In 1707 the Act of Union made Scotland an integral part of English legislation. From then on England, Scotland and Wales became known as Great Britain; the term the United Kingdom was created in 1801 when Ireland joined Great Britain. This chapter covers Wales and Scotland as well as Ireland, because although they were part of Britain, they remained isolated culturally. All three in their geography, climate and habitat and because of their history and traditions have socially an entirely distinct character, which owes nothing to the English. They share a defiance, a strong individualism and a resolute need to celebrate themselves. Hence, the diets of these different Celtic peoples are patently different from the English, although they share some characteristics among themselves, largely because the extremes of their climate made it impossible to grow wheat and they all relied more on oats, barley and rye. They also had a richness of dairy produce which they used to the full, and easy access to sea foods. For the majority in rural districts, living conditions were basic and often, throughout history, their survival was a desperate struggle. This was not helped by their richer neighbour, who exploited and ravaged their countries. In order to survive at all, they were forced to sell their quality produce to England for well nigh most of their history.
Early Medieval Ireland
The Irish poem The Vision of MacConglinne, though first written down around 1250 as a fabliau to be sung or narrated, must have been performed some many hundreds of years earlier. In it one gets a picture of a starving people, living in miserable poverty, undeniably pagan. Indeed, the whole poem is a celebration of pagan folklore and ridicules the early Church. It tells of King Cathal who has a malevolent spirit within him, which has turned him into a great glutton. For breakfast he would eat a pig, cow, a bull calf, three score cakes of pure wheat, a vat of new ale and thirty hen’s eggs. MacConglinne is a clerical student, poet and minstrel, a goliardi, the Latin term for ‘riotous and unthrifty scholars who attended on the table of the richer ecclesiastics and gained their living and clothing by practising the profession of buffoons and jesters.’1 MacConglinne has not eaten for several days, but all he is offered to eat by the abbot is a half cup of whey water (this is the whey from the curds mixed with water, the usual thirst-quencher), which MacConglinne refuses, reviling the Church. He is found guilty of slandering the abbot and sentenced to be crucified the following day. Minstrels and jongleurs, it should be pointed out, were a despised lot, not allowed to take communion or be admitted to monastic life. The anonymous author includes many lines of invective against the monks. ‘Ye curs and ye robbers and dunghounds and unlettered brutes, ye shifting, blundering, hang-head monks of Cork,’ MacConglinne calls them while he is cutting down the tree on which he is to be crucified.
In the night he has a vision of a land where everything is composed of food. Parts of this vision are written as verse and seem older than the prose. It is also a parody of the beatific vision that the saints experience, describing an edible world where the whole landscape can be consumed and which sometimes swallows the humans themselves.
The food described in the Vision by the phantom Wheatlet from the Fairy Knoll of Eating, the son of Milklet, son of Juicy Bacon, is the plain survival food of a peasant economy. ‘Only among a cattle breeding population at a primitive stage of culture could this legend arise.’2 (I would quarrel with his use of the word ‘primitive’, which he employed, I imagine, because of the poem’s anti-Christian message.) The food in the poem is pottage, curds, kale, oatmeal gruel, nuts, mead and tripe, where fat is the supreme luxury. MacConglinne gets into a coracle made of beef-fat, with a coating of tallow, its thwarts of curds, its prow of lard, its stern of butter, its thole pins of marrow, its oars flitches of old boar. It rows across a lake of milk, through seas of broth, rivermouths of mead, waves of butter-milk, past springs of savoury lard and islands of cheeses.3
In much of the poem food is used to parody sacred ritual; they swear ‘in the name of cheese’. A church is made up solely of food with an altar of fat, a knocker of butter and a door of curds. The doorkeeper wears food: a girdle of salmon skin, sandals of old bacon, leggings of potmeat, a seven-filleted crown of butter on his head, in each fillet seven ridges of pure leeks, and seven badges of tripe about his neck. His steed has legs of custard with four hoofs of coarse oaten bread, ears of curds and eyes of honey. MacConglinne reaches the Hermitage where the Wizard Doctor, father of Wheatlet, is in control.
It is the Wizard Doctor who diagnoses MacConglinne’s illness:
Three hags have attacked thee, even scarcity and death and famine, with sharp beaks of hunger … for thine is not the look of a full-suckled milk-fed calf, tended by the hands of a good cook. Thou hast not the corslet look of a well-nourished blood, but that of a youth badly reared under the vapours of bad feeding.4
He also asks MacConglinne what he thinks ails him. MacConglinne describes in great detail all the foods he longs to eat but cannot for he is too poor. ‘My wish would be, that the various numerous wonderful viands of the world were before my gorge, that I might gratify my desires, and satisfy my greed.’
The Wizard Doctor gives him directions, which includes love-making with a beautiful woman, in order to achieve a banquet throughout his life: fresh pork, loins of fat, boiled mutton, salted beef, mead, old bacon, stale curds, new milk, carrots, ale, butter, bread, cheese, juicy kale, white porridge, broth, sheep’s tripe, salt, sweet apples, hen’s eggs and kernels. On the morning of his crucifixion MacConglinne begs to be allowed to relate his vision to the gluttonous king and when he reaches the end of this list of foods, the demon is so entranced by the appetising description that it leaves the king’s throat to listen and is destroyed by a steaming cauldron. Both the king and MacConglinne are saved, while the abbot is in disgrace.
This poem shows how vigorous the pagan culture was as it co-existed with Christianity, the new religion. No wonder the abbot wants to crucify this poet, who has a vision of fairies, wizards and phantoms, and a place where food is all that is sacred and where salvation is a night of romantic love-making in front of a fire.
The poem is astonishingly clear on what ails people: starvation. We also get a vivid picture of the diet of fifth- or sixth-century Ireland, which must have remained the same for hundreds of years and was a diet that would have been shared by all the countries of northern Europe.
For peasants the diet was meagre with very little to eat on most days except garnered scraps. For the landowners, churchmen and ruling elite there were oats for bread and porridge, mead, ale and milk to drink, hard cheese and soft curds, butter, lard, pork, boar, tripe, mutton, bacon and salted beef; while the vegetables were onions, leeks, carrots and kale. Furthermore, we learn that salt was imported from England, milk with honey was a drink for children, pigs’ intestines were stuffed and boiled, eggs were made into fritters, salmon was dressed with honey, wheaten cakes were dipped in salt and honey, while dulse was dried and also called Salt Leaf.
Old Irish texts make it clear that around any prosperous farm there was an enclosed garden. In Old Irish there is no distinction between the word for vegetable and herb; the one word lub includes vegetables that are eaten and plants taken for medicinal purposes. Plant cultivation, however, is associated with the monasteries; the gardener is listed among the seven officers of the church; there is no mention of a gardener in the servants around a king. The most commonly mentioned vegetable is the onion, and from the evidence it would seem to be a bunching onion, pulled green out of the earth and able to be broken up into cloves. One law text deals with an invalid’s entitlement to a supply of onions, unless the physician forbids it on medical grounds. Another text specifies the food that a client must provide for the annual visit of his lord. The amount depends on the rank of the lord: the lowest-ranking lord is entitled to four loaves of bread for each member of his visiting party of four men; the bread must be served with a relish which may consist of honey, fish, cheese or salt meat; the text continues that there must be sixteen cloves of onion for each loaf, or four onion plants for each loaf.5
In conjunction with the onion a vegetable referred to as imus is mentioned, which is thought to be either celery or alexanders. Then there was borlus, which is included in the annual food rent due to a lord, which is thought to be leek, as it is referred to as 16 inches in length. Wild cabbage featured in monastic diets and it is likely that was cultivated by them; a ninth-century monastic rule forbids monks to eat cabbage that has been cooked on a Sunday. Only one root vegetable appears to have been mentioned, cerrbachan, which could be the skirret (Sisum sisarum).
The main meal was normally eaten in the afternoon or evening, supposedly once the sun went down, while light meals and snacks were mentioned at other times of the day. A man was expected to eat a loaf of bread in the day and another at night. The texts appreciate the difference between winter and summer food; winter food rent, for example, consisted of a bullock, a flitch of bacon, three bushels of malt and a half bushel of dried grain; while summer food was mainly dairy products, curds, butter and milk. The summer food rent includes a wether and vegetables.
It is clear that a person of higher rank enjoyed a greater variety of food than one of lower rank, that a lord was given a supply of meat in greater quantity than anyone else and with his bread was entitled to the three condiments, honey, onions and celery. The lord was given in food rent a substantial amount of produce, in fact most of the food eaten within his household. He received live animals, meat, milk products, grain, malt, bread and vegetables, and the law texts specify that these must be of adequate size and quality. The rules of hospitality are binding, as they were in all early societies, but Irish law specifies precisely the amounts of food offered according to social status; for example, a master-builder was entitled to salted meat as a relish with his loaf and a generous ration of beer or fresh milk, while his assistant is only allowed salt and a vegetable and a lot less to drink.
Milk and its products are central to the diet. A tenth-century tale, Tochmarc Ailbe, thinks milk is the best food because it is ‘good when fresh, good when old, good when thick, good when thin’. The comic tale Aislinge Meic Con Glinne speaks of ‘very thick milk, milk which is not very thick, milk which is thick but flowing, milk of medium thickness, yellow bubbling milk the swallowing of which requires chewing’. Milk was drunk sometimes with the addition of water, rennet was added to give a thick milk, fresh milk was used in the making of porridge and made into a herbal broth, and cream kept in a cool place was palatable for all of a week, although it was thought the gradual souring improved the flavour.
Butter was made from the cream using a churn dash and a wooden churn, and was considered a luxury food to which lords were entitled, and it appears in the food rent; low ranking people at table were not given butter at all. The language shows that there was a rich diversity of names for cheese, which was eaten at various stages; even the type of curd is delineated. Cheeses were pressed, salted and dried; the harder the cheese the more useful it was to take on journeys. The name of one cheese indicates that it was so hard it could have been dangerous if thrown; in fact the story Aided Meidbe tells of the death of Queen Medb from a piece of cheese hurled from a sling.6
Inevitably it is Ireland’s climate and its heavy rainfall that dictate this diet. In 1185 Gerald of Wales tells us that there is rich pasture, good fishing and hunting but poorly developed agriculture and ‘little use for the money making of towns’. Cattle and sheep had excellent pasture but livestock were owned only by the rich, so dairy foods were out of reach of the peasantry. As we have seen, butter was valuable and was buried in the peat bogs (see below), as if it were gold. Swine were easily raised and could fatten on the forest floor, but they were the meat preferred for feasting; the haunch or loin was kept for the lord or king. Oddly enough, though eggs were eaten, there is no mention of poultry as food. Perhaps they were merely kept for cock-fighting, as in England.
Pagan rituals continued well into the medieval period, and there was a definite connection between the idea of a good king and a fertile land. The king was married to the land and his union with her should bring about a rich progeny. At the inauguration rite of a king, he was wedded to the goddess Eriu or to some other local goddess. Many foods possessed magical powers and there was a certain prescription that gave life to the king: ‘fish from the Boyne, the deer of Luibnech, the mast of Mana, the bilberries of Bri Leith, the cress of Brossnach, water from the well of Tlachtga, the hares of Naas’. If all these were brought to the king of Tara on the feast of Lugnasad (1 August) and the king consumed them, that year did not count as life spent and he would be victorious in battle.7
There is plenty of evidence of the cultivation of oats, barley, rye and even wheat in ancient Ireland; there are references to bread, ploughing and mills in early literature and a large number of querns for home grinding of corn have survived. Oats were the chief grain crop followed by barley, and bread was made from both of them. There are references to porridge or stirabout in the early literature. The law tract Senchas Mor is precise in the most chilling manner about the kinds of porridge to be fed to the children from different classes.
The children of the inferior grades are fed to a bare sufficiency on stirabout made from oatmeal on buttermilk or water, and it is taken with stale butter. The sons of the chieftain grades are fed to satiety on stirabout made of barley meal upon new milk, taken with fresh butter. The sons of the kings are fed on stirabout made of wheaten meal upon new milk, taken with honey.8
Wheaten bread was regarded, as in England, to be far superior to any other, and therefore the only bread fit for kings and chieftains; it was also made especially for feast days and other important social occasions. So the small wheat harvest was kept separate for the nobility.
Of all societies Ireland must have been notable for its reliance in the diet of milk; the great expanses of lush green pasture which flourished under the amount of rain gave added nutritional value, flavour and fat, to the milk from livestock. Early references in literature, both profane and hagiographical, place milk at the centre of the diet, and this continued well into the eighteenth century. Then it was referred to as ‘whitemeats’. A traveller in Ireland in the seventeenth century commented:
They are the greatest lovers of milk I ever saw, which they eat and drink in about twenty different ways and love it best when sourest. They drink milk sweet, sour, thick, thin and in summertime eat sour curds …9
Milk was thought highly precious. A law text of the eighth century lays down the punishment when someone has given food which contains a dead mouse and weasel; the food is thrown away, but it adds that if the food is porridge thickened with milk then only the part around the dead rodent should be thrown out.
