British Food by Colin Spencer

Author:Colin Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: CKB000000
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781908117779
Publisher: Grub Street Cookery
Published: 2011-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

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

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