The 2024 Celtic Nation Food Almanac is out soon!
The 2024 Celtic Nation Food Almanac is out soon!
Celtic Nation Food is the ethnic cuisine preference of Celts who truly understand their ethnicity - as well as being a preference of outsiders who celebrate Celtic Nation Cuisine - and it is an understanding of Celtic ethnic nature that makes Celtic Nation Cuisine truly stand out amongst other ethnic cuisines, such as Mexican, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Greek, Indian, and French, to name quite a few.
Curiously, it was the ancient Greeks who gave us the first glimpse of what Celtic ethnicity looks like - its shape and form, so to speak.
The word Celt derives from the ancient Greek use of the word keltoi and was used as far back as 517 BC to mean stranger, foreignor, and key to understanding the nature of Celtic Nation Food is to understand what the word keltoi meant, not just in it's original context of an ethnic people being described by outsiders as being keltoi, but also in the continued context of these peoples calling themselves Celt by the first century BC, who by 25 BC had distributed themselves far and wide; and indeed, wherever the Bible has been distributed its readers have knowlege of the Celts, and this is because the Book of Galatians in the Bible was written to the Celtic region of Galatia, which by then comprised of three Celtic tribes that had come under the governance of the Romans, the Tectosages, the Tolistobogii, and the Trocmi.
So the word keltoi is the ancient world's testimony as to it's primary observation of the prevailing ethnic nature of those people whom they came to describe as being keltoi: the ancient world observed that these people tended to not assimilate, to not integrate, to not yield, to not be overcome, by other peoples. That is, the ancient world observed that the keltoi remained strange, they remained foreign, to anyone who would try to integrate with them, to assimilate them, to overcome them.
By the time that these people were calling themselves Celts, their original ethnic nature as was first recorded as being keltoi, had similarly been repeated by many other of history's observers down through several centuries, and even fifteen hundred years later, when Anglo-Saxon chroniclers wrote about the Celts in their own language, they called them Wealhas, which we know as the word Welsh in modern English, which also means stranger, foreignor, and which demonstrates that the ethnic nature of remaining strange, remaining foreign, was even the testimony of English kings.
So the keltoi became 'Celts' by consistently living up to the true meaning of this word over millennia; so it follows that Celts are true to the underlying basis of the famous Celtic story of The Sword and the Stone - in this story, salvation comes from the action of the double-edged sword of truth becoming dislodged from being static and un-useful as though stuck in the stone - so to be free, they too must live up to that word that is their name, their double-edged sword of truth.
It's all about living the word. If the word is in you, you are the word. And that's why they had the story of The Sword and The Stone. It was - and remains - a mechanic to bring the people back on course. Wandering off course was not unusual, indeed the etymology of the word Camelot proves that, because 'cam' means winding. It's a winding road to Camelot! And when the people do recognise that they are off-course, they look around for someone who can pull the sword from the stone for them! And so the cycle starts again!
So someone describing themselves as a Celt, in living up to their name, must too, then, become strangers, foreignors ... keltoi!
There are of course many modern day Celts who have never hear of this description, some who may not even associate the word Celt with being an ethnicity.
To use a parallel to illustrate how they all fit together as a Celtic collective, we have the example of the Jews, some who are Orthodox and live to Jewish Law, others who by comparison are much more liberal, and rather that exploring Jewishness any further, the analogy is sufficient to say that Celts who understand Celtic ethnicity, who understand the meaning of their name, who distinctively draw lines that are strange, foreign, and consistent with Celtic ethnicity, and either do not cross these lines, or when they rarely do, have a method to redress these transgressions as apologetics in retrospect, can be decribed as Orthodox Celts.
So someone who describes themselves as a Celt, who lives up to their name as a stranger, foreignor ... 'keltoi' ... who believes that the story of The Sword and The Stone is about the double-edged sword of truth being freed from a meaningless existence, is an Orthodox Celt - who living such a life gives us a foundation to delineate between what is Celtic Nation Food, and what is not!
And this, of course, gives us a unique opportunity to publish a Celtic Nation Food Almanac!
