MARMALADE, porridge, grouse, whisky and haggis are just a few Scottish food classics that have travelled the globe. They owe their fame, largely, to the millions of expatriate Scots who have taken these eating and drinking habits with them. What Scot in deepest Africa could survive Burns Night without haggis and a bottle of whisky?
But Scottish classics have made it on their own reputation too. Seafood from cool, unpolluted waters is undisputed for quality. There are sweetly succulent soft fruits that mature best in the long, mild Scottish summers. Excellent beef and lamb come from rich grasslands. And there is the unique distillation of whisky, the water of life.
Whisky and smoked salmon have been the trailblazers, successfully exported to every corner of the globe. Now other seafoods – oysters, mussels, langoustines, crabs and lobsters – are catching up. Marmalade has made it up Mount Everest and grouse is flown to top restaurants in London, Paris and New York.
In the meantime, at home, a growing band of enlightened Scottish chefs have taken up the prime quality, locally-produced tag on their menus. They promote Scottish foods in season, support local producers and provide visitors with a unique eating experience.
Though Scotland is a small country its landscape varies dramatically. Fertile agricultural lands in the East and wild mountains in the North, together with seas and islands, shape the nature of the produce and the cooking of the people.
In early times, pastoral Celts herded animals and followed the grazing seasons making milk, butter and cheese throughout the spring and summer. The seafaring Norse salted and smoked fish, to save them for winter supplies. Both traditions survive in a variety of local cheeses and many fish delicacies from ‘smokies’ to ‘finnans’.
The eating traditions have also been shaped by sources of heat and cooking equipment. Slow-burning peat, rather than coal, created cooking heat for much of the population in early times, which resulted in a tradition of slow simmering and stewing in a large pot over a gentle peat fire. Scotch Broth, haggis and Clootie Dumpling are just a few of the classics that depend on the long slow simmer.
On the baking front, few Scots had ovens and baked mostly on a flat metal plate – a girdle – with a handle that was hooked over the peat fire. It was on this that oatcakes were first made, followed by lighter bannocks, soda scones, pancakes and crumpets. Not every home today has a girdle, but every commercial baker still has a hot plate. (English supermarkets in Scotland have had to equip their in-house bakeries with hot plates for the popular girdle-baked scones, pancakes and crumpets.)
Though oatmeal only began to take over from barley as the staple grain around the end of the 17th century, it is now the Scottish grain. More versatile than barley, which is now mostly used for distilling whisky, the advantage of oatmeal is that it can be ground into so many different ‘cuts’: ‘pinhead’ for haggis, ‘coarse’ for mealie puddings, ‘medium’ for oatcakes and ‘fine’ for bannocks.
Oatmeal, in porridge and brose taken with milk, became the backbone of the Scottish diet for most of the 18th and 19th centuries and is reputed to have given Scots of previous generations their sturdy health. In the 1980s, an American professor discovered from his researches that one of the reasons for this was a gummy soluble fibre in oats, which helped to prevent heart disease in his patients. The news popularised oat-eating throughout the world. But you need look no further than classic Scottish cooking for the most original and frequent use, today, of healthy oatmeal.
Catherine Brown