Hospitality was a duty in Irish society and butter was thought so necessary for bread that if there was none to offer, it was an insult to the guest. With copious amounts of milk, butter was churned in great quantities; it was eaten fresh or salted, and flavoured with herbs, leeks or garlic. Butter was also enclosed in wooden tubs and buried in bogs. No one quite knows why, apart from the fact that it was highly valued, but there are two theories: one that butter was regarded as a winter food and this saved it for the lean days before the supply of milk resumed with the fresh pasture of the late spring; secondly, that peat bogs provide an antiseptic storage condition whatever the time of year. All kinds of cheese were made: cow, sheep and goat, pressed cream and dry cheese. Its consumption declined in the eighteenth century, as there was a rise in rents, civil war and redistribution of people and the export trade expired. (See below.)
Later Medieval Period
The Norman invasion of England with its sophisticated cooking and the influences brought from Persia and the Mediterranean hardly affected Ireland, though the Normans were quick to notice the habitat of their new near neighbours. They saw the preponderance of pastoral farming and the relative absence of urban and commercial life. They thought the Irish despised agriculture and lived a pastoral life. William of Malmesbury contrasted the half-starved rural Irish with ‘the English and French, who have a more civilised style of life and inhabit trading towns’. The Normans were too greedy and ambitious (The Earl of Pembroke, William Marshall, had an estate which included lands in Normandy, England, Wales and Ireland) to ignore the green island to the west; it was only a 122 nautical miles from the mouth of the Liffey to the mouth of the Mersey. The Anglo-Saxons had exploited Ireland as a market for buying slaves and selling furs, but in the twelfth century the Normans saw it as a field of conquest and colonisation.
In 1169 Anglo-Norman forces under Henry II landed in Ireland and brought the Anglo-Norman lords already established there to submission. They formed a Lordship of Ireland, which took its legislative structure from a system of counties with sheriffs and coroners that was modelled on those of England. Parts of Ireland were then divided up into knight’s fees and granted out to an immigrant aristocracy, men of English, French, Welsh or even Flemish descent who created new lordships secured by castles with feudal tenures.
Did these Anglo-Irish lords bring with them the grandeur and pomp that we glimpse in the awestruck words of Henry of Huntingdon, who entered the household of the bishop of Lincoln, Robert Bloet (1093-1123), as a young boy? ‘When I saw the glory of our bishop Robert, the handsome knights, noble youths, valuable horses, golden and gilded vessels, the number of dishes, the splendour of those who served them, the purple and satin garments, then I thought nothing could be more blessed.’10The size of a great lord’s household was about thirty-five, while a knight had a mere dozen or so. Pomp and grandeur need a large staff to augment and maintain them. Sophisticated cooking needs not only a skilled, intelligent and experienced master cook, but a trained staff of at least a dozen even to begin to create some of the dishes we know were eaten at the English court. Such cooking also demands a steady supply of produce, not only spices and sugar, but dried fruits from Mediterranean countries. Such supplies may have come once a year, and so one imagines the cooking within the Irish castles to have been plain, revolving around boiling and spit-roasting, but to have been richly supplied by local country produce.
The Anglo-Normans brought to Ireland the cultivation of peas and beans, especially in the south-east, so that for the first time there was a supply of pulses for the pottage, that staple dish within the diet for poor and rich alike. They also controlled the estates with more commercial acumen, exporting cattle, bacon, butter and cheese to England. The rich pasture gave high quality meat and dairy products, so the Anglo-Normans lived well off roasted pork, beef and mutton, and off poultry, eggs and cream. The earliest visitors were impressed by the huge lakes, mighty rivers and wide estuaries which abounded in fish, ‘surpassing in size those of other countries I have visited,’ said Gerald of Wales in the twelfth century. He especially noticed the salmon, trout and oily shad.
The people that lived near the coast made use of the rich store of seafood; they gathered up the shellfish, cockles, clams, mussels, oysters, limpets and periwinkles and made use of the seaweeds. Dulse is mentioned in the ancient laws, but sloke and carrageen moss were also eaten; some seaweeds were dried until brittle, then broken up and added to soup; others were boiled and turned into a slush, then mixed with cereal and fried. Herrings were caught, dried and salted and were sold from markets all over Ireland. Inland fish were caught with nets, traps, lines and spears; pike and herring were the fish of the poor, but cod, mackerel, pollock, whiting, trout, eel, plaice, sole, lobster, crab and oysters were all eaten. Seals were thought to be humans who had suffered some form of magical enchantment, so these were not caught and eaten; on the contrary they were treated with awe.
In a cauldron over a peat fire, the poor cooked soups enriched with wild leaves, nettles, wild garlic, sorrel, watercress and fungi; the soups would be thickened with oats or barley and eaten with flat bread cooked on a griddle. Baking bread was vital to Ireland, for as with the medieval peasant in England, bread was the staple food that kept the poor alive. A seventh- to eighth-century lawtext, Cain Iarraith (Law of the Fosterage Fee), which outlines the rules of fosterage, stipulates that foster-parents are legally obliged to teach the skills of flour-sieving, kneading and baking to young girls.11 The poor seldom ate meat at all, as it was a rich man’s food; what sheep the poor kept they reared for their wool, milk, horn and hide, so when a sheep was slaughtered mutton would be eaten. There are very few references to the eating of meat in early literature, but we know that pigs were reared, for there are mentions of swineherds and oak mast as fattening food. Pieces of bacon hung from the rafters of the poorest cottage, often far too precious to be eaten but saved and used in small scraps as flavouring for the soups.
The Potato and Famine
When did that other great staple, the potato, first become part of the Irish diet? There are differing theories. One is that it was introduced when they were planted in 1586 at Sir Walter Raleigh’s property in Youghal, near Cork, but as the evidence points to the fact that it was the sweet potato which Raleigh brought from the New World it is doubtful that it would have grown at all. Another idea is that the potato was introduced early in the seventeenth century through trade with Flanders. The theory I prefer is that the potato formed part of the store of foods in the Spanish Armada of 1588. We know that Spain grew them in Galicia and used them as staple foods for its army, navy and prisons. When the ships from the Armada were wrecked on the west coast of Ireland, the potatoes could easily have survived. They float and sprout easily; a woman finding them while gathering seaweed and molluscs might very well have planted them in her garden plot. Or if they were plentiful on a particular beach a group of women might very well have boiled some of them and seen what they tasted like. Whatever the truth, potatoes were being grown in Ireland in the decade immediately after the Armada and quickly became a popular crop.
It was appreciated by the Irish that one of their huge advantages (only discovered on the Continent throughout the Napoleonic wars) was that fierce battles could occur over potato fields and the crop remain unharmed below. The raising of cows (the main commercial product up to then) demanded a considerable amount of grazing land, but this had been made scarce by the Anglo-Irish landlords confiscating land and redistributing the population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The ravages of war had destroyed many of the herds, for the Crown forces as a wartime tactic either slaughtered or drove the cattle off. It was also customary to destroy the cereal crops before the harvest; if not burnt, they were trampled over. In September 1567 the English Lord Deputy, Sir Henry Sidney, wrote that his army stayed in South Tyrone, ‘to destroy the corn, we burned the country for 24 miles compass and we found by experience that now was the time of year to do the rebel most hurt.’ So in the late sixteenth century there was a scarcity in cereals to make bread and in cattle to provide milk, the two staples the Irish had for centuries relied on.
Besides, potatoes were an accommodating crop; they could be fitted into scraps of land allowing a family to exist on a very little land; they could be stored easily throughout the winter, allowing the family to economise on the consumption of oats and milk. They needed little time or skill to cook them; they needn’t even be boiled but could be put into the embers of a fire. And if it was necessary to flee to the hills and mountains to avoid the English soldiers, potatoes could even be planted up there.
Agricultural writers were quick to see the advantages of the potato as a food crop: ‘Potatoes are a very profitable root for husbandmen or others that have numerous families.’12 ‘I advise you only to sow potatoes and turnips,’ Lord Bellhaven wrote in 1699, ‘but rather potatoes because being once planted they will never fail, they require little more labour than to keep the ground where they grow free from grass.’13 He goes on: ‘The Flandrian Bovvers make so much use of this root and had such plenty thereof, that both the Confederate and French Army found great support thereby by feeding the common soldiers most plentiously, it is both delicious and wholesome.’ He continues by explaining how the poor people cook them: ‘Boyl them, dry them, mix them with a little meal, knead them and make them up in Bread, which is a most useful and wholesome Food, especially in times of scarcity … or stilled, they make most excellent Aquavitae.’
Ireland exported to England cattle, sheep, pork and bacon, butter and cheese. Charles II and William III prohibited these imports as they were depressing English sales of the same goods; this prohibition continued until the third quarter of the eighteenth century when the increasing pressure of population on food resources, created concern and discontent, and led to the relaxation of the laws on Irish imports.
For the farm labourer food was scarce long before the famine of the nineteenth century. The cause was clear: the agricultural worker toiled in the fields, the crop was flourishing, but the harvest was carried to the nearest port and sent to England, while he returned home to a meal of potatoes. The worst time of year was the month of July; all the old potatoes had been eaten and the new crop was not yet ready. It was called Hungry July or July of the cabbage, for the new crop was not dug until the first day of August.
However, a few farmers who owned land were still fortunate: ‘The food of the farmers is plain, wholesome and substantial, consisting of fried bacon or hung beef, boiled beef (chiefly in broth). Excellent broth made of beef, groats and oatmeal, leeks and cabbage is a favourite and comfortable dish.’ So recorded James Boyle in his Ordnance Survey Memoirs in 1838.14 The beef was salted and so was some of the butter to preserve it and these farmers were small landowners, so their diet was substantial, as Boyle says. The poorer families made do with sheep’s head broths and plenty of cabbage, kale and leek, and by the time Boyle was writing there was real impoverishment. There had been an astonishing rise in the Irish population of four million between 1780 and 1841, because farm labourers married very young compared with the farming class of small landowners who were bound by the conventions of matchmaker and dowry. Once married, labourers produced large families of ten or more children. So from the beginning of the nineteenth century the standard of living for the farm labourer gradually declined to a subsistence level.
By the middle of the century seven families out of ten were barely surviving; they had no surplus money or goods, so nothing that could now be sold in exchange for food. On the eve of the famine (named afterwards as The Great Hunger) Irish people needed seven million tons of potatoes; the very poor, the cottiers, smallholders and landless labourers required at least five million tons just to survive, for the average male adult consumed upwards of 10 lb pounds of potatoes per day; the rest of the population needed another two million for food, another five million were needed for animal consumption and two million for seed, making a total requirement of fourteen million tons.15
There were potato failures due to blight in 1845, 1846 and 1847; the population of Ireland in 1841 was just over 8 million, in 1851 it had dropped to just over 61/2 million, although by the normal rate of population increase it should have reached over 9 million; so at least 21/2 million people were lost through the famine; a million people had emigrated, many of them dying before they reached the promised land. Between 1848 and 1864 £13,000,000 were sent home to Ireland by emigrants in America to bring relatives out, so there was a steady drain of the best and most enterprising to enrich other countries.16
It was the west coast of Ireland that had suffered most in the famine, yet the Atlantic broke upon these shores and the sea was full of shoals of herring and mackerel in immense quantities which swam near the shore, and further out there were cod, ling, sole, turbot and haddock. But sea fishing was a neglected industry; one of the problems was that there were no trees, hence no wood to make seaworthy craft for deep-sea fishing. There was the curragh, a frail craft, made of wickerwork covered in stretched hides or tarred canvas, but it was not suitable for nets for deep-sea fishing; a vessel of 50 tons was needed, laden with nets, in order to combat the heavy swell. The coast nearer the shore was perilous, full of great rocks, cliffs, treacherous currents and sudden squalls. The fishermen were heroic but the odds were impossible. When the potato harvest failed, many of the fishermen stripped their boats and sold all their gear, in order to buy food for their families. In such circumstances one might expect the British Government to have provided a fishing fleet, or at least the wood to build one, but it was not to be. Soup kitchens were set up and emergency rations distributed to three million people, and with that the British Government considered that its responsibility towards starving Ireland was almost at an end.
It is astonishing that throughout this terrible tragedy, and in the years before and after, the potato was still one of the few staple foods, however poor and hungry a family was. They could not, as they might have done centuries before, search the fields for wild greens, herbs and fungi, for the soil belonged to a landowner who fiercely protected his rights. Such knowledge of wild foods had gone. The potatoes were boiled in their skins over an open fire and were drained in a shallow basket called sciathoga; the family gathered around the kitchen table, or huddled in the middle of the floor. If they were fortunate they also were able to drink milk and eat the potatoes with butter. It is here that the dish ‘Potatoes and Point’ was born: to pick up your potato and point it at the scrap of dried bacon hanging from the rafters, somehow endowed the potato with a touch of salty bacon flavour.
