Scotland’s bed-and-breakfast industry operates from about March through to the end of October and is based on the idea of opening your home to visitors for a night’s rest and breakfast. It’s a tradition throughout the country, but particularly strong in remote areas like the Highlands and Islands where hotels are few and far between, and where people who make a living from a number of other freelance activities, such as crofting and fishing, vacate their houses in summer, often living in sheds at the bottom of the garden, to do B&Bs.
It has developed from an old custom of private hospitality, when a welcome was always given to travellers in outlying areas. A knock on any door guaranteed a bed and food for the night. A gift, rather than money, was given in lieu of payment and it’s still traditional to carry gifts when visiting. In the old clan system, hospitality was a matter of honour. No one, not even a deadly enemy, who turned up looking for shelter and food was ever turned away. The legendary ‘Highland Welcome’, which Burns enjoyed on a visit to the area, prompted him to claim that he would be happy to arrive in Heaven, if only he could be sure of a Highland welcome.
Universal private hospitality meant that there was much less need for public inns. When the outrageously rude English doctor Samuel Johnson and his polite Scottish travelling companion, James Boswell, took their tour of the Highlands and Islands in the late 18th century, they did not stay at inns, but enjoyed the hospitality of the lairds who operated a system of passing-on with a letter of introduction. It was a custom which, inadvertently, created a much lower standard of public inns in Scotland. From accounts in the early days it seems that they were rough and ready affairs, used mainly as stables for horses and bothies for servants. Compared with a comfortable English inn, they were not a pleasant experience. As Englishman Edward Burt who lived in Inverness during the 18th century, discovered as he travelled around the Highlands: ‘Some of the inns in these remote parts are not very inviting. Your chamber, which you sometimes enter from without doors by stairs as dirty as the streets, is so far from having been washed that it would be no wonder you stumbled over clods of dried dirt in going from fire-side to bed.’
Burt was equally unimpressed with the food. The Highland table at the inn might have been a risky experience but there was nothing wrong with food presented at homely tables such as the Highland breakfast which was described by Tobias Smollett in Humphrey Clinker (1771): ‘One kit boiled eggs; a second full of butter; a third full of cream; an entire cheese made of goat’s milk; a large earthen 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 large stone bottle full of whisky, another of brandy, and a kilderkin of ale.’
To a roast-beef-eating English traveller, these were novel tastes: wild game, goat’s and sheep’s milk cheeses, peat-smoked fish, heather honey, mellow oatcakes, earthy barley breads, and potent distilled whisky. It was a vast choice of food, by modern standards, eaten first thing. But in Smollet’s time, before disrupting-lunch took over, everyone ate heartily at breakfast. Breakfast and dinner were the two main meals of the day. People rose early, between five and six, and worked for a few hours before breakfast around nine, when there was always something substantial like a pie or cold beef, or a sheep’s heid. And they never ate again till dinner, which was in the mid to late afternoon.
The two young Germans who were sitting at Mrs McPhail’s breakfast table, in a remote corner of North-West Sutherland, had just finished their modern version of Smollet’s 18th-century breakfast feast. No sheep’s heid or potent whisky, but bacon and eggs, sausages, black pudding, haggis, tomatoes and mushrooms. Their bed-and-breakfast deal had also included plates of porridge and cream, while Mrs McPhail’s home-made oatcakes, baps and marmalade came with a pot of tea or a cafétière of freshly ground coffee. ‘This is wonderful,’ said one. ‘Now all we need is a biscuit in the middle of the day to keep us going till dinner. Your breakfasts are fantastic.’
Those who provide such a breakfast feast which makes lunch redundant, preserve a distinguished tradition of Scottish hospitality. They are often to be found baking their own breads and oatcakes, making their own marmalades and preserves, ensuring that the bacon is water-free, the eggs free-range and the kippers and smoked fish free from unwanted colourings. They have sensibly banished characterless plant-baked bread, along with packaged portion-controlled butter and jam, in their early-morning effort to make an unforgettable start to the day.
An oatcake may take a number of different forms. It can be an oven-baked, manufactured biscuit containing a proportion of wheat flour. Or it can be a girdle-baked version, containing no flour, which takes on a life of its own as a thin curling triangle as it dries out. A hybrid of this is the toasted oatcake, which has not only been dried-out on a girdle, but also gently toasted before a live fire, or other source of heat, to sharpen up the oatmeal flavour and increase crispness. They are rarely found for sale commercially, though farmer’s wives who bake for rural shows and Highland games sometimes produce a batch for sale. Wafer-thin, girdle-curled, dusky-coloured, crunchy-textured, nutty-flavoured — they are a distinctive product of the home-baker’s art. A method which requires both skill and care, which accounts for their rarity.
