INTRODUCTION

The Past

While Maggie puts her girdle-baked barley bannocks and oatcakes on the table with some soft cheese, Alistair goes to lift the lid of the pot on the peat fire, taking out a piece of meat and bringing it to the table. It’s been in ‘the salt’ (a barrel of brine in the barn), he tells us. It comes, we discover, from one of his Blackies (Blackface sheep) which has roamed the rough hillsides for the best part of four years. We all get a piece of the mutton to eat with an oatcake. We marvel at its flavour. Afterwards, he chops up some kale and adds it to the pot and serves us platefuls of his broth, flavoured with barley, carrots, turnips and potatoes. Simple, sustaining and unforgettable.

I’d like to take you into the remote corner of the North West Highlands where these crofters lived. The date is 1972 and the place is a croft house on the Applecross peninsula in Wester Ross. Born at the beginning of the century, brother and sister, Maggie and Alistair, are in their seventies now and have lived here all their lives. A road has just been built round this coastline where the transport – until now – has been by boat or foot. It’s a wild night outside, but there is a warm glow from a peat fire and the pot on it, slowly simmering, is filling the croft house with its fabulous aromas.

This ingenious system of self-sufficiency, making the best use of an inhospitable landscape and harsh climate, is the basis of the ancient crofting system of agriculture where scarce fertile land is divided among the population and extensive grazing land is common for all to use. These Scots, in the past, could be described as poor Northern Europeans. Without material assets, they were naturally thrifty in their ways. Their frugal, largely meatless, diet was based on broths made with vegetables, dried beans and peas, barley and lentils; brose and porridge made of oats and barley; and everything supplemented with milk, cheese and butter. Meat was a relatively rare occurrence, since animals – especially cattle – were valuable capital assets for export, not eating. Fish, on the other hand, was everyday food. Wild game, sorrel, watercress, silverweed, seaweed, garlic, nettles, hazel and beech nuts, brambles, blaeberries, cloudberries and raspberries were seasonal treats.

Before the Jacobite rebellions of the 1700s, and the exodus to the New World in the 1800s, these Highland clanspeople were expert in preservation techniques: salting, drying and smoking. Their method of cooking was ruled by their source of fuel: mostly dried-out blocks of peat turf which burned with a slow, steady glow, creating a gentle source of heat suitable for slow-simmered broths and stews. Their method of baking on an iron girdle was also ruled by the gentle peat fire. Flat unleavened breads, known as bannocks, were cut into farls (quarters) and baked on a cast-iron girdle.

The gradual deterioration of the Highland economy, after the introduction of sheep farms and the growth of shooting estates in the 1800s, led to a much less varied diet as well as a great deal of poverty. When the people were moved from the fertile glens, and rehoused at the less fertile coast, their diet suffered. The potato became a staple. The large herds of hardy native cattle were replaced by the landlord’s sheep. Game, now sport for the landlord, was off the menu. Fish was their saving, a rich food supply which they exploited to the full.

South of what is called the Highland line from Stonehaven on the east coast to Dumbarton on the west, in the area described as the Lowlands, things were different. Here, there were larger areas of rich agricultural land, colonised by Benedictine and Cistercian monks in the Middle Ages. They had come with horticultural expertise and new varieties of fruits and vegetables. In other lowland areas there were also improving landlords who cleared stones, built dykes and enclosed fields. Using the Highlanders’ cattle as breeding stock, some developed new breeds of cattle which have become famous worldwide for their fine-flavoured beef.

This spirit of agricultural improvement brought with it an improvement in the diet. There were better supplies of fruits and vegetables. For the more affluent, meat became a more regular item of diet, though fish remained the predominant source of protein for coastal communities and their hinterland. High food value oatmeal – the great sustainer – had overtaken barley as the staple grain in everyday brose and porridge, taken with milk, and in oatcakes eaten with cheese. The vigour and endurance of the people recorded in Statistical Accounts, and also noted by visiting observers, was generally attributed to the high quality of their frugal, but nutritious, diet.