It is even more astonishing that from this Irish experience a now equivocal attitude to the potato was born. Great potato dishes emerged, central to Irish cuisine, and at least two of them have emigrated happily to other countries. Firstly, there is Colcannon, for which the potatoes are mashed, then mixed with cabbage and cooked leeks or spring onion, with masses of butter. Secondly, there is Boxty, a potato cake, made so that it could be carried as travelling food; it is also known as ‘tatties’ or ‘parleys’. The mashed potato and butter are mixed with flour, made into a dough, then cut into rounds and cooked over a griddle. There are potato puddings, potato pies and potato bread. The Irish cuisine revolves around butter and milk as much as the potato, as well as oats and mutton stew. It is food to warm the body, to keep out the damp; it is hearty, rich and basic.
Modern Period
Irish food changed very slowly. American bacon, jam, tea and sugar all became established at the end of the nineteenth century. The fish and chip shop arrived in 1900. However, it was the corner store that changed what the Irish ate; the goods from abroad, such as tinned fruits, salmon and ham, were considered better than home-produced ones and were designated as treats, designed for high tea with soda bread. Nevertheless, right through to the 1950s the staples still remained potatoes, butter and cabbage, which for the majority of people comprised the main meal of each day. Throughout the 1960s French, Italian and Chinese foods were introduced and quickly accepted in urban areas, followed in the 1970s by the American hamburger. It is only recently, in the last two decades, that a renaissance of traditional Irish foods has occurred, in which a real pride and skill in the making of farmhouse cheeses have created remarkable products equal to any great continental cheeses. Irish salmon, smoked or fresh, is renowned. Foods such as the seaweeds have become chic and valued for their health-giving properties.
Many of the traditional dishes are rightly famous: the broths and soups made with wild foods, then thickened with oatmeal, were often made from shellfish, the free harvest of the shores; Irish Stew made with mutton, onions and potatoes could not be more basic, yet if made with care with all the fat skimmed off it is a fine dish. The original recipe needed the fat and the potatoes obligingly soaked up much of it. Some Irish cooks flavoured it with thyme or rosemary and many added carrots and dumplings. Cabbage and bacon is another hearty dish, with the cabbage boiled in the bacon water for the last eight minutes. Many of the dishes now prized stem from the Anglo-Irish kitchens of great estates whose old recipe books have come to light; all the game pies, for example, and fish dishes like scallops with cream and hot buttered lobster have their origin here. The Irish poor had a way with offal, and Drisheen, from stuffed lamb’s intestines, is still made in Cork, while both black and white puddings as well as a goose pudding are still eaten with great enjoyment. There are also a host of cakes and bread mixtures such as Barm Brack, which is usually a yeast dough with dried fruit, candied peel and lemon peel and carraway seed added, or Irish plum cake made with sour milk, an enormous amount of butter as well as currants, raisins and mixed peel. Irish Soda Bread is one of the great breads of the world – and there are very few of those left.17
Scotland
In the fifth century when the Roman legions left Britain and the invasions from the north and east began, the sixth-century British writer Gildas tells us that it was a British king who invited these tribes to defend his kingdom against the Picts and Scots. If they were invited, they certainly outstayed their welcome. The Jutes from the Rhineland, the Angles from the Cimbric Peninsula and the Saxons from the northwestern coast of Germany, saw the rich abundance of the country and stayed to fight the British themselves, until the British fell back into Devon, Cornwall, lowland Scotland and the Welsh Marches. Within the next hundred years all distinctions between these German tribes had vanished and they regarded themselves as one nation, though it was divided into several kingdoms.
The British, thrust back to the edge of these islands, were the last inheritors of the Roman culture and in the sixth century a literature of verses and ballad poetry, often intensely lyrical, but which also celebrated sacrifice in battle and the heroism of warriors, was written. These works mention food in passing: reflecting Homer, it is the food of warriors, roasting meats and drinking mead and wine:
Men went to Catraeth at dawn:
Their high spirits lessened their life spans.
They drank mead, gold and sweet, ensnaring.18
We learn that the soldiers sat around a large vessel which held the mead or wine, and with their pann – a scoop or drinking bowl – dipped into the communal bowl. Mead and ale were drunk from vessels made from horn, while for wine they used glass, gold or silver. They grew oats which made a flat round bread baked on an iron, they hunted deer, boar and grouse, they kept cattle, while the soldiers had a fondness for apples and for tending kitchen gardens.
There had always been huge difficulties in wresting an adequate food supply from the landscape of Scotland; more than three-fifths of the land consists of mountain, moor and hill. In the south is the plateau of the southern uplands, a slaty rock, which runs across from south-west to north-east for 120 miles. The Highlands are granite rock with a thin topsoil where the frequent rains from the south-west wash away the soluble minerals. Much of the valley ground is marsh or bog, where the acidity of the peaty soil and the poorness of natural drainage add almost insuperable difficulties to cultivating anything. So great stretches of Scotland were regions where very little would grow. Dr Johnson, as always, summed it all up, by saying that in Scotland a tree elicited some of the curiosity bestowed on rarities, and went on to remark that at Tobermory he saw ‘what they called a wood, which I unluckily took for heath’.19
Much of the farming technique in the early years was basic, devoted to growing oats, barley and kale and forcing the soil to give a return until it was exhausted then moving onto another virgin patch. This worked while there was still plenty of land to move around on, but once settlements began, the land never had any opportunity to rest and recuperate which resulted in a decline in its quality.
Over the extent of this small country there were huge differences in the quality and amount of food, as there was between what the majority had to survive on and what the nobility clustered around the monarch enjoyed; for example, the nobility relied on a substantial amount of imported goods. What the poor ate in Edinburgh was vastly different from what the poor ate in the coastal regions and islands.
Early Agriculture
The struggle against the elements had always been a harrowing one. The actual growing season for the crops was short, so there were never enough cereals to extend through the year. The summer, often up to the late nineteenth century, was a breadless period and cereal products might only be available for four to five months of the year. The oats or barley prior to grinding was dried in a kiln, or put into a pot to parch over the fire or even placed in the ash; if the grain was placed in the fire the process avoided threshing and parched the grain simultaneously, thus preparing it for the hand mill or quern. Once ground, the grains were boiled to make porridge, which was the staple daily dish and eaten with milk and salt. Meat was eaten very occasionally and very early methods of cooking meat still remained in the Hebrides and Highlands; animal skins were sewn into a pouch and the meat was boiled in this bag over a fire or the animal’s stomach was used as a container. This practice was still in use in the Hebrides in the late eighteenth century; it was common in the Highlands until after 1759, when a range of mass-produced cast-iron domestic cooking utensils became available through the development of the Scottish iron industry.
A late eighteenth-century traveller met a man on the island of Rum, who did not taste bread until he was fifty and for the rest of his life (he lived to 103) never ate it from March till October, but only took fish and milk, like everyone else in Rum. It was even considered unmanly to toil with spades for such an unnecessary luxury. Fish in fresh or preserved form might have to be a substitute for bread or other cereal products for fifty per cent or more of the year.20
In these coastal areas wild foods that could be gathered were paramount in the diet: eggs from sea birds, small shellfish, clams, limpets (but see below) and mussels, seaweeds like dulse and alaria esculenta, edible algae called slake or slawk, and vegetables that grew on the beaches like sea kale and wild skirret (when boiled the last was a substitute for bread). The staple fish was coley which could be caught in small boats close to the shore, or with a rod and line from the cliffs and rocks; it was eaten fresh, rolled in breadcrumbs and fried, or dried and salted; its livers were also eaten and sometimes stuffed into the heads of cod or haddock, a dish that came to be called Crappit Heid (Stuffed Head). Walter Scott mentions ‘crappit heads’ in his novel Guy Mannering. An oil was made from the livers on the Isle of Skye, described as dark like port wine, thin but effective.
Wind Blown Fish was made by cleaning the fish, taking out the eyes and passing a string through, then covering the fish with salt and hanging the fish in a draught for the night; the next morning the fish was cooked slowly over a low fire. As in Ireland, seaweeds were used in soups and a jelly made from carrageen; a seaweed referred to as tangle was thought very good for the eyesight, and was both eaten raw and boiled with butter. Limpet shells have been discovered from the earliest times; they were used as fish bait as well as food, but whether eaten cooked or raw they were tough and tasteless, and people who ate them were looked down upon, for limpets were eaten in times of famine and extreme poverty. Yet a soup, stew or ‘skink’ was made from them, boiled in milk, because it was thought to increase the milk in nursing mothers. Whelks and periwinkles were also eaten, and in Barra the cockle was collected from April to August; horseloads were gathered at a single tide. They were boiled and eaten from the shell, or sometimes boiled in milk and made into a soup. On the east coast fishergirls from Ardersier gathered cockles and sold them in Inverness.
On the Highlands and the Islands dairy products were a central part of the diet; in fact, as in Ireland, newly made butter was often buried in the peat bogs. Butter was made in the summer months when the livestock were on the hills grazing; this was called the ‘shieling’ system of transhumance necessary with subsistence farming on poor terrain, a term that referred to both the summer pasture and the hut in which the shepherds, who in this case were the women, lived. In the summer period, these women made the butter in clay pots, called crogans, which they also made by hand and left to dry by the hearth. Crogans were used as milking pails, to carry water and ale and to store oil. Crogans made especially to churn butter had holes perforated in one side to allow the gases to escape, otherwise the crogan would have exploded. The method was partially to fill the crogan with milk, to tie a piece of cloth or skin tightly over the circular mouth and to rock the vessel backwards and forwards until the butter was made; this process could take up to nine or ten hours.21 It is odd that the churning tool and wooden churn common in early Ireland did not find their way north across the water.
Before the Act of Union roads were very few and what existed were well-nigh impassable; wheeled traffic was completely impossible, and travel on foot was often the quickest way as stepping stones could be utilised while horses simply slipped, fell or got stuck in the mud. Winter feeding of livestock was unknown; the milch cows and sheep that were housed had to starve on straw, boiled chaff, mashed wins, dry benty grass and coarse rushes, which had been cut in autumn from the marsh lands with an occasional sheaf of oats. The animals that survived staggered outside dizzy with weakness, sometimes so feeble they had to be carried to the pasture; for the first few days they had to be dragged out of the bogs and marshes into which they had been tempted by the sprouting vegetation on the surface but were then too weak to extricate their clogged feet.22 That these animals could slowly recover, grow stronger on the new grass and then be sold on, going on long journeys over these rough tracks seems astonishing.
The chief industry of the south-west and the Highlands of Scotland was the trade in cattle with England. From Galloway came the black, polled, shaggy cattle which were good grazing stock and were readily sold in England. Large herds were driven from the north to the cattle trysts at Crieff and Falkirk where they were sold to English drovers. The Highland cattle, which had been well nigh starved in the winters, were small, hardy, lean and active; they were, not unexpectedly, poor milkers (they calved only every second year), giving in the height of summer only 11/2 gallons per day. In the Lowlands double that amount was given.
A few swine were kept in the Lowlands, but none at all in the Highlands as they refused to eat pork. An old Cavalier song ridicules them as ‘the Jewish Scots that scorn to eat the flesh of swine’. (James VI of Scotland and I of England also disliked pork.) They kept small flocks of sheep to provide wool for domestic purposes; these fed on the hill slopes, but often had to be driven through snow to distant sheltered valleys, a journey on which many died. They had to be housed at night, as they could be attacked by eagles, wild cats and foxes. The ewes were milked for a few weeks after weaning, the milk being made into cheese or butter; they were a small, narrow-framed, unshapely breed, slow in growth, varying between 28 lb and 36 lb in the carcass, producing mutton and wool of poor quality.
The Food
Jean de Froissart (1333-1400), European medieval poet and court historian who travelled to Italy, France, and the Iberian peninsula as well as Scotland, wrote an impressive account of the Scots army campaigning. He was astonished at its mobility, advancing seventy miles in a day, sweeping into the north of England on horseback, its knights and squires on fine strong horses, the commoners on small ponies. Its secret was that it dispensed with the baggage carts; each soldier took with him a bag of oats and a flat stone kept between the saddle and the saddle cloth. The army lived on water, underdone meat and thin oat cake. It drank river water without wine, slaughtered cattle from the surrounding countryside and cooked the meat in the hides over a fire; the water was then mixed with the oats, the stone laid over the fire and the thin cake spread over the stone. Froissart ends his account with the remark, ‘It is not surprising that they can travel faster than other armies.’ He goes on to describe the discomfort of living in Scottish burghs, the lack of refinement among the nobles and gentry and the violent Byzantine barbarity of the court. This was at the beginning of the Auld Alliance when French soldiers came to Scotland to help fight the English. From Froissart one gets the impression that the Scottish court remained uninfluenced by French manners, certainly at the table. However, Froissart was impressed by the fact that the farmers were not downtrodden by the nobility as they were in France.
In the medieval period, from the few scattered accounts of consumption, one gathers that meat-eating was prominent, at least in the military, the navy and the towns and cities. Visiting Denmark in 1564, a Scottish recruiting officer declared that the men he offered to bring over from Scotland to fight the Swedes would need but few provisions – water and milk for drink, fresh flesh and a little bread. In 1513 the James, one of James IV’s great ships, had forty men on board and was provisioned daily. Each man’s ration was 15 oz bread, 3 oz mutton, 12 oz herring and a good deal of ale, which would have supplied 3,500 calories. In the 1380s John Fordoun thought that ‘the Scots were a people rarely indulging in food before sunset and contenting themselves, moreover with meat, and food prepared from milk.’ Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, envoy to the Pope and the future Pope Pius II, visited Scotland to report on life there a few decades later, thought the country bleak and wild with few trees and very little corn.
