Mrs McLintock
Mrs McLintock’s Receipts for Cookery, Glasgow 1736
Thought to be the first collection of Scottish recipes, it is a rare little book (only two copies are known to exist, both in Glasgow University Library) and Mrs McLintock has clearly been influenced by the need for preservation of food, since more than half the book is taken up with recipes for pickling, potting, preserving and making wines. This perhaps explains why there are few Scottish national dishes. No Haggis, Barley Broth or Black Bun, though there is a recipe for Shortbread. She has one or two excellent soups, a Lobster Soup which is finished with oysters and mussels and a basic soup recipe which starts with, ‘great whole onions stuck with cloves, a bunch of sweet herbs,’ and lots of beef and veal bones. It is finished with toasted bread floating in the soup and a cooked marrow bone in the centre of the plate.
Mrs Johnston
Mrs Johnston’s Receipts for all sort of pastry, cream, puddings, etc., Edinburgh 1740
A small collection of recipes for plain basic fare thought to be either copied from Mrs McLintock or written by her under another name. Of the 117 pages in the book the first 92 are the same as in Mrs McLintock’s 1736 edition.
Elizabeth Cleland
The Practice of Cookery, pastry, pickling, preserving, containing...a full list of supper dishes...directions for choosing provisions: with two plates, showing the method of placing dishes upon a table etc., Edinburgh 1759
Mrs Cleland also had a cookery school in Edinburgh and her book has the feeling of an elementary manual of instruction—there is much emphasis on methods of preservation. A whole chapter is dedicated ‘To pot and make hams’, but Scottish national dishes are also well represented.
Susanna MacIver
Cookery and Pastry, Edinburgh 1773
She began by selling cakes, jams, chutneys and pickles from her shop, but later opened a cookery school where she taught a sophisticated range of dishes to the well-to-do of Edinburgh. In 1773 her pupils encouraged her to publish her recipes. The collection is well mixed with French influence. Unlike many contemporary English books which are at pains to denounce the French as spoiling good English fare, possibly because of the long Scottish association with the French, she, like most Scots, seems to have had a more relaxed attitude to their incursions.
She includes a fair representation of Scottish dishes, like Scotch Haggis, Parton Pies, Rich Bun, Shortbread, Diet Loaf, Chip Marmalade, To Make Tablets and To Make Barley Sugar. It seems, though, that she was not a broth-lover, since no recipe appears for the universal Scotch Broth, which was considered so much of a national institution both at home and abroad that it is included in The London Art of Cookery by John Farley (1785).
Mrs Fraser
The Practice of Cookery and Pastry, Edinburgh 1791
She helped to run Mrs McIver’s cookery school, took over after her death and then published her own recipes. This is a more sophisticated and comprehensive collection than Mrs McIver’s. Her aim was to ‘reconcile simplicity with elegance, and variety with economy’. She has organised the book in a more logical structure, dividing it up into three parts—I cookery; II Pastry; and III Confectionery, which includes all the preservation methods. Plain simple fare predominates, with all the basic Scottish dishes, and little French or foreign influence besides the odd ‘ragoo’ and ‘fricassy’. Curiously she also, like Mrs McIver, has no recipe for Scotch Broth among her nineteen soup recipes of which only three could be termed traditionally Scottish. In place of Cock-a-Leekie she has a poor version of Leek Soup with prunes but no chicken.
Mistress Margaret (Meg) Dods of the Cleikum Inn, St Ronan’s
The Cook and Housewife’s Manual, Edinburgh 1826
Meg Dods was a fictitious character whom Sir Walter Scott created in his novel St Ronan’s Well, but is said to have been modelled on Miss Marian Ritchie, the landlady of his local inn, the Cross Keys in Peebles. Meg was a capricious and eccentric old landlady with a detestable bad humour. Potential guests were turned away if she disliked the ‘cut of their jib’, and the ones who stayed had to be prepared for her blunt couthy ways. Her saving grace, and the reason why gourmets flocked to her inn, was that she was a superb cook.