The publication does need to be an almanac, of course, because the nature of an annual publication would give us the opportunity to publish updates in the science of Celtic Nation Food cuisine, and in particular, to publish updates of peer-reviewed scientific papers from institutions worldwide that give greater clarity to the science of what additional foods should be included in the almanac as are discovered to be pertinent to the science, and on what basis, and which would also give us a mechanism to remove foods from the almanac when such peer-reviewed papers indicate that such a food or foods were put in the almanac in error.
Although the likelihood of removing foods would be very rare, even a pragmatic person who was looking back into the past over three-thousand years would, where on occassion a new discovery altered the modern perception of the past, consider that such a publication mechanism was a positively useful tool. And of course, where businesses are licencing logos that promote a food-stuff as being a Celtic Nation Food and yet a peer-reviewed publication identifies that it is not, then there needs to be a mechanism where other scientists can object to the proposal to remove the foodstuff from the almanac, and businesses given a recognised mechanism and time period to remove the Celtic Nation Food certifications from their advertising, distribution processes, and networks.
One does not need to be an orthodox Celt to eat Celtic nation food - indeed, many items that are listed in the almanac are a regular part of many people's diets without realising that they are Celtic Nation Food - however the more that those who openly celebrate Celtic Nation Food, even adopting the discipline of only eating Celtic Nation Food in their home, then they are clearly on the path to becoming, and being, a modern day Orthodox Celt.
So here's the premise: people who remain strange, who remain foreign, who avoid other people's ways, tend to maintain their own ways in preference to the ways of the outside world.
It easily follows, then, that Celtic Nation Food is a cuisine that remains strange, remains foreign, to foods that are outside of the collective geography of the Celtic world.
Illustrating this with an example, foods from South America, a region that was never Celtic and which was the geographic origin of such ubiquitous moden day foods like corn, potatoes, and tomatoes, would typically be avoided in the home of modern day Celts who were being true to their ethnicity, who were living up to the meaning of the word of their name.
Given that Celtic Nation Food covers a very wide platter, then crucial to this understanding is the matter that the very wide distribution of Celtic nations gives all Celts a very wide choice of Celtic Nation Foods from the whole wide collective of all of the Celtic nations, and this comes from the wonderful realisation that if Celts typically remained strange to outsiders, that such behaviour did not necessarily mean that they should remain strange from other Celtic nations.
In this way, for example, Celts in the north of Great Britain, could enjoy apricots all the way from Galatia in the middle east, despite apricots not being native to Britain.
And that's because by not being strange to their fellow Celtic nations, each and every one of them could enjoy each other's produce without compromising their collectively similar ethnic nature!
However, this Celtic existence across almost three millennia, with the accompanying rise and fall of many Celtic nations, as well as the occupation of some, but not all, of the Celtic nations - such as by the Romans and others of similar ilk - raises difficulties in deciding how to assess the nature of what is Celtic Nation Food, and the nature of what is not.
An easy starting point is the proverb 'by the measure that you use, so it will be measured to you'.
We've seen this measure already, a Celt is someone whose character is 'to remain strange, foreign' - that is the measure!
So to distinguish the very least, let's bracket this from left to right:
The Celtic Nation Food Almanac concludes that the year 638 AD is a very representative cut-off date for food to be considered for inclusion as a Celtic Nation Food:
However, why was the year 638 AD chosen as being a representative cut-off date to qualify a food for inclusion in the Celtic Nation Food Almanac?
We extoll all of the reasons in this next chapter, Why the Year 638 AD?
Both images above are of the Hardknott Roman Fort, which guards the Bear and Raven Stones in Cumberland, UK, which illustrate the dilemma of including foreign-food introductions in a culture that typicaly remains strange from being assimilated.
On one hand, the matter that there were not any Roman Legionaires around when the photos were taken, illustrates the significance of the both the Bear and Raven Stones, and our Bear and Raven logo: the Bear has stood it's ground - our Celtic heritage is intact; and the raven has flown back and forth across the waters of the deep - proving that we have survived all adversity.
So what year is suitable for a cut-off for inclusion of food in a Celtic Nation Food Almanac?
Celtic Nation Food Almanac
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