Sulphurous stone dug out of the ground (coal) was used as fuel. The towns were without walls, the houses built without mortar, with doors of ox-hide, the common people are poor, and destitute of all refinement. They eat flesh and fish, and bread was a luxury. Trading with Flanders the people exported hides, wool, salt fish, and pearls.
Perhaps, understandably as all nations do, the Scots put on a show for these foreign visitors, for in 1498 Don Pedro de Ayala noted that ‘they have more meat in great and small animals than they want’ and in 1545 Nicander Nucius wrote that ‘the Scots have so many oxen and so many flocks of sheep that wonder arises in the beholders on account of the multitude of them,’ adding, ‘they abound in butter, cheese and milk.’ Estienne Perlin, writing in 1551-2, found plentiful and cheap provisions, not least meat: ‘They have plenty of cows and calves, on which account their flesh is cheap; and in my time bread was tolerably cheap.’23
There is other evidence which points to meat being plentiful up to the beginning of the seventeenth century which is that at times of famine and dearth the Privy Council took measures to halt all exports of fish, flesh, cheese and butter. The eating of meat in 1565 and 1567 was banned by the Privy Council in Lent, not for religious reasons, but to conserve supplies, ‘for the common weill’, as there had been bad harvests; these regulations continued in the 1570s and 1580s. In the famine of 1598, when Dumfries was short of food, the local magistrates purchased cattle from the surrounding countryside and had them brought into the burgh.24 Unless the townpeople regularly ate meat this, of course, would not have happened. At these times of food shortages Parliament rationed the food according to rank: in 1551 a Parliamentary order maintained ‘that having respect to the great and exorbitant dearth risen in this realm of victuals and other stuff for the sustenation of mankind … it is decided and ordained that no archbishop, bishop, nor earl shall have at his mess but eight dishes of meat, nor baron nor freeholder have but four dishes of meat, nor no burgess or other substantious man, spiritual or temporal, shall have at his mess but three dishes, and but one kind of meat in every dish.’ This, in fact, is a temporary sumptuary law employed at a time of famine. There were penalties if any of the grandees exceeded their limits, though one doubts that the higher orders were ever fined a £100 for an infringement. In 1572 in the midst of these meat bans Lord Lovat’s accounts show that he consumed seventy fat oxen a year as well as venison, fish, poultry, lamb, veal and huge quantities of game birds, as well as imported wines, sugars and spices from France.
Very early in the following century the authorities ceased to concern themselves with meat supplies at times of food shortages. In the famine years of 1622-4, the Privy Council never attempted to control meat supplies. Exports of hides also declined in this century, but the export of live cattle increased; up to 48,000 beasts crossed the border to England in the 1660s, rising to 60,000 by the 1690s. What had occurred was that the English were now eating the Scottish beef, while the Scots had to eat something else. Even throughout the medieval period, there must have been regions of Scotland that rarely ate meat at all.
Bishop Leslie in 1568 said of the Highlanders that they were accustomed to a mixed diet of rye, pease, beans, wheat and especially oats, but their ‘greatest delyte’ was beef. Of the Borderers he comments that they lived mainly on flesh, milk, cheese and ‘sodden’ beir (barley supposedly in broths), adding that they made little use of bread. Not so long afterwards in 1598, Fynes Morison described the Lowland population as eating ‘little fresh meate’; he added: ‘They vulgarly eate harth Cakes of Oates, but in Cities have also wheaten bread.’ In 1605 Sir Thomas Craig, investigating the possibilities of a union between the two countries, for now they shared the same monarch, saw a striking difference between the Lowlands and the Highlands. ‘Nowadays,’ he pointed out, ‘national plenty is a question of food and clothing; and in the matter of food we are as well off as any other people.’ He claimed that fewer Scots died of starvation than the English, that nowhere else was fish so plentiful, and that there was meat of every kind and barley bread as pure and white as that of England and France. He was impressed by the servants ‘who are content with oatmeal, which makes them hardy and long lived. The greater number of our farmhands eat bread made of peas and beans.’ Craig described the Highlanders as robust, long-lived active people, in spite of their entire dependence on cheese, flesh and milk like the Scythians.25
The first known reference to porridge is from Richard James (1592-1638), an English traveller, who spoke of a ‘pottage’ made of oatmeal flour boiled in water which was eaten with butter, milk or ale; he speaks of it as being ‘eaten by the common people and school children at breakfast and by Ladies also’. He also speaks of the ‘meaner’ sort in Berwickshire eating pease bread, while he enthuses over the food he has eaten in the gentlemen’s houses he stayed at – the boiled meat dishes, broths and stews. All references to the Lowland diet now emphasise the staple food, oatmeal, and hardly mention meat at all. Even the seventeenth-century army diet is now without meat, allowing for two soldiers 2 lb oatbread and 28 oz wheatbread with a pint of ale per day. In 1689 the provisions for 100 men for a month provided two-thirds of the nutrition from oatmeal, with a quarter from butter and cheese and the rest from ale and brandy. In 1649 an orphan’s diet from Hutcheson’s Hospital in Glasgow shows that eight-two per cent of the nutrition came from oatbread, eight from meat and three from fish. An analysis of other institutional diets shows roughly the same ratio.26
Highland food was described by Bishop Pococke in 1760 as milk, curds, whey and oatmeal. Pennant, in his Tour of Scotland (1769), described the food on Arran as ‘chiefly potatoes and meal, and during the winter some dried mutton or goat is added to their hard fare’. He describes three groups that drank milk: the Highland shepherds who drank ‘milk, whey and sometimes by way of indulgence, whisky’; the married servants on Skye who as their common food had Brochan, a thick meal-pudding with milk, butter or treacle; and the inhabitants of Lismore who were forced to live off boiled sheep’s milk throughout the spring in the absence of anything else. Marshall, in his survey of the Highlands in 1794, told of a peasantry that lived predominantly on oatmeal and milk; if butter and cheese was made from it, they could not give any to their children, for it all had to be sold at the market.
The food the tenant farmers ate was both monotonous and inadequate. The families gathered around one wooden dish and helped themselves with a horn spoon which each carried about them. Table knives and forks were not even provided at inns, so travellers learnt to carry their own. Oatmeal of the poorest quality was the staple food; it was boiled with water to make a porridge and eaten with thin milk or ale; bread was thin oatcakes cooked over a griddle. The food was further rendered insipid by the absence of salt, since the salt tax made that commodity a luxury. Oatmeal and pease-meal mixed together provided a dish called ‘brose’, made by pouring over water which had had greens boiled in it, or kail, which was a broth made from cabbage leaves thickened with coarse barley or groats of oats. These dishes were sometimes flavoured with a piece of salt meat, but meat was a luxury eaten only at a wedding or a christening, or when an animal died of starvation or disease. The slightly better off farmer at the end of autumn killed and salted one or two animals to be kept throughout the winter. In 1795 a traveller commented that ‘among the ordinary tenants not five pounds of meat were consumed in the family in a year; that an egg, and still more a fowl was a luxury seldom enjoyed; and that an occasional haddock was regarded as a wonderful regalement.’27 Elizabeth Hamilton complained of the slovenly methods adopted by the people in making cheese and butter and the filthy state of these articles when ready for use.28 ‘The butter was of twenty different colours and stuck with hairs like mortar.’ A black pudding was sometimes made by bleeding the cows and mixing the blood with oatmeal and boiling it together. Tenants who lived above a Highland stream could supplement this meagre diet by catching salmon and other fish. Further north in the Orkneys, the diet was little better, the daily fare consisted of ‘morning piece’, which was half a bannock of bread made from bere (a form of barley which had its grains in four rows and sometimes contained almost twice as many grains as ordinary barley) mixed with seeds from wild plants. Breakfast was porridge made from the native black oats and more wild seeds, and fish with nettle broth formed the main meal. The water in which the fish was boiled was kept to cook the cabbage reserved for supper, and the scourings from the pots and platters were mixed with the following morning’s porridge. Salt water supplied the only seasoning. Reuthie bread, made from the seeds of wild mustard, filled the gap between the exhaustion of the old crop and the harvest of new grain.
The French Influence
The Auld Alliance goes back certainly as far as 1239 when Alexander II of Scotland married Mary de Courcy of Picardy, who survived him to act as Regent for her son. (Norman influences could have entered Scotland earlier after Alexander I married the daughter of Henry I of England.) From then on there must have been cultural influences from across the Channel entering the Scottish court and inevitably moulding some of the food eaten. James I (1406-1437) is said to have had a French cook and James II (1437-1460) married a French wife. Did they bring French cookery books with them, contemporary versions of Le Viandier and the Grand Cuisinier?29 If so, the influences were only detected later in the midst of the sixteenth century. The court of James IV was considered the most romantic and brilliant in Europe; its praises were sung by the Italian poet Ariosto, and it is the subject of a finely painted frieze in Siena. The poet Dunbar wrote of the swans, cranes, partridges and plovers and every fish that swam in the rivers adorning the tables with wines from the Rhine, so one must conclude that gastronomy was of a high order. But whether this was specifically French is another matter. Court dishes, as we have seen, were almost international in their character.
Historians think it was Mary of Guise, Queen to James V, who brought French food and recipes to the court of Scotland. Throughout her 18-year regency, while her daughter, the future Mary Queen of Scots, was growing up, that French influence in Scotland reached its zenith. Her family, Cardinal de Guise and the Duke of Lorraine, did all they could to tighten the bonds between France and Scotland, and also to stem the advance of Protestant Reformers. The Duke of Lorraine sent French miners to help the Scots develop their coal-mining and engineers, masons and master builders, carvers, glaziers and decorators, clothmakers and cooks followed. The Scots began to drink their wine from silver ‘tassies’ and cut their meat with a ‘jockteleg’ after Jacques de Liège, the inventor of the table knife; they ate thin triangles of shortbread called ‘Petticoatails’ from petites Gatelles, and liked cod in a horseradish and egg sauce, or ‘cabbieclaw’30 from cabillaud. French cookery terms have passed into Scots: others include ashet from the French assiette, meaning meat dish, battry (batterie de cuisine) for kitchen utensils, pottisea for patissier and mange for meal.31 F. Marian McNeill lists over 150 Franco-Scottish domestic terms in her book The Scots Kitchen; she quotes a Colonsay woman who was cook to a great Highland chief in the Jacobite period as saying that she thought French and Scottish methods of cooking were similar:
The way we cook up meat and vegetables together, and go in so much for braising and stewing. I often think their charcoal stoves are very like our peat embers that keep the broth boiling so gently and bake the potatoes on the top.
Once Mary Stuart came to the throne she continued to improve the court manners and table. Feather Fowlie appears to be a rendition of Velouté de Volaille, while Lorraine Soup, with almonds, eggs, chicken, breadcrumbs, lemon, nutmeg and cream was possibly a tribute to the Queen Regent, as was Soupe à la Reine, a white soup, made from veal, chicken and herbs. Veal Flory, a veal stew with herbs and mushrooms, is supposed to have arrived via Paris and Florence.
There are also two puddings that bear the same word Flory, Almond Flory and Prune Flory. Meg Dods thinks the nuns of Florence and France were the source of much confectionery and many Scottish puddings: ‘caramelled and candied fruits, fruits en chemise, chantilly and caramel baskets’. Archangelica officinalis, green angelica which is candied, has been grown in Scotland since 1568, the only place in the British Isles where it is cultivated. A ‘crokain’ is a pudding made from sugar, water and lemon and derives from croque en bouche; another pudding, Nun’s Beads, is a kind of beignet soufflé, while Haggis is a corruption of hachis, French for mince.32
George Buchanan was delighted with the feasting at the Duke of Atholl’s table, where he was regaled ‘with all sich deliciosus and sumptuous meattis as was to be had in Scotland for fleschis, fischis, and all kinds of fyne wyne, and spyces requisite for ane prince’.33
At the end of the sixteenth century Fynes Morrison travelled around the country and gives a picture of the diet of the people:
They eat much colewort and cabbage but little fresh meat, using to salt their mutton and geese … The gentlemen reckon their revenues not by rents of money, but by cauldrons of victuals …
He explains he was at a knight’s house, attended by many servants wearing blue caps, who when they had finished eating sat down at the end of the table and were given great platters of porridge with a small piece of boiled meat, but the more senior servants had a pullet and some prunes in a broth instead of porridge. There was a difference, he explained, between the food of the country and the food of the city: in the former they vulgarly ate hearth cakes of oats, while in the latter they have wheaten bread bought by courtiers, gentlemen and the best sort of citizen. ‘They drink pure wines not with sugar as the English, yet at feasts they put Comfits in the wine after the French manner.’
