Isabelle Sheridan: English Market, Food, Culture

Isabelle Sheridan.jpg

Title

Isabelle Sheridan: English Market, Food, Culture

Subject

Life History

Description

Isabelle Sheridan is from a suburb outside Paris called Le Pleine de Mont Esson. She moved to Ireland in 1986 and eventually established the well-known charcuterie called ‘On the Pig’s Back’ in the English Market in Cork. She discusses her childhood in France, differences between France and Ireland, and some of the social nuances of running her market stall.

Isabelle started ‘On the Pig’s Back’ artisan food company which began as a stall in The English Market in the early 1990s. Isabelle grew up in an apartment block in a village called La Plaine de Montesson, a suburb near Paris, where vegetables were grown and mushrooms were farmed underground. She has two younger sisters. Her father was an engineer and her mother was a painter. She remembers going to the opera and museums in Paris, as a treat, with her godmother. Isabelle is married with three children. Her husband is from Mayo. She states that there were fireworks everywhere on the 14th of July and in the area where Isabelle grew up they had a Village Day where local villages came together to host parades, barbecues, and have fireworks. They celebrated Saints Day, La Toussaint, around Halloween, which was a day of dedication for the dead when they went to the cemetery to visit family graves. At Christmas, they would all go to mass on the 24th, which was followed by a family meal at midnight. She made her communion twice. The boys and girls all wore the same rented white robes. Isabelle describes her love of food and cooking as a child. Her father taught her to identify cheese and cut it properly. She talks about the culture of French food and wine and how having dinner with others was a social occasion. Every house had a wine cellar. Her grandfather’s cellar held up to 800 bottles of wine.

Isabelle came to Ireland as a purchaser in a new factory, initially for six months. Then, having met her husband, she stayed. Isabelle describes her wedding in Nantes and the differences in the civil ceremony experience as compared to Ireland. Isabelle offers a good description of the differences between French and Irish working practices. She highlights that French people commuting in and out of Paris would not have had the time, upon arriving home, for much else than cooking and eating dinner. In Ireland, she states there is enough time, upon arriving home, that you almost have a ‘second day’. Cork has a large French community which meets regularly mainly for children centred activity. Isabelle gives good detail on the development of The English Market, the types of traders and the food stalls available there and how she set up her own charcuterie stall. She began importing French food and eventually set up the well-known brand ‘On the Pig’s back’.

Note; This interview was conducted as part of the Cork 2005 Project

Date

9 September 2004

Identifier

CFP_SR00335_sheridan_2004

Coverage

Cork; Ireland; France; 1980s - 2000s;

Source

Cork Folklore Project Audio Archive

Language

English

Type

Sound

Format

1 .wav File

Interviewee

Interviewer

Duration

51m 08s

Location

Cork City, Cork, Ireland

Original Format

MiniDisc

Bit Rate/Frequency

16bit / 44.1kHz

Transcription

The following is a short extract from the interview transcript, copyright of the Cork Folklore Project. If you wish to access further archival material please contact CFP, folklorearchive@gmail.com

D.H: So we’ll speak about the English market, you can tell me about it, what prompted you to take a stall in the market?

I.S: Actually it’s all circumstances: I never meant to take a stall in the Market, except I met French people who had a stall there previously who were making cheese, and they wanted to, they had a big stall, now it was in 1991 no ‘92. In ‘92 the English Market wasn’t the way it is now – it was getting not kind of not a very good reputation in Cork, and you know like the stall had been let down a bit, there was loads of empty stalls, and nobody wanted them, and those French people came in there, and I was laughing at them, and I said is not like the market in France, you know, this market isn’t going to bring you anything, that was the time. And eh and they said you’ll see, you’ll see, you’ll see, you’ll see, you see this is going to change right. And I said right, ok and they brought me to share their stall and they were doing cheese at the time so I was going to do charcuterie which is a cooked meat, and pates, and cured meat, it’s usually based on pork meat, you know, so I said why not, and then I started importing those, and then I started making my own, and eh and then they left, but it was very, very hard at the beginning because there were very few people interested in the kind of product we were doing, and the condition of the market was actually was also difficult, you know. And then year by year it improved, and the other stall came in, and the other cheese stall came in, and then after a few years then we had the Café Centrale, and then I moved to a bigger stall, and that makes a big difference, and the market is now running so well, it is so bright there is a diversity of product, and still what makes it very special is the mixing of old and new

Collection

Citation

Cork Folklore Project, “Isabelle Sheridan: English Market, Food, Culture,” accessed March 28, 2024, https://corkfolklore.org/archivecatalolgue/document/23.