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Cork made its fortune on butter and salt beef. This book follows the money, from the cattle on Munster grass to the Butter Exchange that graded and shipped it across the Atlantic. You will meet the merchant families who built the South Mall, read how Cork's salt beef fed the Navy and the Caribbean plantations, and walk into the English Market of 1788, still trading today. It closes with the taste of Cork itself: spiced beef and the food the city still eats. Twelve chapters plus a visitor's guide to the sites. Illustrated. Digital download (PDF).
What's inside:
Prologue: The Smell
1. The Marsh and the Merchants
2. The Grass and the Cow
3. The Butter Roads
4. The Exchange
5. Beef, Salt and the Cattle Acts
6. The Navy and the Caribbean
7. The Merchants and the City They Built
8. The English Market
9. The Taste of Cork
10. The Decline
11. From Shandon to Kerrygold
12. What Remains
Epilogue: The World in a Firkin
47 pages, illustrated.
From the opening pages:
For the better part of a century and a half, Cork smelled of its trade, and the trade was food.
The strongest note was butter, salt and cream and the faint sourness of preserved fat, cut with the sharper smell of fresh-cut wood from the cooperages that turned out the barrels. Under it, in the right districts and the right season, ran the heavier reek of the provision trade, the slaughter yards and the salting houses where tens of thousands of cattle a year were killed, butchered and packed in brine for the ships. The smell came off the storage houses on John Redmond Street, off the exchange where the weighmasters worked, off the carts coming in through the North Gate from Kerry and Tipperary, and off the firkins and the beef tierces stacked on the quays, waiting for the tide.
Cork made its fortune on butter and salt beef. This book follows the money, from the cattle on Munster grass to the Butter Exchange that graded and shipped it across the Atlantic. You will meet the merchant families who built the South Mall, read how Cork's salt beef fed the Navy and the Caribbean plantations, and walk into the English Market of 1788, still trading today. It closes with the taste of Cork itself: spiced beef and the food the city still eats. Twelve chapters plus a visitor's guide to the sites. Illustrated. Digital download (PDF).
What's inside:
Prologue: The Smell
1. The Marsh and the Merchants
2. The Grass and the Cow
3. The Butter Roads
4. The Exchange
5. Beef, Salt and the Cattle Acts
6. The Navy and the Caribbean
7. The Merchants and the City They Built
8. The English Market
9. The Taste of Cork
10. The Decline
11. From Shandon to Kerrygold
12. What Remains
Epilogue: The World in a Firkin
47 pages, illustrated.
From the opening pages:
For the better part of a century and a half, Cork smelled of its trade, and the trade was food.
The strongest note was butter, salt and cream and the faint sourness of preserved fat, cut with the sharper smell of fresh-cut wood from the cooperages that turned out the barrels. Under it, in the right districts and the right season, ran the heavier reek of the provision trade, the slaughter yards and the salting houses where tens of thousands of cattle a year were killed, butchered and packed in brine for the ships. The smell came off the storage houses on John Redmond Street, off the exchange where the weighmasters worked, off the carts coming in through the North Gate from Kerry and Tipperary, and off the firkins and the beef tierces stacked on the quays, waiting for the tide.