The Eighteenth Century
Travellers to Scotland found getting around a hazardous business while the food at the inns outraged them. ‘A couple of roasted hens, very poor, new killed, the skins much broke with plucking, black with smoke and greased with bad butter,’ remarked one traveller in 1801.34 At breakfast in the inn at Inveroran Dorothy Wordsworth found the butter ‘not eatable, the barley cakes fusty, the oatbread so hard that I could not chew it and there were only four eggs in the house which they had boiled as hard as stones’. At an Edinburgh inn Dr Spier ate a dinner of ‘salt haddock, cold chicken in a periwig of feathers, tarts covered in black dirt instead of white sugar which seemed to have been first tasted by the mice’.35
As always the nobility did very well. Not only did they take valuable food from their tenants, but they could afford to buy the best imported food if they wished. In addition to money rent, the Earl of Dunnottar had corn, fodder butter, eggs, capons, hens and swine. Stewart of Appin is said to have received as part of his rent an ox or cow for every week and a goat or wether for every day of the year. In the Arniston Memoirs, a bill of fare for a week in December 1748 for Lord Arniston mentions cocky-leekie, boiled beef and greens, roast goose, shoulder of mutton, eggs, rice and milk, pea soup, boiled turkey, roast beef, apple pie, sheep’s head broth, rabbits, boiled hens with oyster sauce, mince pie, calves’ head, moorfowl, roast pig, hare soup, jugged hare, roast ducks, tongue, tarts and jellies, claret wine, white wine and ale. Dr Johnson was astonished at the high standard of living in the Hebrides. ‘I forgot to enquire how they were supplied with so much exotic luxury.’ The luxury could have been explained by the merchants of Inverness, who exported quantities of cured fish to France, Spain, Italy, Holland and Sweden, and in return imported glass, silk, muslin, tea, coffee, raisins, spices, oranges and lemons, wine and brandy. Dr Johnson continued to be amazed at the scale and magnificence of Scottish hospitality that he enjoyed: ‘veal in Edinburgh, roasted kid in Inverness, admirable venison and generous wine in the castle of Dunvegan’.
In 1784, the French traveller Faujas de St Fond tells us:
At the Duke of Argyll’s table, the different courses and the aftermeats were all done as in France, and with the same variety and abundance. We had delicate water-fowl, excellent fish and the vegetables which did honour to the Scotch gardeners. At the dessert, the cloth and napkins disappeared and the mahogany table was covered with brilliant decanters filled with the most exquisite wines, vases of porcelain and crystal glass containing comfits, and beautiful baskets, replete with choice fruits, which could scarely have been expected in this cold climate, even with every assistance from art …36
When John Knox dined at Brahan Castle near Dingwall in the 1780s there was beef, mutton, veal, lamb, pork, venison, hare, pigeons, fowls, tame and wild ducks, tame and wild geese, partridges and a great variety of moorfowl. From Lord Seaforth’s own boat came cod, haddock, whiting, mackerel, skate, sole, flounders, lythe, salmon and trout; the fish caught in the bay before the house were thrown in a heap on the kitchen floor, the cook chose what she wanted for his Lordship’s table and the rest went to the poor. Knox claimed that all these items, as well as the garden produce, was what a Highland laird or chieftain had at his dinner. For breakfast there were French rolls, oat and barley bread, tea and coffee, honey in the comb, red and blackcurrant jellies, marmalades, conserves, cream, a plateful of fresh eggs, fresh and salted herrings boiled, fresh and salted haddocks, a cold round of venison, beef and mutton hams. While to begin the meal there were drams of whisky, gin, rum or brandy, plain or infused with berries that grow among the heath.37
There is a Highland breakfast described in Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker where laid out upon the table are piles of boiled eggs, butter and cream, ‘an entire cheese made of goat’s milk; a large earthenware pot, full of honey; the best part of a ham; a cold venison pasty; a bushel of oatmeal, made into thin cakes and bannocks; with a small wheaten loaf in the middle, for the strangers; a stone bottle full of whisky; another of brandy, and a kilderkin of ale.’ A rather more sophisticated breakfast was found by the French visitor, Faujas de St Fond in 1784: ‘Plates of smoked beef, cheese of the country and English cheese, fresh eggs, salted herrings, butter, milk, and cream; a sort of boullie of oatmeal and water, in eating which each spoonful is plunged into a basin of cream; milk worked up with yolks of eggs, sugar, and rum; currant jelly, conserve of myrtle, a wild fruit that grows among the heath; tea, coffee, three kinds of bread (sea biscuits, oatmeal cakes, and very thin and fine barley cakes); and Jamaica rum.’ This breakfast is interesting for its medieval dishes; the boullie is flummery or the Welsh llymru and the flavoured milk is eggnog or syllabub. One wonders whether the beef was smoked or wind dried. Meg Dods, the one authority to inform us on this matter, does not mention beef in her chapter on curing.
Scottish breakfasts were understandably praised, but another meal in which the Scots would excel was about to appear, when Mary of Modena, the wife of James II of England, introduced tea in 1681 when her husband as Duke of York was Lord High Commissioner of Scotland. By 1750 tea had become a meal that gave great impetus to the national flair for baking. Henry Mackenzie, born in 1745, wrote of his childhood:
Tea was the meal of ceremony and we had fifty odd kinds of teabread. One Scott made a little fortune by his milk-bakes. His shop in Forrester’s Wynd was surrounded at five o’clock by a great concourse of servant maids …38
One Scottish lady living in London despised the meal there, writing back to a friend that they only have flimsy bread and butter and ‘no such thing as short-bread, seed cake, bun, marmlet or jeely to be seen …’39
There is a yawning gap between the food of the poor and that of the rich; the injustice of these social conditions strikes one as unbearable, especially as no one seemed moved to redress the situation. The irony was that oatmeal provides the basis for an extremely healthy diet and though the food of the Scottish poor was limited and bland it was highly nutritious. Francis Douglas, writing in 1782 of the food of small farmers in the north-east, remarked that they lived on ‘oatmeal, milk and vegetables, chiefly red cabbage in the winter seasons and coleworts for the summer and spring’, while flesh was never seen in their houses except at Christmas and Shrove Tuesday and at baptisms and weddings: ‘Nevertheless they are strong and active and live to a good old age.’
A very dismal view of Scottish cattle and their poor milk yield because of the scarcity of pasture is given in 1813 by a Mr Robertson in a book called A General View of Inverness. ‘The best cows in the Island afford only a Scots Quart (about 3 English pints) of milk a day; of which the calf gets a Choppin (one and a half pints) in the morning and the same quantity in the evening; but many of them yield not daily above a pint (one and a half quarts) of milk.’40
Very soon afterwards the potato was added to this diet. The first mention of it is in 1683 in Sutherland’s Hortus Medicus Edinburghensis and it found its way into the gardens of a few landowners as an occasional vegetable dish. In 1701 in the household book of the Duchess of Buccleuch there is an item of one peck of potatoes brought from Edinburgh for 2s 6d; in 1731 potatoes are mentioned several times as a supper dish in another household book of the Eglinton family.41 On the Marchmont estate field cultivation was practised at an early date for that part of Scotland. Among the directions for farm work in 1757 are the following: ‘The little valley below full of thistles to be planted with potatoes’, and ‘Potatoes to be planted in the ground next to the pond below the Old Parterre to supply the family’. A letter written in 1726 by John Cockburn to his favourite tenant, Alexander Wight, reads: ‘As your potato ground was well dunged and in order I doubt nothing of your having a good crop of barley upon it … the profit from the one fourth acre potatoes upon the bad land opposite the church is so great that I hope you will go on with them, especially as you find good crops after them.’ It was quickly realised that potatoes planted on ‘bad land’ broke up the soil, aerated it and were excellent as the first cultivating crop. Yet the Scottish people initially were suspicious about eating these tubers, and there were stories of the workers compelled to grow them laying the crop at the laird’s gate, as if to say they were not going to be made to eat them.
This was quickly to change, however:
Potatoes are used chiefly in lieu of bread by the great mass of Hebrideans plain boiled and without anything else but a little milk or salt; and in winter some salted meat or herrings. One fourth of the quantity raised is given to cattle, horses and pigs between the beginnings of February and the middle of March.42
The traveller who wrote thus was obviously suspicious of the potato, and his dislike of it is communicated in the best civil servant manner, on whether it can really be good for these people. He wrote: ‘It has been questioned whether potatoes are in fact advantageous to the Highlands or ought to be encouraged, as they tend to discountenance industry by affording so great a quantity of sustenance with so little labour.’43 Yet by the end he thinks they should be cultivated as long as they are confined to waste land. He tells us that a Hebridean would consume 8 lb potatoes per day.
However, as in Ireland, allowing the potato to become a staple food of the poor was to lead to disaster. There is little doubt that it was a major contributory factor to over population in the Hebrides and Highlands, so that by the second half of the eighteenth century population was overrunning resources. A combination of smallholdings, inefficient farming systems and the lack of integrated national markets in basic foodstuffs put the population at risk. From the 1690s the Highlands continued to suffer periodic famine periods, the worst one being in 1782. People, having nothing to eat at home, took to the road and begged; one commentator estimated that the numbers of begging poor had doubled to 200,000 during the later 1690s.
The crucial factor that changed Highland policy and the temperament of the chieftains themselves was the collapse of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. The Highlands had always remained apart from the rest of Scotland; dominated by a feudal regime, clan chieftains enjoyed medieval judicial and military privileges, achieving devoted loyalty from their tenants. Now the British Government abolished the chieftains’ authority and extended the royal system of shires and judges as they had done in the sixteenth century in Wales. Though the chieftains’ status was destroyed they did not suffer economically, for they became landlords on estates that before they had held in trust for their clans. Loyalty in the feudal system had been a one-way process, but now the new policies were all to the detriment of the crofter who had to pay rent for his land, a rent which the chieftain kept on raising.
Emigration overseas now increased greatly. It was the small farmers who left in their thousands, for the sub-tenants were too poor to emigrate. The Highland farmer could raise the money for himself and his family by selling his livestock. Dr Johnson discovered the plight from his host at Anach in Glenmoriston:
From him we first heard of the general dissatisfaction which is now driving the Highlanders into the other hemisphere; and when I asked him whether they could stay at home if they were well treated, he answered with indignation that no man willingly left his native country. Of the farm, which he himself had occupied, the rent had in twenty five years, been advanced from five to twenty pounds which he found himself so little able to pay that he would be glad to try his fortune in some other place.44
Consolidation of farms accompanied the rise in rents and emigration, and from this time too there was a changeover to sheep-farming. The Scots Magazine of July 1772 thought the emigration of hundreds of people to America from the north of Scotland was caused by the coming of opulent farmers from the Lowlands who turned the Highlands into sheep runs. In 1784 the export of wool from Inverness was only 1 ton 3 hundredweight, but in 1804 it had increased to 131 tons 10 hundredweight. The growing wealth of the country was all part of the industrial revolution, which had created the iron and steel trade, the expansion of the linen industry, woollen manufactures and the cotton industry in the west. This in turn made new and increasing demands on agricultural produce which could now reach the market towns by travelling efficiently on the new highways.
At the end of the century an artificial stimulus was given to the economy by the war with France. The price of wheat continued to rise throughout the Napoleonic Wars, and the result of the new prosperity was the erection of new farms and threshing mills, new agricultural implements and the making of enclosures. There was also a substantial increase in the wages of agricultural labourers. A ploughman’s wage in 1720 was £2 per year, in 1809 it was £24; a servant maid earned 16 shillings a year which went up to £10. There was general improvement in the social conditions of the people. One writer pointed out that in 1760 no wheat was sown in the parish, except one half acre by the minister and no kail or potatoes were planted in the open field; in 1790 above 100 acres of wheat were cultivated and three-fifths of the ground was under grasses, turnips, kail and potatoes; the whole parish was completely enclosed. In 1760 there was only one eight-day clock in the parish and one tea kettle; in 1790 there were thirty clocks, above 100 watches and at least 160 tea kettles, ‘there being scarce a family that have one and many that have two’. Wheaten bread, sweet milk, butter, cheese, eggs, tea and sometimes roast meat were added to the general diet.45 Good roads for carts and horses had replaced the mud tracks of 1750, so that some hundred pounds value annually of wheaten bread was brought from Kirkintilloch and Glasgow. ‘The houses of every decent inhabitant of this parish consist at least of a kitchen and one room, generally two rooms ceiled above, and often laid with deal floors, with elegant glass windows and, I believe, few of the tradesmen sit down to dinner without flesh meat on the table and malt liquor to drink.’46 Another writer remarked that ‘as ministers to our luxury we have in the same street an oilman, who advertises the sale of Quin sauce, Genoa capers, Gorgona anchovies etc.’47
Public roadhouses now also improved: one traveller commented on the cheapness of the tariff, a dinner of ‘fine fresh trout, a shoulder of mutton, two fowls and bacon, hung beef and salmon salted, vegetables, cheese and an excellent bottle of port, cost only four shillings and twopence’.48 Oatmeal still remained the staple food for breakfast and supper in many parts of Scotland. Among the poorer tenants, potatoes, milk and salted herrings came as a welcome change from the eternal brose and sowens, but if they kept a pig it provided them with pickled pork for part of the year, the lard dressed the potatoes and vegetables and the bones gave relish to the broth, if they kept poultry they had eggs which they could sell to buy tea and sugar.