The real author of the cookery book was Mrs Isobel Christian Johnston, wife of an Edinburgh publisher. The connection with Scott and his novel is not made clear in the introductory ‘The St Ronan’s Culinary Club’. Mrs Johnston is the first Scottish cookery writer of the century to make an accurate assessment of the changes taking place, cutting her cloth accordingly, while at the same time carrying out the task with expert professionalism. Public horizons were widening far beyond the basics of Plain Roast and Boiled, although these were still important. Curiosity and the desire to learn were cultivating the made dishes of beef, mutton, veal and venison, etc. In the second chapter the whole system of French Cuisine is thoroughly explored, while the next deals with national dishes—Scottish, Irish, Welsh, German, Spanish and Oriental. She is one of the first cookery writers to isolate these subjects, recognising the public interest in them. Both before and after her, the tendency was to create a hotch-potch of foreign and national dishes with no clear distinction.
She was careful also not to adopt these dishes purely for their novelty, but claims that she has set out to embody ‘all in Foreign culinary science that is considered really useful’. She was a very practical lady.
Mrs Dalgairns
The Practice of Cookery, Edinburgh 1829
First published only three years after Meg Dods, and competing with her for popularity, this is a large cookery book with 1,434 recipes. It seems, however, that the public did not take to Mrs Dalgairns with the same enthusiasm they felt for Meg Dods, but her book is just as large and comprehensive. Despite this, there is a feeling of muddle about the structure of the book. There are all the basic Scottish national dishes, but French, English, Irish and other foreign dishes occur randomly throughout the book. Apart from the lack of form she has a vague style of writing, so that when you read the recipes you are constantly frustrated by lack of quantities and instruction. None of these criticisms apply to Meg Dods, which explains why her book was reprinted frequently throughout the century and Mrs Dalgairns’ was not.
Lady Clark of Tillypronie
The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie, arranged and edited by Catherine F. Frere, London 1909
Lady Clark was an obsessional collector of recipes. When she died her husband asked Catherine Frere to edit her manuscript collection. She took on the task of sorting out ‘the gatherings of many years’ which consisted of sixteen books of various sizes, containing nearly three thousand pages of manuscript, some of the page written on every available margin, plus recipes written on loose sheets pinned in; or on backs of envelopes; or on backs of paid bills; or any available piece of paper.
The collection begins in 1841 when emigrés from the French Revolution stayed with Lady Clark’s family. Her culinary curiosity was aroused by them and consolidated when she travelled with her family to Italy and France. When she married in 1851, her husband was in the Diplomatic Service and they lived in both Paris and Turin. Her collection has a strong hidden implication that if you give fifty different chefs the same recipe they will all produce a different dish. She spent so much time gathering recipes from so many different people that there are many variations of the same recipe, reflecting always the personality of the individual. It makes interesting reading; especially since her roots were in the North East of Scotland, and it was to this part that she returned frequently, absorbing also the culinary traditions of her home.
F. Marian McNeill
The Scots Kitchen, Its Traditions and Lore, Blackie 1929 (new edition Birlinn, 2010)
Because she thought that our old national dishes were in danger of sinking into oblivion through modern standardisation of food, F. Marion McNeill set about preserving everything hallowed by age.
She ranged the country from north to south and from palaces to island sheilings in her search for the authentic food of the people. Being by profession a historian, she also sketched the development of Scottish food throughout the centuries, and set about showing how ‘the pageant of Scottish History is shadowed in the kitchen.’ She highlights the distinctive traditions and customs, not out of ‘antiquarian zeal’, but from a ‘healthy national sentiment’, and our debt to her is infinite.
Gourmet Recipes From a Highland Hotel, Faber and Faber 1967
In the 1920s when railway hotels were the only outposts of serious gastronomy in Scotland, an enterprising Yorkshire-born chef, with a formidable international reputation, bought Fortingall Hotel—eight miles from the nearest railway station and on a quiet back road in Perthshire.
During the thirty-five years of Heptinstall’s reign at Fortingall he not only created an outstanding hotel off the beaten track, but stimulated, encouraged and trained many young chefs who continue to keep his cooking philosophy alive in hotels and restaurants in Scotland and further afield. He was particularly well known for his Cold Table, only offered once a week, preceding Sunday lunch. On an average Sunday, forty dishes could appear on the table, half of which probably had to be prepared before breakfast. He felt that the start to a meal was vitally important—‘Just as a good or bad start may win or lose the race,’ he said, ‘so may hors-d’oeuvres make or mar a meal. Unless they are dainty, little, and tasty, they will dull the keen edge of your appetite.’
In Gourmet Recipes he exploits the natural produce of Scotland with originality and flair, but mindful always of the practicalities—his infectious enthusiasm shines through.