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Morag MacInnes, F.-M. McNeill, The Scots Kitchen

Porridge and the Shorter Catechism

Food is an expression of a culture, a reminder of your roots. I inherited a battered copy of Glasgow Cookery, peppered with my granny’s authoritative biro. It transports me to a simpler time. Liver and bacon every Wednesday, cod in lumpy sauce on Fridays. She scalded and plucked chickens. I’ll never forget the smell of the feathers. She was what’s called a good plain cook – lots of pancakes, jammy scones and barley thickened soups. But it would never have occurred to her that the way she cooked – using every last bit of an animal, turning hard bread into puddings – was interesting in itself, or that it could teach anyone about what it meant to be Scottish. For that insight we are indebted to a remarkable Orcadian woman.

Florence Marian McNeill, known as Floss, understood the importance of regional dishes. You may know her better as a folklorist; but without The Scots Kitchen, first published in 1929, she’d never have begun collecting the scraps of song, story, local traditions and unlikely remedies which grew over the years to become her definitive work on folklore, The Silver Bough. She was born in Holm, in Orkney, in 1885, the eighth of twelve children of the Manse. Her father, Daniel, was not a typical Free Kirk character – he sang, played fiddle, liked a dram and a dance. His wife Jessie was austere, self-effacing. She had wanted to be a doctor or a missionary, but such options weren’t open to her. Instead, she inspired her bairns.

In summer the old Manse overflowed with young life . . . one never knew what the winds would blow in – an Oxford don or a packman . . . the sea before our window was blue and green and purple, and brown sailed fishing vessels passed up and down the sound. Owld Jock would climb the long loan from the village with his creel of silver herring, and Beenie, who presided in the kitchen, would run down to the gate for an ashetful, and serve t

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Food is an expression of a culture, a reminder of your roots. I inherited a battered copy of Glasgow Cookery, peppered with my granny’s authoritative biro. It transports me to a simpler time. Liver and bacon every Wednesday, cod in lumpy sauce on Fridays. She scalded and plucked chickens. I’ll never forget the smell of the feathers. She was what’s called a good plain cook – lots of pancakes, jammy scones and barley thickened soups. But it would never have occurred to her that the way she cooked – using every last bit of an animal, turning hard bread into puddings – was interesting in itself, or that it could teach anyone about what it meant to be Scottish. For that insight we are indebted to a remarkable Orcadian woman.

Florence Marian McNeill, known as Floss, understood the importance of regional dishes. You may know her better as a folklorist; but without The Scots Kitchen, first published in 1929, she’d never have begun collecting the scraps of song, story, local traditions and unlikely remedies which grew over the years to become her definitive work on folklore, The Silver Bough. She was born in Holm, in Orkney, in 1885, the eighth of twelve children of the Manse. Her father, Daniel, was not a typical Free Kirk character – he sang, played fiddle, liked a dram and a dance. His wife Jessie was austere, self-effacing. She had wanted to be a doctor or a missionary, but such options weren’t open to her. Instead, she inspired her bairns.

In summer the old Manse overflowed with young life . . . one never knew what the winds would blow in – an Oxford don or a packman . . . the sea before our window was blue and green and purple, and brown sailed fishing vessels passed up and down the sound. Owld Jock would climb the long loan from the village with his creel of silver herring, and Beenie, who presided in the kitchen, would run down to the gate for an ashetful, and serve them up for supper all frizzling in their golden coats of oatmeal.

