as recently as the 1600s AD. His account also seems to suggest that the method was also used to heat water for washing.