‘Toast very slowly at a distance from the fire,’ says an old recipe, ‘first on one side and then the other, on a toaster of open bars that lets the moisture escape.’
Lacking both the open fire and the old-fashioned oatcake toaster with the open bars, a compromise is to cook them first on the girdle, and finish them with a toasting under a very low grill. To get a curl on the oatcake it’s necessary to cut them into triangular farls.
125g (4oz) medium or fine oatmeal
1 tablespoon melted fat, preferably bacon fat
1-2 tablespoons boiling water
pinch of salt
To mix and shape:
Add the fat to the meal and mix through. Sprinkle over the boiling water and bring together into a soft, firm ball. The rolling out must be done quickly before the mixture cools, when it will be much more difficult to roll. Dust the work surface with oatmeal and roll out with a rolling pin, pinching the edges to stop them cracking, to a circle about ⅕in (½cm) thick. Leave whole or cut into four, six or eight triangles. They can be left to dry out for an hour or longer if wished. This helps them to curl.
Heating the girdle:
Heat up slowly to a moderate heat. Test by holding your hand just above the surface when it should feel pleasantly, but not fiercely, hot. Firing the oatcakes: Put on the girdle and leave until they have dried out and started to curl. If they are too thick they will not curl. Remove and toast in the oven (gas mark 4/180C/350F) for 10-15 minutes, or toast under a cool grill, or in front of the fire, or in a toaster. Cool on a rack and store in an airtight tin between layers of greaseproof paper. Toast again before use.
250g (8oz) medium oatmeal
125g (4oz) pinhead oatmeal
125g (4oz) spelt or low-gluten flour
pinch of salt
1 teaspoon sugar
75g (3oz) butter, dripping or lard, or a mixture
150ml (5fl oz) boiling water
You will need two 19 x 28cm (7½ x 11in) baking tins or two 20cm (8in) round sandwich tins — greased and floured. Preheat oven to gas mark 4/180C/350F.
Put the oatmeal, flour, salt and sugar into a bowl. Melt the fat in the water and add. Mix to a fairly stiff dough. Divide between tins. Level with a spatula. Dust with oatmeal. Cut into squares or triangles. Bake for 30-35 minutes.
Legend has it that the Aberdeen rowie, roll or butterie came into being when a local fisherman, scunnered with living off hard ship’s biscuit on long forays into the North Sea fish, met up with his friendly local baker.
‘Fit wey can ye no mak a better rowie for takkin on the boatie?’ asks the fisherman.
‘Nae bother ava,’ says the baker. ‘Jist gie me a few days, an I’ll hae something for ye.’
So the baker starts off with a lump from his daily bread dough. To make a keeping-rowie, he knows he must add fat. The most readily available is meat dripping from the butcher, it’s also the least likely to toughen the rowie. He mixes the dripping with some dough to make it more pliable, rolls out some plain bread dough and covers it with the fatty-dripping dough. Folds it, rolls it, kneads it and then cuts it up into misshapen mounds which he flattens into the same large thin round shape as his normal softies.
His fisherman friend is delighted. And so, too, are the people of the town, who have sampled the new fisherman’s rowie. The news of this crisp, crunchy rowie, with its faintly burnt saltiness, spreads. It’s soon being made by every baker on the East coast from Caithness to Edinburgh. Its endearing homely shape and good taste, ensures its success. It may have none of the stylish pretensions of a French croissant, but for the people of Aberdeen it has become the favoured roll.
The first recorded literary mention of a butterie (in the Scottish National Dictionary) is of a street-seller in Arbroath in 1899: ‘Between butteries, Rob Roy’s [a kind of Bath Bun], an’ turnovers, her basket was weel filled.’ But the name of the baker who first took up the fisherman’s challenge remains a mystery. No written evidence has yet been found and my search among the elders of Aberdeen’s baking fraternity to find the first butterie baker has drawn a complete blank.
The important thing, however, is that they survive, despite attacks by healthy-eating propagandists on foods with a fatty overload. Aberdonians, and all those who face a chilling blast, need sustaining inner fuel. Butteries fulfil that practical purpose.
Though they are known in Aberdeen as rowies, or just rolls, outside the city the term butterie has become attached to them. On a rowie crawl around the town one arctic wintry day (total sampling: 16) the textures varied enormously from very crisp to very ‘bready’, while the taste also varied from quite bland to very salty and well-fired. Chalmers of Brocksburn, just outside Aberdeen, made a wee rowie, about two thirds the normal size, and in some of their branches they sell a double rowie for serious rowie eaters, which is two stuck together with butter.