In 1826 Meg Dods was impressed by the advances made in the last few years ‘to improve the quality, hasten the seasons and to spread the cultivation of vegetables’. She remarked in her The Cook and Housewife’s Manual that now upon a gentleman’s table when there had just been peas, broccoli, cauliflower, there was now asparagus, seakale, endive and artichoke. She spoke of the vegetable market improving ‘so that a healthful luxury is now within reach of all classes’. However, it was another story if you lived in the Highlands. In 1812 Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus wrote:
We were so remote from markets that we had to depend on our own produce … we brewed our own beer, made our bread, made our candles, nothing was brought from afar but, wine, groceries and flour for wheat did not ripen so high above the sea. Yet we lived in luxury; game was plentiful, red deer, roes, hare, grouse, ptarmigan and partridge; the rivers provided trout and salmon, the different lochs, pike and char; the garden abounded in common fruits and common vegetables; cranberries and raspberries ran over the country and the poultry yard was ever well furnished.49
The diet became less frugal in the cottage too. Mrs Katherine Grant from Appin in Argyll, recalled the ordinary diet as being porridge or potatoes with milk, cheese, eggs, scones, oatcakes and an occasional potful of cock-a-leekie, but a night’s fishing could bring in a harvest of shellfish and they would dry ling and codfish with herring and saithe and preserve them in barrels. A slaughtered sheep would be salted down and packed into a barrel, tripe had to be cleaned, suet transformed into candles and any left went into white puddings. Nothing was ever wasted: sheep’s head, barley broth, haggis, hash and fine mince patties. Meg Dods sums up this pragmatic and imaginative cooking when she writes: ‘We are convinced that the art of preparing cheap dishes is much better understood by the intelligent poor than by those who assume the task of instructing them.’
The industrial revolution brought the making of new roads, bridges and canals, giving work to thousands of agricultural labourers; these men left home and experienced new places and different foods. Moralists saw great benefits: ‘They have returned to their native districts with the advantages of using the most perfect sort of tools and utensils or they have been usefully distributed through other parts of the country … wheelwrights and cartwrights have been established, the plough has been introduced … the moral habits of the great masses of working classes are changed …’50
The Role of Women
From the earliest days, as in England, until greater urbanisation and the industrial revolution, women laboured in the fields besides their husbands and sons. It was not only the milking and feeding of livestock, but they spread the manure, carried the sheaves for threshing, cleaned out the byres and stables and helped winnow the corn, as an account from the Lothians in 1656 makes clear.51 A fit and able wife was essential to any adult male agricultural worker. It was also expected that not only were they the cooks for the main daily meal, but that bread would have been baked and at times of glut for any fruit and vegetable, it would be preserved, bottled, pickled or dried.
Women’s work was not confined to farming. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coal-mining women were part of the workforce; colliers in the east Lothian had to provide bearers to carry the coal to the surface, and generally they chose their wives and daughters. In pits such as Loanhead in Midlothian in the 1680s or Bo’ness in West Lothian during the 1760s women outnumbered men by two to one. This phenomenon was almost unknown in England. Women who lived around large towns could market vegetables, fruit and dairy products; fishwives from Fishmerrow and Prestonpans walked to Edinburgh to sell the fish caught by their husbands and fathers. Rural domestic industry was important, especially in the textile industry, and in the mid-eighteenth century roughly eighty per cent of adult women were involved in spinning. Women’s participation in trade was generally limited to shop-keeping. In the late seventeenth century, a Fife woman, Isobel Anderson, dealt in pepper, sugar, candy, soap, starch and hemp, in addition to a ton of tea from Bruges. These women also cooked, cleaned and mended in their homes; they looked after the children and made clothes for the family. The concept of a ‘housewife’ (a married woman who simply looked after her house and family) did not exist until the eighteenth century, until with greater urbanisation the burgeoning of the middle classes occurred and female leisure became an indication of the husband’s social status.
Scottish Cookery
Cookery books began to appear for this new woman, books which she would read and then give to the housekeeper to pass to the cook. One of the later ones, Mrs Frazer’s The Practice of Cookery, appeared in 1800: she writes in her preface: ‘These recipes were originally intended for the Author’s own private life, but at the request and solicitation of her scholars, and several respectable friends, she was induced to publish them.’ The cloak of respectability is thick upon this volume; it is much concerned with the appearances of food, giving great detail on how to dress and garnish it. There are four pages on how to dress a turtle, then three more on how to dress it the West Indian way; making an ornamental salmagundy entailed making a pound of butter into the shape of a pineapple – no instructions are given for this effect. It is obvious that how the food looks is the first priority; its appearance must impress and strike the onlooker with awe, but whether they found this appetising is not recorded.
These are books about social aspiration: indeed there are long homilies in Cookery and Domestic Economy by Mrs Somerville (Practical Teacher of the Art), which she published herself in 1862, and which is respectfully dedicated to the Ladies of Scotland. The book begins with a piece on the young housekeeper and her duties, which starts with the many difficulties that will meet her on her initiation into the duties of her new sphere of life. She must avoid all wasteful expenditure, in personal attire she will be neat and tasteful without extravagance: ‘rich adornments and gaudy jewellery are not the standard by which the real lady is judged’. It goes on to point out that ‘Many good husbands have been sadly changed by ill cooked and ill-timed dinners.’ This is followed by sections on cleanliness; ‘to dispel odours from the kitchen heat a coal shovel and pour a little coarse vinegar upon it and carry it about for a few moments in the lower hall and kitchen.’ Punctuality: ‘Without this qualification it is impossible to get on well, if indeed at all.’ ‘The kitchen time piece should be regularly attended to, to prevent the possibility of a mistake.’ We catch a glimpse of how the dinner dishes had to be made, all of them prepared some time before (soup should be made the day before), so that everything could be served at once. Fish, for example, should be prepared a few hours previously, vegetables laid in salt and water until boiled, then drained and kept warm.
Among the recipes for soup there are two, one called Summer Hotch-potch and the other Winter Hotch-potch (from the French hochepot) that do not inspire confidence. (However, see Chapter 10 on the art of left-overs, a Victorian practice, which began earlier if Mrs Somerville’s book is to be trusted as reflecting a social trend. Mrs Glasse’s recipe for Hodge-podge is made from fresh ingredients and so is Meg Dods’.) The recipe for turtle soup begins by taking the turtle out of the water, laying it on its back, tying its feet and cutting off its head. It ends with the remark that turtle fins make a nice corner dish. She is woefully inadequate, however, on instructions for nettles and dandelions, which, she says, ‘are esteemed by some and are said to be very wholesome; they are dressed in small bundles and served on toast with melted butter on them.’ The Victorian tendency to provide cheaper substitutes as in Mock Turtle soup made from a calf ’s head here appears in Mrs Somerville’s recipe for mock ginger made from sliced apple soaked in salt water and flavoured with ginger. An extract of calves’ feet is used to make jelly for setting various puddings, such as white vanilla cream, strawberry or ginger cream. Fritters of left-over pudding, were made by dipping slices into pancake batter, frying them, then dusting them with sugar. Cold left-over rice is mixed with flour and fried. A recipe for cow-heel, a mould of jellied beef with hard boiled eggs, ends with the remark ‘This is an economical dish.’
The one cookery book of great authority is The Cook and Housewife’s Manual (1826), written under the authorship of ‘Mrs Margaret [Meg] Dods’, who is a character in Sir Walter Scott’s St Ronan’s Well, the termagant landlady of the Cleikum Inn. The writer was really a Mrs Johnston, the wife of an Edinburgh publisher; she was the author The Edinburgh Tales and other works, and was later editor of Tait’s Magazine. She considers Anglo-Gallican cookery to be the best the world has ever known, but regards both the conceit of French cooks and the affectation of juvenile gastronomers as detrimental. She thinks that the French took the lead of all European peoples in soups and broths, while the Scots ranked second and the Welsh next; the English were at the very bottom of the scale. (Miss Acton complains only a little later that the English appeared to have forgotten how to make soup, Dods gives thirty pages on making stock and various game soups as well as five more pages on fish soups. Her Oyster Soup is made from a quart of oysters, pounded and simmered for half an hour, then strained and another dozen added, poached for eight minutes, seasoned with mace and cayenne, then thickened with three egg yolks. She adds a note: ‘Any other flavour that is relished may be given to this luscious soup. We like lemon: mustard and vinegar are used, and tarragon or garlic, for those who relish foreign cookery.’ Note, she does not say French cookery but foreign, yet these are two flavourings we would now associate with French cuisine. Apart from the chicken and leek, her Cock-a-Leekie also has prunes and like the Oyster Soup has two lots of leeks, the first cooked to a purée, the second cut into chunks and added later.
She advises the Rumford Steamer for vegetables and deplores them boiled and watery. She cooks peas with lettuce, parsley and young onions. She advises potatoes cut into rounds and fried in goose fat, cutting endive into slices and stewing it in veal gravy; she wants white turnips to be the size of marbles before frying them in butter, she stews red cabbage, in only the water still clinging to it after being washed, with cayenne and a glass of vinegar, and cooks sorrel with butter. In short her ideas and methods are sound, her cooking brief; everything in her fresh vegetables is designed to retain the maximum flavour.
She likes her fish to be ‘ripened’ for two days or more, for she considers fresh fish harsh, while ripened fish is more delicate and sapid. (This liking is hardly shared by us today.) The Scots had a predilection for slightly high fish: on the Island of Lewis they hung up skate unsalted for a few days to be eaten ‘high’. Another method with skate was to earth-dry it: the skate were placed on damp grass and covered with sods (grass side down) for a day or two, because they were too tough if eaten fresh. On the Islands salmon was poached in sea water; for overripe salmon, as Dods puts it, horse-radish is added to the water.
Much of Meg Dods could still be used today and certainly her book is well worth reading. McNeill believes it is a work ‘not unworthy to be placed alongside its French contemporary, Brillat Savarin’s Physiologie du Gout’. How far, however, did the aspirations of these cookery books, both the good ones like Dods and the execrable like Somerville, influence staple fare in middle-class homes? It is impossible to say, one suspects that the central basis of traditional Scottish food was retained, plain fare cooked simply, but using the very best of fresh ingredients, butter and cream, beef and mutton, potatoes, oats. In the hands of inspired cooks such ingredients were to become the best food imaginable. There is a description of a nineteenth-century larder at Conan House in Ross-shire that makes the mouth water: of jam pots by the hundred, shelves of preserved candied apricots and Magnum Bonum plums, smoked sheep and deer tongues, strings of threaded artichoke bottoms for adding to soups, gooseberry and currant wines, raspberry vinegar and ginger beer.52
McNeill’s book is a collection of traditional Scottish recipes from many reliable sources; she correctly claims that you can only make nettle soup in the early spring because it must be made from the young shoots. (As does Mrs Somerville, a later Scottish writer, Elizabeth Craig, entirely omits this point, making one suspect she had never made this soup, for if you make it with anything else but the young shoots you’ll end up with a fibrous skein which is entirely inedible. After all, old nettles are as good as flax for making cloth; better, some say, than any species of linen.) McNeill’s collection also includes Scots Hare Soup (Bawd Bree), Mussel Brose which is made with oatmeal, milk and water, Cullen Skink, that great soup of smoked haddock and potatoes, and Partan Bree, a crab soup. Her traditional dishes continue through game, meat, fish, puddings, bannock, shortbreads and much else.
This is a cuisine that is a far cry from the English one. It has its own very distinctive tone and flavour, described as ‘pastoral cooking, brightly influenced by old ties with France’. It is heard clearly today in the work of Scottish food writers.
Wales
A land that juts out into the Irish Sea, half of it mountainous where the Britons, once part of Rome, were beaten back by the Angles, Jutes and Saxons made invasion a slow process. Once the Roman Empire had retracted in the early fifth century, the invasions began in 476 and were not complete for another 200 years. In the uplands they grew oats which made a flat round bread baked on an iron, they hunted deer, boar and grouse, they kept cattle and sheep, milking both and making both butter and cheese.
British cheese making was no doubt stimulated by Roman methods and flavours. Palladius made his cheese in May, curdling fresh milk with rennet from a kid, lamb or calf, or with a teasel or sprig of fig. As elsewhere transhumance was practised, taking the livestock up from the valleys at sowing time into the hills as the pasture there began to come to life. It was at the hafod, or smaller hill farm, that the butter and cheese were made; the butter churns were the right size to take oatcakes made in the winter in the valley farms for summer eating. The curd was wrung, pressed, wrapped in salt, pressed again, laid on slats and finally stored in a dry place out of draughts. Welsh cheese was stored for some time in barrels of brine.
