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Unusual recipe book gives taste of north west's history

Move over Delia and Jamie - the north west now has its own book of recipes, telling the region's history through its food and eating customs, including Famine soup, Derry's distilleries and siege rats "fed on human flesh", writes Seamus McKinney

THE world famous Bog-side as it has never been seen before is just one of the images in a most unusual cookery book.

For Feast or Famine, Derry chef Emmet McCourt has researched the food which sustained Derry and Donegal from the earliest of times. McCourt, a lecturer at North West Regional College, has spent the last three years researching regional and historical recipes.

These include venison, famine oatcakes, Malin Head crab cakes, Derry's own Doherty's mince stew and many more.

The book, to be published next Monday, charts Irish eating habits from the berries favoured by the monks of St Colmcille to the hazelnut muesli which became a firm Derry breakfast from the 9th century. All is accompanied by mouth-watering and easy-to-cook recipes.

McCourt gives great credit to the Vikings who, he points out, introduced rhubarb to the Irish diet and even taught the islanders of Ireland how to catch and cure fish.

As he moves through history McCourt lists the recipes which were in vogue at the time. The eras covered include all those major events which shaped modern Irish history.

Of the 1689 siege of Derry, he notes that there were only nine "lean horses" left in the city, as all the others had been eaten.

"Indeed, a butcher's menu from the time shows rats which had been 'fed on human flesh' were being sold for 1s0d each while a quarter of a dog, 'fattened by eating corpses' went for 5s.6d," he says.

While poor Shep and Rover may have had ended up on the dinner plate, man's best friend wasn't the only stable of siege-time Derry. Other titbits favoured by the starving populace included tallow - or wax - cats and mice.

"Soldiers and defenders of the city had a daily allowance of half a pound of meal, half a pound of shelled oats and half a pound of salted hides," the chef reveals.

McCourt touches on the north west's strong-drink tradition, that is the tradition of making alcohol from the potin of Inishowen to the whiskies produced in Derry after the introduction of new statute on spirits.

"Burt distillery in Co Donegal sold its whiskey as far afield as Dublin and London and had an annual production in the 1830s or 40,000 gallons," he says.

"Alexander Stewart was the first distiller of whiskey at Pennyburn in Derry and at its height his facility was producing 117,000 gallons a heart.

"Ross T Smith had a distillery on Abbey Street in the Bogside, James Robinson a distillery and by 1836 the combined distilleries of Derry were producing 350,000 gallons of spirits."

The images which accompany the food are as interesting as the culinary history.

There are pictures of sailing ships on the Foyle, a seaweed-roofed home in Co Antrim and a cow in Derry's Bogside. The cow is pictured on its way to Derry's main abattoir which remained in the Bogside until the late 1970s.

McCourt notes that the north west fared quite well during the Great Famine, largely because of the abundant fishing grounds off the coast and, no doubted, helped by those skills taught by the Vikings. In fact some of his famine recipes seem quite tasty.

Famine soup included "beef, dripping, onions, flour, barley, brown sugar and salt". In Donegal they might not have had potatoes but they pretty much had everything else.

* GLIMPSE: Clockwise from right, chef Emmet McCourt and photographs from his book Feast or Famine: Rabble days and hiring fairs in Derry's Diamond; Sailing ships moored in the city; a woman sits outside a seaweed-roofed home on Antrim's coast road; and Derry's Bogside as it is seldom seen. A bull is examined as Walker's pillar (blown up by the IRA in 1973) can be seen in the background