In rowie technology, the differences between its finished characteristics can vary from one batch to the next coming from the same baker’s oven. Some rowie experts claim that baker George Robertson, ten miles south in Stonehaven makes the best-flavoured and textured rowie. Food writers, myself included, have attempted to explain the rowie technology with recipes, but none, myself included, have got it right.
The only way to unravel the correct baker’s procedure is to visit in the middle of the night.
At Aitken’s bakery in Glenbervie Street the night’s production is counted by the thousand — all shaped by hand. David Aitken is the fourth generation on this site among the grey granite tenements in the Torry district of the town. When I arrive at 4.30am it is cold and dark. There are lights shining from an open doorway and a police car is drawing up outside. Not to investigate a crime, but to collect their daily supply of hot-out-the-oven rowies. I make my way through the lighted doorway and into the source of warm, yeasty smells where the bakers are about to begin the last batch of rowies for the night. The dough is lying in a giant mound on the table, waiting to be made into 4,000 rowies. It is Friday night and by morning a total of 27,000 will be shaped by hand for the weekend consumption (through the week the production drops to 18,000).
At their stations round the white mountain of dough on the table are a team of flour-dusted bakers, ready to start carving it up. It has been made from two separate doughs, already mixed: the fatty-dough and the bread-dough. The men start to cut it up.
‘Want to have a go?’ says one of the young bakers and he pushes a tray towards me. Flouring his hands and lifting one of the soft, sticky lumps of dough, he shows me the knack of using masses of flour which prevents the sticky dough sticking to your hands.
He picks up the piece of dough and throws it onto the floured board. As the soft dough hits the board it spreads out into a misshapen mound. He now spreads it out more thinly. I copy him, pressing the sticky mass out with four outspread floury fingers. Next, he flours the backs of his fingers on his right hand and the fronts of those on his left.
‘Yes, I’ve got that.’
Now he clenches his right hand into a fist and presses the rowie simultaneously with his left outstretched fingers till it is roughly a quarter of an inch thick. It takes a bit of practice, but after the fourth tray I’m beginning to get the hang of it. Now they go off to a hot steamy cupboard beside the ovens where they will prove for about 20 minutes, before going into the oven for another 18 minutes or so.
Some come out darker than others and they are put in a separate pile for customers who like a ‘cremated’ rowie. Some are so brittle that they break up, so the broken bits are put into paper bags for those who like a ‘baggie of bities’.
Over breakfast tea and freshly-out-the-oven rowies, David Aitken tells me that he was waiting for a plane last summer in Majorca when he spied a family with a bag of Aitken’s rowies. They had, he discovered, taken a fortnight’s supply on holiday. Aberdonians love their rowies.
Bread-dough:
3 teaspoons sugar
25g (1oz) fresh yeast
375-450ml (12-16fl oz) warm water
500g (1lb) very strong bread flour, slightly warmed
Dissolve the yeast and sugar in a little of the water and leave for ten minutes. Add to the warmed flour along with most of the remaining water and knead in. Add enough water to make a very soft sticky dough.
Fatty-dough:
325g (11oz) solid vegetable fat
12-25g (½-1oz) salt
3 teaspoons sugar
150g (5oz) very strong bread flour
Mix all the ingredients together till thoroughly blended. Preheat the oven to gas mark 7/220C/425F.
Mixing the two doughs:
Put a very thick layer of flour on the board and place on the first dough. Flour it on top and spread it out with well-floured hands, or a rolling pin, till it is about 1cm (½in) thick and roughly rectangular. Spread half of the second dough all over. Fold down one third to the centre and fold the other third up. Roll out to about 1cm (½in) thick and repeat with the remaining second dough. Roll out and fold up the dough one more using plenty of flour to prevent sticking.
Shaping the rowies:
Divide up the dough into 50g (2oz) pieces — approximately 20-24. Flour your hands well, take up a piece, toss to coat it evenly with flour, place it on the baking tray and press down in it with four outstretched fingers so that it spreads out. Fill the baking tray, leaving a small space between them. To finish shaping, flour the fronts of the four fingers on your right hand. Make the final pressing-out of the mis-shapen rowies by pressing down and then spreading out with the right and left floured fingers together. The rowies should by this time be roughly 5mm-1cm (¼-½in) thick.
Proving:
Oil a sheet of clingfilm and cover the tray to enclose the rowies and prevent air getting in. Leave for about 20 minutes to double in size. It is important to keep the surface from drying out.
Baking/cooling:
Bake for 18-20 minutes in a fairly hot oven till they are crisp and golden. Leave on the tray till they have cooled a little. Then stack them together, end on, in a tray. If they are stacked too soon they will have too much moisture and be soggy, on the other hand, if they are left till they go cold they will become very crisp and brittle and may break more easily.
