![]() Butter and cheese were in use in the earliest times and the oat and barley crops have always provided the staple bread.”īy the end of the seventeenth century, however, the Scottish peasantry suffered a period of great scarcity of food and even famine that lasted intermittently into the first fifty years of the next century. ![]() Sheep were valued mainly for their wool, cows for their milk. ![]() Rivers, lochs, and seas teemed with fish. The moors and forests abounded with game elsewhere ‘herds of kye nocht tame’ with flesh ‘of a marvelous sweetness, of a wonderful tenderness, and excellent delicateness of taste’ ranged the hills. Speaking of the period pre-dating the Agrarian Revolution (which spanned roughly 1750 to 1850) McNeill paints the scene of the early Scot amid the gifts of his homeland: “In olden times, when the population was small and sparse-by the beginning of the sixteenth century it did not exceed half a million-the means of sustenance were on the whole plentiful. McNeill generously interlards the many old recipes with historical, literary and contemporary commentaries that animate the period, as well as provide a constant social context for the heritage of the recipes and menus. The Scots Kitchen evokes the era before the forced pace of social change brought about by industrialization, and conjures the image of the self-sufficient farmstead, and within, the capable mistress at the helm of her bubbling cauldrons and sizzling “girdles” over the peat fire. Later in her life she produced a four-volume history of Scottish customs, folklore and ancient festivals called The Silver Bough, today considered an essential source by historians in the field. Her early years on the islands helped to shape her life-long fascination and pride in Scottish history and cultural traditions. McNeill was born in 1885 in Orkney, the archipelago of islands just north of Scotland, at a time when the previous century of Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions had wrought their stark and sometimes brutal dislocations and disruption of the ancient Scots traditions in social and domestic life. McNeill first published The Scots Kitchen in 1929, with the aim of commemorating and extolling the Scots national tradition as expressed in its regional gastronomical heritages that she, even by the start of the last century, feared might be lost forever “in this age of standardization.” The foods, menus, history and folklore of Scottish domestic culture are celebrated with a robust affection and pride that are delightfully infectious in Florence Marian McNeill’s The Scots Kitchen: Its Lore and Recipes. ![]() This distinction in some part recalls the days of the Auld Alliance-Scotland’s political consolidation with France against the English from the thirteenth century until the end of the sixteenth-which left a bright and lasting influence on Scottish cuisine both in its style and its lexicon. The mistress of the Scots kitchen turned these honest, simple ingredients into a nourishing assortment of dishes which are quite distinct from those represented by the bulk of other British Isle cuisines. The emphasis in this diet on fish livers and fish liver oils, shellfish, organ meats, blood, and healthy fats like lard-and the resulting robust health of the traditional Scots-helps dispel the modern myth that vitamin A is toxic and the modern notion that we cannot obtain sufficient vitamin D from food. The healthy Scots diet of two hundred years or so ago consisted of a fairly limited bill of fare composed of local foods: oats as chief cereal grain root vegetables such as turnips and potatoes leeks, cabbage and kale supplemented by wild vegetables such as nettles, sorrel and garlic butter, cheese and other dairy products fish, shellfish and seaweed some meat and game and numerous varieties of wild berries in summer. Nourishing Traditional Diets with Sally Fallon Morell.
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