In the Boole household, first in Lincoln and later in Cork, the day was structured around three Anglo-Irish meals. Breakfast opened with oatmeal porridge and tea. Dinner — the main meal, taken at noon or early evening depending on university duties — brought a stewed or boiled meat with vegetables and bread. Afternoon or evening tea gathered bread, strong tea, and, on good days, a sweet treat. This was a sober, nourishing, and frugal cuisine, faithful to the temperance of a pious professor.

Oats are the thread running through Boole's table, from morning porridge to thin gruel on feverish days. A quintessentially northern grain, hardy and cheap, it spans both the mathematician's English childhood and his Irish years in Cork, where oats remained a staple of the modest home and the college alike.