You don’t have to be a sociologist to see how she has neatly pinpointed what modern chefs, with their proud cries of ‘locally sourced’, can never return to – a world where you could see the link between the fishing boats outside your window and the ‘frizzling’ (what a perfect word) herring. No big supermarkets or air miles – just the local van, ‘a miniature shop on wheels . . . he never failed to reach down a big glass jar, and, with a “Ha’e, bairns”, fill our small outstretched hands with gaily coloured fruit drops that sparkled in the sun’. It wasn’t, of course, all wonderful. ‘Soon we were in the chill embrace of the northern winter . . . breakfast and tea were served in lamplight, and in the long dark evenings fearful shadows lurked . . . shut off from the outer world by raging winds and seas, we lived largely in a world of fancy, inspired by song and story.’ Floss matriculated from Glasgow in 1912, a contemporary of James Bridie the playwright and the left-wing politician Jimmy Maxton. Her novel The Road Home describes some of the routine sexism she encountered. Women had to watch from the galleries during the debates which the university held regularly. They weren’t allowed to stand on the rostrum and take part. ‘It’s a man’s show . . . exactly alike in their black and white uniforms, like rows of penguins . . .’ The novel also charts a painful love affair. However close the account is to the truth, she never married, and devoted the rest of her life to Scottishness, liberal causes and the folk customs she’d first heard about from Beenie. Perhaps her only indulgence was her love of good food and drink; it connected her to that happier past, when, like her fictional heroine Morag, she was ‘a shocking little gourmet. She could tell you just the specialities of each farm and cottage where she went to tea, and could warn you against those good wives whose scones were stodgy, whose butter tasted of turnips, or who let their tea infuse too long.’ The Scots Kitchen seems almost inevitable. Floss’s mother was from the east of Scotland, her father from the west, and she was a northerner who loved the Border ballads. It was a perfect triangle of rural experience. Scotland was on the brink of a political and literary renaissance. A book which was part social history and memoir, part recipes, which put her country’s food and customs down for all to enjoy, and also allowed her to express her ebullient, trenchant personality, hit all the right notes. The moment you read the preface you know you’re travelling with a feisty companion. ‘In Scotland today, there is of good home cooking less and less . . . neither the variety nor the respect for quality.’ This in 1929 – imagine if you took her to a burger bar! Glance at the appendices, and you’re hooked. Grosset means gooseberry, from the French. It yields two quotes: ‘A randy-like woman with a basket of grossets’ (that’s John Galt), and ‘They will jump at them in Edinburgh like a cock at a grosset.’ That’s from a Scott novel – she loves Sir Walter. ‘The proverbial Scot has been reared on porridge and the Shorter Catechism,’ she tells us, ‘a rigorous diet but highly beneficial to those possessed of sound digestive organs.’ Her footnotes are a source of great joy. Carlyle said Macaulay was an honest, good sort of fellow made out of oatmeal and she thinks he might have returned the compliment. Girls keep a muslin bag of oatmeal in their ewer overnight to improve their complexions. Teething babies get an oatcake with a ring in it to bite on. The Bonnach Solain (the Gaelic term for a bannock, or scone) was highly salted, to induce dreams which foretold the future. The mix of erudition and the unexpected is delightful. Add in her love of songs, poems, names – Veal Flory, Wind Blown Fish, Whim Wham, Clapshot, Inky Pinky, plus her magpie-like collection of gems from other writers – and it becomes a paean to Scottishness. There are using cookbooks and having ones. You can use The Scots Kitchen. You can prepare haggis (‘make incisions in the heart and liver to allow the blood to flow out . . . leave the windpipe hanging out over the pot to let out any impurities’) but if you are faint-hearted with regard to cleaning out ‘the great bag’ and cutting away ‘skins, black parts and superfluities of gristle’, perhaps it’s best to make for the footnote. ‘It is a thoroughly democratic dish,’ we learn, ‘equally available and equally honoured in castle and croft. The use of the paunch of the animal as the receptacle for the ingredients gives that touch of barbarism so dear to the Scots people.’ She bats away the suggestion that haggis might be ‘one of the nobler legacies of France’ (they allude to it as le pain bénit d’Ecosse) and reminds those who might sneer at its simplicity that ‘that most aesthetic of nations, the ancient Greeks, had a haggis of their own, immortalised by Aristophanes’. There you have Floss in full flow; clever, funny, partial, patriotic. The rest of her life was less kind. The Silver Bough, her seminal work, was twenty years in the making. She died in Edinburgh, ‘in sadly constrained and lonely circumstances’, aged 88. In this early book she’s in her prime.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 63 © Morag MacInnes 2019


About the contributor

Morag MacInnes is an Orcadian writer. She has never tried to make her own haggis but her scones are passable. The illustrations in this article are by Iain McIntosh.

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