Early Riches
Material from the middens at Dinas Powys suggests that soldiers in the fifth-seventh centuries ate well on pork and beef, with poultry, shellfish, salmon or sea trout, bread and vegetables.53 The soldiers also had a fondness for apples and for tending kitchen gardens. Apples would have grown well in the eastern part of the country, in what would become the counties of Breconshire, Radnorshire and Monmouthshire. The monastic diet for penitents is specified by Gildas which is bread and relish with butter on Sundays, as well as vegetables, eggs, cheese, milk and buttermilk – hardly penitential at all, since the only sacrifice is the beer and meat that are mentioned for others to eat. The stricter Book of David lists bread, salt and pease porridge, but later monastic diets at Llancarfan mention fish and milk. Cadog is reputed to have given a cask of beer and a fat sow as well as fifty wheaten loaves to the soldiers who came to demand food from him. There is further mention in the Colloquy54 of breads, fats, milk of many kinds, chicken, cheese and broth for feasts, and ale, wine, cider and mead to drink.
Giraldus Cambrensis (1188) comments on the ‘strange habit’ of serving the main dish on bread rolled out large and thin and baked fresh each day. This sounds like Persian bread, rolled out as thin as a sheet, which is thrown against the hot walls of an oven, or like a large Indian Nan. Or could it be like the pikelet, which originally stems from Wales, for this is a thick batter mixture, the dough being thinned enough by the addition of milk to run across the stone. Whatever its nature it sounds good. The Welsh, like the Bretons, have always loved pancakes – crempog. Giraldus goes on to mention the plentiful supply of meat and poultry, evoking a varied and nourishing diet, perhaps only lacking in green vegetables, although the peasantry, as in Ireland, ate seaweeds, particularly rich in all the vitamins. They reared sheep, cattle, pigs and some goats. They also ate river and sea fish; there are mentions of monastic rights over rivers, lakes and estuaries which show us how concerned they were about fishing rights. Also, one gets the impression that cornfields were as common as pasture, that the arable land available was divided equally, that their food staples were bread and meat and there was plenty of dairy produce. This was a land of plenty, thinly populated and able to export some of its livestock and corn.
As in Ireland, there is in Wales a poem that turns everything into cheese. It has not as yet been translated, and the date is much later than The Vision of MacConglinne. It is by Deio ap leuan Ddu (fl.1460-80) a Cardigan man who sang eulogies. The story goes that someone told the poet that the abbot of Bardsey, Nadog ap Madog, was an extremely generous man, so the poet hired a boat and visited the island with a prepared eulogy for him. He discovered on his visit, however, that the abbot was an old skinflint, for he was only given bread, cheese and buttermilk, so instead of presenting him with the prepared ode, he went home and produced another: ‘The Ode of the Cheese’.
Unlike MacConglinne, a work which the poet must have known (making this a case perhaps of early plagiarism or merely creating in a current mode), and in which everything is described in terms of fat, bacon, ham, cheese, buttermilk and cream, Deio ap leuan Ddu only uses cheese. Perhaps it was particularly bad, dry and sour cheese he had been given, for the term ‘bitter cheese’ is used. Thus, every corner of the abbot’s dwelling is full of goat’s milk and cheese; his cloak and alb like his milking pail are all cheese. Morning, midday and evening meals, his Christmas fare, are all cheese; his only occupation is cheese-making as he is too miserly to employ staff, whilst the only bards that sing to him are his cows, his goats and his chickens. When the poet talks of Christmas fare, we get a glimpse of the food the abbot would have eaten; he has no relish or sauce, no pie, roast or boiled food, no brawn, no poultry or spit to cook it on, there is no butler to serve him, no staff to cook for him and for New Year’s Day – also celebrated with a feast – the poet wishes him eighteen kinds of cheese, with two large pails full of buttermilk and a profusion of curdled milk.55
It is impossible to say without reading the whole text whether like MacConglinne it is an attack upon the Church as a whole, or just the abbot personally; nevertheless what one does have is a vivid impression of the wealth of good food available. Certainly this picture does not conflict with the accounts that have come down to us56 where up to the sixteenth century even the Welsh peasantry enjoyed a diet which was certainly more abundant than many peasants in England, and possibly Ireland. The peasantry of Scotland too in this period, certainly on the mainland, enjoyed an adequate diet. There was plenty of milk, cheese and eggs, barley bread and bacon broth in abundance, including meats of all kinds.
As in England the Welsh diet was based upon bread, but Welsh bread was made out of barley which had added beer barm to the dough, so that it fermented and made a lighter mixture. Thrust back into the uplands, they could only grow barley, rye and oats, so their pottage made with meat (being more fortunate than their English cousins) and wild greens was thickened with barley or oats. Rye bread was made but not liked; it was only eaten for medicinal reasons.57 They also made porridge out of either oats or barley, mixed with water and boiled with added salt; it was eaten with buttermilk. Llymru was also made from oatmeal where it was steeped in water for a length of time, then strained and the water boiled until it became almost solid. As noted earlier, this dish travelled east to England where it was eaten with enthusiasm under the name of flummery. Gervase Markham praised the dish for its extreme goodness and explained that some ate it with honey, others with wine or strong beer. A coarser version of this dish called sucan was made from the soaked husks and leavings from the oats that had been ground; in north Pembrokeshire and south Cardiganshire it was called uwd or uwd sucan. For centures, it became the noonday meal for farmworkers, who had huge tin milk dishes carried to them filled with a quivering brown jelly. It was eaten with spoons with added beer or milk and stacks of bread spread with salted butter.
After Henry VIII’s Act of Union with Wales in 1536 most of the arable land was enclosed, yet it was not necessarily cultivated. Even in Anglesey, a fertile area, only one-eleventh of the cultivated land was under cereals. Very little wheat was grown and only such oats and barley as were needed for home consumption. However, the open field with its multiple owners was still functioning in 1620. In the south-east and north-eastern parts below the 600 ft level where the Norman manorial system had made itself felt, a few open arable fields persisted for nearly 200 years longer and were not enclosed until the eighteenth century. In Wales there was no right to common pasturage on the autumn stubbles, for there was no need; there was enough common and waste land to graze the peasants’ few livestock. When the great wave of enclosures occurred in the eighteenth century it was these lands that were taken, and their loss was deeply resented by the peasantry.
Wales was a difficult land to farm as so much is mountainous and farms straddle mountain and plain, upland and valley which gives great environmental diversity. Hence, it is impossible to generalise about the size and structure of the landed estates or of their constituent farms. However, the selective building up of large estates was already clear by 1640, and throughout the late seventeenth century caused the virtual extinction of the lesser gentry. Big properties at Crosswood and Gogerddan in Cardiganshire spread over a variety of farming environments. The 28,000 acres of Gogerddan extended from saltmarsh to the mountainous sheepwalks on Pumlumon.
Opportunities and means of marketing the produce were all-important, which is why the farms in easy reach of the port at Liverpool or Bristol were profitable. Inland the seasonal fairs, some held at market towns, others in wide-open spaces, did brisk business. To these went the droves of cattle on their long walk to distant buyers (see below).
By 1700 Wales had become a competitive supplier of agricultural produce, beyond its traditional strength in cattle and wool. John Aubrey thought that Pembrokeshire corn came in after the Civil War and cites evidence that the Monmouthshire dealers began to take corn to Bristol around 1660. The bakers found that Welsh wheat yielded more flour than English grain bought at Warminster and was no dearer, thanks to water transport. North Wales too was producing more. John Lloyd described the Vale of Endyrnion in the 1690s on the upper Dee, near Corwen: ‘I am sure we live plentifully in it, God make us thankful,’ and goes on to list the good husbandry that had been employed. Henry Rowlands speaks of the improvements in Anglesey of marl, lime and sand added to the soil.
From the seventeenth century onwards the Welsh peasantry were not freeholders but tenants. In Wales the system of land-holding was influenced by the proximity to England and by intermarriage of Welsh and English families: the landlords tended to be remote estate owners operating through agents or poverty-stricken squires interested only in their rents and exercise of their sporting rights. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that landlords started to invest in buildings and other improvements, though always with interest charges added to the rents. So there was always great estrangement between the people and the landlords, leading to an increasingly wide economic and cultural barrier, a legacy that was to foster the spread of rebellious Nonconformity.
Snowdonia in the 1690s was bleak and taxing. A visitor to Llanberis found, ‘the best bread being black, tough and thick oat-bread, they have neither miller, fuller, and any other tradesman but one taylor; there’s not a cock, hen or goose, nay ne’re an oven in ye parish.’ Cattle had to be stall-fed through the winter, and sheep still grazed on grass, where brutally cold winters could decimate the flocks. Wild animals, such as polecat, pine marten and wild cat were numerous in the terrain, finding good cover in the woodlands. On level tracts of tillage field crops grew: wheat, barley, oats, rye, peas, vetches and even clover.
Market business was affected by adverse weather; cold spells were acute in the Welsh uplands, where the growing season was short at the best of times. There was a disastrous winter in 1739-40; the diarist Owen Thomas noted ‘the great frost’ as beginning on 23 December 1739 and lasting until 10 February 1740; it was still freezing at night throughout April and there was snow on the mountains into May. The peasants now suffered, their diet reduced to oat bread, wild foods and if they were near the coast, the gathering of seaweeds, especially laver. This was boiled until it was a purée, then mixed with oats and fried. Of course, the landed gentry lived as well as they did across the border, aping fashionable manners in eating.
The typical cottages of Wales and the north of England were of mud-and-stud or wattle-and-daub construction, though here and there more substantial ones of brick and stone were built, especially where industrial development and labour shortages encouraged such building.
Migration from the rural areas of England and Wales to the towns and overseas has shown that there was a considerable increase in the numbers moving in the 1850s, followed by a check in the 1860s, and then an even higher outflow in the 1870s and 1880s. Between 1851 and 1871 the number of agricultural workers fell by twenty-two per cent. The Welsh migration came to a head in the 1880s. The worker might be paid in sacks of corn and potatoes at rates above the market price, in cider unfit for sale, in carcasses of stock that had died of disease, and his cottage would be wretchedly small, of mud walls and a thatched roof consisting of one room with a floor of clay or broken stone. In an exceptionally bad village there would be either no allotments or gardens, or the rents charged for them would be exorbitant. (By 1866 there were as many as 646,000 allotments and gardens of an eighth of an acre or more, 93,000 potato patches and over 9,000 cow gates or rights to graze a cow on lane verges and spare ground.)
The Gentry
Elizabeth Morgan paid 2s 0d for 800 oysters, and a lobster cost 3d. There were plenty of oysters at Penmon and the poor of Anglesey found employment in dredging and then pickled them in barrels for export. In 1739 Sir William Bulkeley sent thirteen live lobsters and a bag of samphire to his daughter in Liverpool by sea, giving the mate 1s 0d to take care of them. This was rock samphire, which grew in the rocks and on Anglesey’s cliffs, which was pickled; it has fleshy aromatic leaves and should not be confused with marsh samphire. Much salmon was caught and what was not eaten fresh was potted under a thick layer of clarified butter. On Anglesey, surrounded on three sides by the Irish Sea, where these reports come from, much sea fish was eaten: flatfish, coalfish (coley), prawns, crabs, cockles and mussels.58
A church ceremony at the beach on Holyhead began the herring season in September. The Reverend Thomas Ellis wrote: ‘They are preparing for the herring harvest and so I must very soon again kneel on the sea shore.’ Fish, especially shellfish, was thought to be very good for complaints of the chest. ‘Conway herring good against cough, raw oysters with much liquor in them are excellent, mussels and cockles in their own liquor boiled are excellent, in short all sea fish which have plenty of sea in them.’59 William Bulkeley noted that in 1735 herring were being sold for seven or eight for a penny. When a season brought in a great catch it was noted that it contributed to the support of the poor inhabitants being then their principal food.
Chicken and ducks were 3d each; guinea fowl was also eaten, but the main staples were meat, beef, mutton and pork. Pork was surprisingly cheap; a roasting pig cost 1s 0d in 1738, but it must have been a suckling pig, for William Bulkeley bought a side of pork weighing 46 lb at 13/4d per pound and a little later complained of rising inflation: ‘paid 16s 6d for a Small Pig which might have been bought ten years ago for 9 shilling.’ Venison was cheaper: a haunch cost 5s, bought from the gamekeeper of one of the deer parks, while a side of young venison was bought from Llabfechell market for 1s 3d. At Christmas they ate beef and mutton and on Christmas Eve William Bulkeley killed a sheep ‘for my own use and to distribute to the poor’. He writes a description of a turtle found which had been driven on shore by a great storm.
… none ever seen upon the Coasts of England before, as I could learn, but they are very common in the West Indies … I had the guts taken out which were near as large as those of a Cow – had a prodigious quantity of blood and when washed clean I had a great quantity of the flesh cut out of it and dressed like Beef Steaks and some of it I had stewed and it eat very like Beef, it had a Bladder as large as a sheep’s, what flesh remained within the Shell I had it salted and hung in the air and sun to dry … . We dined today upon the Turtle, part of it was broiled at the fire and part was stewed. All of it eat well enough not much unlike the beef steaks, but I think the broiled pieces were best.
