The contents of a spice bag, showing chip, onions, green peppers and bits of presumably chicken In 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

I met John Mulcahy at the Food and Drink as Education Conference, which he helped to organise.
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.
Here is the transcript.

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