Half-way between a yeasted bread and a sweet cake, quick-mix loaves and muffins have many uses but their value at breakfast is speed. Make the loaves in two small loaf tins and they will take less than ten minutes preparation and no longer than 40 minutes to bake. The muffins are faster, from start to finish less than 30 minutes.
An easy-mix loaf with walnuts and sesame seeds as the flavouring combined with soured cream to make a dense moist, springy texture. May also be used as a savoury loaf with soups, salads and cheese.
2 tablespoons sesame seeds
250g (8oz) self-raising ‘cake’ flour
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
60ml (2fl oz) olive oil
50g (2oz) soft brown sugar
2 eggs
150g (6oz) finely chopped walnuts
300ml (10fl oz) soured cream
Preheat the oven to gas mark 5/190C/375F. Grease and coat with sesame seeds: two 1 litre (1¾ pint) loaf tins. Sift the flour and bicarbonate of soda into one bowl and mix well. Put the oil, sugar, eggs into another large bowl and beat to mix thoroughly for about 30 seconds. Add the flour, nuts and soured cream and stir in, mixing until smooth. Pour immediately into prepared tin. Bake for 40 minutes in the middle of the oven.
Test for readiness when a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Cool in the tin for ten minutes, finish cooling on a rack. Serve while warm, or wrap tightly in cling film.
Another easy-mix savoury loaf with a dense crumb and lively character.
125g (4oz) fine oatmeal
250g (8oz) self-raising ‘cake’ flour
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
125g (4oz) ground hazel nuts
60ml (2fl oz) olive oil
1 tablespoon blossom or heather honey
2 eggs
300ml (10fl oz) soured cream
Preheat the oven to gas mark 5/190C/375F. Grease and flour two 1 litre (1¾ pint) loaf tins. Take one tablespoon of the oatmeal and put into the tins. Shake round the sides so that they are thoroughly coated. Reserve about two teaspoons of the oatmeal for sprinkling on top.
Sift the flour and bicarbonate of soda into one bowl. Add the oatmeal and nuts and mix well.
Put the oil, honey and eggs into another large bowl and beat to mix thoroughly for about 30 seconds.
Add the flour mixture and stir in, mixing until it is smooth. Add the soured cream and mix in.
Pour into the tin immediately, leave for ten minutes before baking. Bake for 40-45 minutes. Test with a skewer inserted into the cake, which should come out clean. Cool in the tin for ten minutes then remove to a rack. When completely cold, wrap in cling film and store.
Using a ready-mixed crunchy cereal and a food processor method speeds up the preparation of these muffins which can be served with bacon and eggs for breakfast.
For 8-12 muffins:
50g (2oz) raisins
250g (8oz) crunchy toasted oat cereal
150g (5oz) self-raising superfine cake flour
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
75g (3oz) butter
1 egg
250ml (8fl oz) buttermilk or fresh milk soured
with 2 tablespoons lemon juice
Preheat the oven to gas mark 5/190C/375F. You will need a tray of 12 individual muffin tins. Grease and flour the tins. Sprinkle a few raisins in the base of each tin.
Put the crunchy cereal into the food processor and add the flour. Pulse for ten seconds, remove 2 tablespoons for the topping. Add the butter and bicarbonate of soda and pulse until the mixture is like fine breadcrumbs. Add the egg and buttermilk and pulse for a few seconds. It should form a soft batter. Spoon into the muffin tins. Sprinkle over the crunchy topping. Bake for 15-20 minutes. Cool for 5 minutes in the tin and serve warm.
CLeanse about the Roots of Trees, Suckers and weeds, water their Covered Bulks : especially the new planted.
Fell the long small ill-trained Forrest-trees in the nurserie within foot of the ground. Unbind grass’s. Prun all Wall and Standard Trees. Towards the end you may Inoculat. And increase by circumposition.
Gather Elm seed and sow immediatly.
Transplant Coleflowers, Coleworts, Beets, Leeks, Purslain, &c. In moist weather; at least water first the ground if dry.
Sow Peas, Radish, Turneep, Letice, Chervil, Cresses,. &c. Destroy Snails, Worms, &c.
Begin to lay carnations or July-flowers: shade, support and prun such as will blow. Water pots and thristy plants. Weeding and mowing is in season and so is distilation.
Bees now Swarm, look diligently, to them.
Garden Dishes and Drinks in season.
Cole, Beets, Parsly, Sorrall and other Pot-herbes. Purslain, Letice, and other Sallads. Radish, Scorzonera, Asparagus. Green Peas and Artichocks. Green Goosberries. Ripe cherries , Rasps, Currans, Straw-berries.
Housed Aples and Pears.
Cyder, Metheglin, &c.
John Reid, The Scots Gard’ner, (1683)