The social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, in the second half of the 1800s, altered this high quality diet. In the Lowlands it created urban slums, poverty and deterioration in diet. In the worst conditions, a kettle of boiling water for sugary tea to drink with slices of white bread and jam replaced the previous nutritious diet. In less dire conditions, the old thrifty rural diet survived in cheaply-made pots of broth using native vegetables, barley, peas and lentils along with inexpensive cuts of butcher meat. The cheap odds and ends of the carcass, tripe, liver, kidney, heart and head were highly valued. Black puddings, mealie puddings, sausages, mince and of course haggis were all useful adjuncts to the ubiquitous pot of potatoes.

Though the Lowland urban diet – at its worst – had nothing left of this previous culinary system, the rural diet survived better. It retained a more intimate link with the soil and its produce, continuing the old thrifty-cooking methods still to be found in the 1970s in Alistair and Maggie’s croft house. Like others of their generation they had lived through two world wars, and during the second one had joined with the rest of the nation in the fight to keep the nation at home fed. They were well-placed to survive in the worst-case scenario – the urban population less so. But wartime rationing to save the country from starvation jolted them into a new mindset. Suburban front lawns were dug up to grow potatoes and thrifty nose-to-tail cooking became a necessity for both urban and rural. It was a relatively brief period (1940-1954) but it improved the urban diet. Everyone re-connected, more meaningfully, with their food supply; remembering how to cook good-tasting meals which made the best use of the native-grown and locally-sourced ingredients of the frugal, but nutritious, old Scots diet.

The Future

Since the end of wartime rationing the healthy benefits of the old diet have steadily been eroded. In 2006, a report from a group of health professionals, interviewing schoolchildren about their daily diet, revealed that they often started the day with one or two packets of crisps (or quite often had no breakfast at all); for lunch they might have a pastry or a roll filled with chips; sweets and coke on the way home from school; and for dinner a sausage roll, bridie or pie with chips, followed by a bought trifle or jelly and ice cream.

A technological food revolution, driven by persuasive advertising, industrialised food manufacture, factory farming and multiple food retailing, has created huge efficiencies in production and distribution. Thousands of new food products liberate, and de-skill, those who buy and prepare food. The global marketplace provides strawberries every day of the year. Yet despite the convenience and sometimes cheapness of this system, the diets of some young people have way too high levels of salt, sugar and fats. Their simultaneous loss of health is now an issue. Educators have failed to provide them with the basic nutritional knowledge to eat healthily and the skills to cook food for themselves.

Action to improve Scotland’s poor health statistics was given impetus with the Scottish Diet Action Plan in 1996. It contained an ambitious set of targets which have yet to be achieved. Among the many activities it suggested, with the potential to make a difference, was setting up the government-funded Scottish Community Diet Project (now Community Food and Health). This targeted the most vulnerable in society, those most at risk from loss of health due to diet. Community food initiatives such as food co-ops and cafes, cooking and nutrition courses, and many other activities, have all focused on a health-improvement agenda. At a community-led initiative in Shotts, just outside Glasgow, they announced recently that their ‘Getting Better Together’ project had sold three million portions of fruit and veg.

Nothing can be more important – for future generations – than continuing the battle to achieve the targets set out in the 1996 Scottish Diet Action Plan. But the future also depends on those who shop for food and cook for themselves or their families asking some questions. Such as: Where does the food come from? How has it been produced? What’s in it?

In the past this was not a problem. Butchers, bakers, greengrocers, fishmongers, once prolific on every high street, were accountable to their customers who bought from them every other day. When suspicion and doubt first surfaced with the safety of eggs in 1988, it was not so easy to get answers to troubling questions about the integrity of the new food supply. Even more troubling questions about serious health issues emerged throughout the 1990s. Consumer reason and instinct began to challenge the wisdom of technology on everything from additives to genetically modified food and a consumer-led backlash was born.

An early global voice in this subversion was the Slow Food movement. Founded in Italy in 1986, it challenged the junk-food diet of the fast-food industry. Not just for its damaging effect on people’s health, but also for its damage to local food systems and traditional ingredients which are the lifeblood of local communities. Its founder, Carlo Petrini, was motivated by the arrival of the first fast food McDonalds restaurant in the centre of Rome. The movement now has followers in 150 countries.