In 1753 they were unable to feed their livestock throughout the winter, at a time when in England livestock were being fed with turnips, swedes and rape cake, and so the livestock was slaughtered, butchered and salted. Lady Bridget bought 1,200 lb salt which cost her £3 8s. The hunting was good, however, and Sir William shot pheasant, partridges, teal, widgeons, plovers, woodcock, snipe and wild ducks. Then there were the puffins on Priestholm Island and South Stack, the headland beyond Holyhead: ‘Puffins resort thither in great abundance leaving it sometime in August or at furthest the beginning of September, great many barrels of which are yearly sent up to London where they are sold at no small price.’ Parties of gentry with their servants would sail to Priestholm in the summer to see the menfolk have sport, for as well as puffins there were also rabbits and other sea fowls. The puffins were pickled in vinegar and spices, which must have cut through the oiliness of the flesh. Five dozen pickled puffins cost 4s 0d and the gentry kept a couple of barrels as part of their kitchen stores. They must have been much favoured for Elizabeth Morgan had a recipe on how to make pickled pigeon look like puffin; on their estates they all had large stone dovecotes and ate pigeon regularly throughout the winter.
One of the Morris brothers, William, described a typical dinner enjoyed at his home, helpfully listing where all the ingredients had come from: ‘April codlings, lobsters and crabs from the ocean, radishes from my garden, pepper from India, ketchup from Llechychled, wine from Portugal and France, small beer from Holyhead and Liverpool beer, cheese from Chester and butter from Llanfigel, French cress and radish from Paradwys.’ What an excellent dinner this sounds. William was fond of gardening; he grew both carrots and potatoes and had soft fruit in a walled garden.
Icehouses were built upon the island; in fact for the elite they had become part of the necessary architecture, for one was built in 1755 at Plas Gwyn at the same time as the house was built. Another essential building was the brewhouse so that home-brewed ale, drunk by everyone, could be made. William Morris, however, thought that toddy was the drink of the island, which was made from brandy, hot water and sugar. Coffee, tea and chocolate were to oust ale within this century. As early as 1711, Lady Bridget was the first to introduce Anglesey to the new beverages; she bought 6 lb ‘chocolat’ for 13s 6d, 1 lb coffee for 6s 6d and 1/4 lb tea, by far the most expensive, for 9s 6d. Within twenty years tea had become essential to the upper classes; in 1736 Elizabeth Morgan bought twelve cups and saucers of porcelain, two ‘slope’ bowls, a china milkpot and seven teapots. Tea drinking seems to have been resented by the men as a women’s activity; Lewis Morris was glad that the Customs men had seized ‘a bag of pernicious tea without which women’s prattling tongues are as dry as chips’. His brother William wrote sadly when William Bulkeley died in 1760: ‘Farewell now to the harp, there will only be there now a gang of women drinking tea.’
They were aware, for how could they not be, that the poor suffered and ate coarse food: Lewis Morris talked of the gruel which the poor ate and that barley bread was the common household bread of the island, while his brother William boasted of how he and other parishioners in Holyhead had enjoyed the best wheaten loaf from Dublin. The poor ate potes blawd, a flour and water broth with salt boiled to the consistency of porridge.
Cattle Droves
As we have seen, a large proportion of the cattle eaten in England was brought in for fattening from Wales, Scotland, and later Ireland. The great trade in Welsh cattle goes back to the Middle Ages. Anglesey cattle, which were the hardy black longhorns found down the length of coastal Wales, swam the Menai Strait as their start to the long journey to Barnet Fair. The scene was described by an eighteenth-century writer:
They are urged in a body by loud shoutings and blows into the water and as they swim well and fast, usually make their way to the opposite shore. The whole herd proceeds pretty regularly until it arrives within about 150 yards of the landing place, when, meeting with a very rapid current formed by the tide eddying and rushing with great violence between the rocks that encroach far into the Channel, the herd is thrown in the utmost confusion. Some of the boldest and strongest push directly across and presently reach the land; the more timorous immediately turn around and endeavour to reach the place from which they set off; but the greatest part, borne down by the force of the stream, are carried towards Beaumaris Bay and frequently float to a great distance before they are able to reach the Caernarvonshire shore.60
Other cattle went by boat; from Pembrokeshire, Carmarthen and Brecknock, across the Severn or from Tenby they sailed to the Somerset ports. The chief route from south and central Wales was by land through Herefordshire, Ross, Ledbury and Tewkesbury where they pastured on the South Midland fields, or went on to Essex and Kent then to the London butchers. By the eighteenth century the black cattle included dun-coloured and parti-coloured beasts, useful both for beef and milk. Farmers in the Welsh hills kept sheep and reared young stock also destined for the fattening farms of the Midlands and the south-east of England; while they reared these animals they also had the benefit of their wool, milk, butter and cheese which they sold in the local Welsh markets.
In Scotland the cattle were driven from the Hebrides and swam Kyle Rhea, the narrowest channel between Skye and the mainland, which was notorious for its strong currents and inshore eddies. But few beasts were ever lost, for the drovers had a method that they swore saved their cattle: they placed a rope around the lower jaws to keep the mouth open to keep the tongues free.
The reason given for leaving the tongue loose is that the animal may be able to keep the salt water from going down its throat in such a quantity as to fill all the cavities in the body which would prevent the action of the lungs; for every beast is found dead and said to be drowned at the landing place to which this mark of attention has not been paid. Whenever the noose is put under the jaw all the beasts destined to be ferried together are led by the ferryman into the water until they are afloat, which puts an end to their resistance. Then every cow is tied to the tail of the cow before until 6 or 8 be joined. A man in the stern of the boat holds the rope of the foremost cow. The rowers then ply the oars immediately.61
In the long journey southwards sometimes the cattle were bled to make the drovers’ black puddings which with oatmeal and a ram’s horn of whisky provided their staple fare.
Both the Welsh and the Scottish drovers had their own particular routes, but both attempted to keep to the higher ground and the moorlands, so as to avoid the hard roads which injured the cattle’s feet and the lanes that traversed the enclosed land and which were too narrow.
Welsh Food
In Wales there is also a legend, as in Ireland, that the potato arrived on its shores with a shipwreck of a barque from Ireland. It had certainly arrived early in the seventeenth century; two writers in 1664 speak of the growing popularity of the potato in Wales, how they prosper and increase exceedingly, and there is another reference in 1667: ‘Potatoes with white and ash coloured flowers are planted in many fields in Wales.’ In 1688 potatoes were seen growing in fields adjoining the highways.62
Recipes that are inherently Welsh tend to be breads, which include the famous speckled fruit bread bara brith made with buttermilk. Other recipes are enriched with the butter and dairy products which were plentiful from the earliest days. One of the most basic of all north European dishes, the meat and vegetable stew cooked in a cauldron or now in a large saucepan is called cawl. This seems to be especially loved, perhaps because of the mixture of bacon joint and beef with leeks which forms the essence of the dish; it is mentioned by writers like Richard Llewellyn and recalled by the old with great nostalgia. The meal was a movable feast; any vegetable could be included and it was eaten over a series of days, some swore that the older it got the better it tasted. Some versions had parsley sauce added, made from the floury potato water; others had cabbage and root vegetables such as parsnips. On some days only the vegetables were eaten, while at other times just the meat, which was a way of making the dish last. A nineteenth-century recipe cooks the meat first, which is taken from the cauldron, then vegetables, herbs and oatmeal are added to the stock and that is stewed for half an hour. This was dinner on the first day and became breakfast for the next three days. There were cawls made with broad beans; others made with wood pigeons.
Potatoes were mashed and eaten with added buttermilk stirred in, or roasted beneath the meat or cooked with the bacon. Another distinctive dish was onion cake (teisen nionod), made from layers of onions, then potatoes dotted with butter, and moistened with beef stock. There are, oddly enough, not so many recipes for leeks, which grow well in Wales and hence became the national emblem, mainly because they tended simply to take the place of onions in recipes of onions; there are, however: pastai cennin, a pasty of chopped leeks and bacon enfolded in a short pastry crust; cooked leeks mixed with mashed potato, rather like a leek colcannon, to form a nest around hard-boiled eggs covered in cheese sauce; and there is a famous leek soup, cawl cennin, in which leeks and potatoes are cooked with stock, butter and milk; this is, of course, the same as vichyssoise which stemmed from the French country soup potage à la bonne femme. It was inevitably the French version that became known in England (chilled it was an easy and economical banquet dish), though the recipe could just as well have been borrowed from the Welsh, except they never served it chilled.
Salmon was poached in milk with a bay leaf, then served with parsley sauce using the milk in which the fish was cooked. Herrings were salted, potted and soused; oysters were made into a soup, plunged into batter and fried, or, in an early eighteenth-century recipe for oyster loaves, poached in wine with sweetbreads and herbs and stuffed into loaves which are warmed in the oven. (This, of course, is much the same as the Anglo-Saxon recipe and Lady Craven’s). From the same book come oyster sausages, for which oysters are parboiled, then chopped with sage, herbs, anchovies mixed with egg yolks, breadcrumbs, suet, pepper and nutmeg; spoonfuls of the mixture are then fried.63 A shoulder of mutton could be stuffed with oysters, capers and samphire, while oysters with anchovies, butter and lemon make a pie. There are several recipes for cockles to be made into a pie, as well as their being mixed with eggs and bacon fat, as were limpets and winkles.
Welsh mutton and lamb are still famous and there were many eighteenth-century recipes given for roasting, boiling and stuffing both, even for making hams out of mutton; curing mutton legs by rubbing them with black treacle started the process off. Mutton pies were a traditional dish at Gower wedding feasts. The meat was eaten with rowan jelly, red currant jelly and mint sauce, though mutton with laver sauce was popular near the coast. Laver, when it is cooked for hours and turned into a purée, becomes laverbread and is particularly delicious.
Historians have varying explanations as to how Welsh Rabbit got its name or whether it came from Wales at all. Hannah Glasse gives a recipe of plain toasted cheese under its name, but then gives a recipe for Scotch Rabbit which has no mustard, but further complicates matters by adding a third recipe called English Rabbit where the bread is soaked in red wine. By 1885 it was referred to as Welsh Rarebit and amazingly luxurious versions were given by chefs like Brillat-Savarin. Ale was always drunk with the dish and by the end of the nineteenth century it began to be made with ale, with the cheese melted into it.
The Twentieth Century
What is clear is that the cooking of Ireland, Scotland and Wales is based on oats, barley and dairy products and it emphasises these in the many breads, both sweet and savoury, which all these countries excel in. As in rural England, their cuisines by the middle of the nineteenth century were altered by the advent of technology, commercial instant foods and the corner shop. This process accelerated in the twentieth century, as the corner shop itself became more and more generalised, stocking everything that their customers had need of. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a chandler’s, for example, might stock knitted stockings, wines and spirits, by the middle of the century they would have added tea and sugar and by the end of the century half the shop would have tins and dried packets of food. The advent of blended tea (Horniman and Cassell had been making up small packets of tea in foil-lined paper since the 1850s) allowed shopkeepers to store one or two types of brands of tea without having to be a specialist in tea-blending, as the old-type grocers were. The multiple grocers concentrated on low-priced, readily available, well-displayed general groceries and provisions of an even quality. Apart from tea and sugar, salt and pepper they stocked pickles and relishes, flour, rice and some dried fruits; and dairy products, which included the cheaper, imported Cheddar cheeses from Canada and Dutch Edam.
As towns grew and urbanisation spread a greater variety of grocer’s shops opened servicing their locality and competing with each other. The traditional high class grocer continued to flourish, carrying a very wide range of commodities, many of them imported, which was aimed at the richer customer. These luxury foods and delicacies enabled them to continue to combine the specialist trades of both the grocer and the provision dealer. Fixed purpose-built shops, as opposed to market stalls, dominated the trading centre of the growing towns, augmented by the weekly market and by the dispersed shops in the spreading outlying districts.
Each region reacted differently to these new influences, as regional surveys in the 1950s show. The Scots, Welsh and Irish all have a tradition of not eating a wide range of vegetables, and of only growing one or two. A history of self-sufficiency in farming must presumably explain their high consumption of eggs, but what explains the high consumption of salt in the Highlands and Wales but not in Ireland? Is it that for centuries the Highlands and the Welsh lived off salted mutton throughout the winter? (Highland butter is traditionally much saltier than Lowland.) The Welsh relied for centuries on their own supplies of meat and distrusted butcher’s meat; in fact, they used the term as abuse. They took to canning and freezing, as being reliable methods of preservation, while the Scots did not, being exceptionally resistant to the sale of chilled and frozen meat in the inter-war period. Yet the Scots consume a large amount of processed meat pies, cakes and ice cream. They are also unaccountably choosy when it comes to buying tins, liking tinned soups, baked beans, spaghetti, sweet puddings, fruit juices while only buying in small amounts tinned fish, peas, fruit, milk and cream.
By the middle of the nineteenth century in England an urban diet had evolved which was dependent upon the new commercial foods; in Ireland, Wales and Scotland the diet took longer to spread and, in some distant rural areas, dependent on one small shop, the urban diet possibly did not reach it until the 1930s or 1950s. However, it was inevitable that this diet now reflected what was eaten in the whole of the British Isles, and that regional differences, discussed in this chapter, had now had commercialisation superimposed upon them. What is exciting is that by the end of the century these differences were being rediscovered and regional foods were being revalued. They were seen as rich testaments to living communities; a struggle began to unearth more from archive material and people’s memories of their childhood and to save these dishes for new generations.