VIDEO: Cork City wined and dined during Famine, Boole letters show

Turtle soup and champagne were among the delicacies enjoyed by well-heeled Cork City dwellers during the final years of the Great Famine, according to the letters of UCC’s first professor of maths, George Boole.

However, snail-tea was among a number of bizarre medicinal treatments used by locals who felt under-the-weather in that period.

And it seems that, contrary to the stereotyped image of Irish people subsisting on potatoes, family tables in the city groaned under an abundance of rich foods — meats, ‘French-style’ duck, complicated puddings, and even curries according to an unpublished 19th century recipe book held in UCC.