Slow Food argues local rootedness, decentralisation and conservation of typicality. The benefits to communities of this approach are an improvement in diet; a reduction in pollution; the development of food-producing skills; and more money circulating locally – for every £1 spent in a supermarket, around 90p leaves the area, but every £1 spent in a local shop/market/farm-supplier doubles its value to the local economy.

Over quarter of a century old now, Petrini’s trailblazing movement has flourished. In Scotland, Slow Food’s call to subversion can be seen in new linked-up thinking, where regions with special food assets have taken up the challenge. In 1998, Argyll and the Islands Enterprise funded a local food networking project on the Isle of Arran which was published as an Arran Taste Trail. An independently written guide, it was about the producers of distinctive local foods and drinks and the shops, restaurants, cafes and hotels who were selling Arran produce. It was updated in two more editions and won a Scottish Thistle Award for best Tourism Project in 2000. It has now become the producer-led Taste of Arran brand, marketing Arran products on the island and beyond. In 2002 the first Food Network was set up in Ayrshire, growing from the Farmers’ Market movement. It, and others which have followed, have also increased the availability of the region’s food by setting up a membership of producers, farm-shops, delicatessens, hotels and restaurants committed to sourcing local produce.

The Soil Association took up a similar challenge with their Food Futures programme in the late 1990s. It was a three-year initiative, aimed at developing the local food economy in eleven areas of the UK, including three in Scotland: Dumfries and Galloway, Forth Valley and Skye and Lochalsh. Key individuals were brought together through workshops to investigate the potential and identify the problems. In Skye and Lochalsh there was the paradox of foreign visitors arriving in the Highlands and expecting to find the produce of Scotland’s cool, unpolluted waters – langoustines, scallops, crabs, oysters, lobsters – which they could enjoy in Paris, Rome, Madrid, New York and London. Yet they were having difficulty finding them here, in their place of origin. As a result of grants from Skye and Lochalsh Enterprise, and Community Food and Health, a producer-led Food Link network was set up with its own van to collect fresh produce, dropping off orders to hotels, restaurants and shops throughout the area. Since the first year, the value of produce kept in the area has increased by around seven hundred per cent.

Similar initiatives are also up and running in other areas. Enlightened chefs and restaurant owners are now geared-up to stating on menus such local produce information as the port where the fish has been landed or the native breed of beef. The Farmers’ Market movement has been an important motivator in the increased availability of local food. The first Scottish market in Perth in 1999 was a joint initiative between local food suppliers and the city council. Now seventy-one markets are established in towns and cities throughout the country.

Adding yet more power to reviving the nation’s food culture has been the consumer-led Fife Diet project. This was a daring move by its founders Mike and Maureen Small, and some friends, who pledged, in 2007, to eat only Fife produce for a year. Five years on, they have an organisation of over three thousand members, funded by the Scottish Government’s Climate Challenge Fund, all pledged to making their diet 80% Fife food. It has not only reduced their personal carbon footprint hugely, but also motivated producers to meet their demands. Until the project began, Fife had no local cheese. It now has the St Andrews Farmhouse Cheese Company at Falside Farm, where Jane Stewart took up the challenge, went on a cheese-making course, and now makes the excellent Anster cheese.

The momentum from all these initiatives has increased consumption of native and local ingredients. Cooking from scratch with them may not be as quick and easy as microwaving a ready-meal, but there are now liberating, time-saving gadgets and equipment which cut the time and effort. Food processors and liquidisers reduce time spent cutting, slicing and pureeing to a matter of seconds, and effort to almost zero. The microwave (especially a combination model with a convection oven and grill) reduces cooking times and is good for steaming fish and vegetables.

This book concentrates on Scottish ingredients: historic grains of oats and barley; fine seafoods; rich-tasting game; outstanding beef and lamb; slow-ripened soft fruits; hardy root vegetables; floury potatoes and distinguished cheeses. Dishes made with these ingredients bring with them an inherent quality and taste which demands that not too much is added and not too much taken away in the cooking/preparing process. And it also brings Scottish food into the twenty-first century with ingredients which continue to define the country. They have been the basis, in the past, of a diet which produced a nation of great vigour and endurance. What follows in these pages provides the means to maximise – in the future – the potential of Scottish cookery.

Catherine Brown, 2013