Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman

Author:Ruth Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michael O'Mara

This satirical engraving from 1811, entitled ‘Scotch Training for a Milling Match’, features a pot of ‘crowdy’ – a very thick porridge – cooking over a peat fire, with bags of barley and haggis, leaves of kale, bowls of Scotch broth and gruel, stacks of oatcakes and bannocks, and a crate of that essential ingredient – oatmeal – scattered around the room.

Vegetable and pulse purees continued to be made in the Highlands and Islands, although in the twentieth century the word ‘mash’ tended to take over from ‘purry’ when naming the dishes. It is hard to think of a Scottish main meal that doesn’t come with mashed neeps, a term used to cover all root vegetables but most commonly that which is known in England as swede. And of course there was that simple staple, porridge.

Wales offers further examples. The 1896 report of the Royal Commission on Land in Wales and Monmouthshire noted that ‘llymru’, ‘uwd’ and ‘brwes’ were still being eaten in mountainous rural districts (where coal supplies arrived late in history). Llymru is often rendered into English as ‘flummery’; the first to do so was Gervase Markham, who in The English Hus-Wife described this dish particularly favoured ‘in the west’: ‘From this small Oat-meale, by oft steeping it in water and clensing it, and then boyling it to a thicke and stiffe jelly … which they call Wash-brew, and in Chesheire and Lankasheire they call it Flamerie or Flumerie.’ Other descriptions of llymru, dating back to the eighteenth century, speak of soured buttermilk rather than water as the boiling liquid. Uwd was occasionally said to be the same thing as llymru, the name changing according to whether you were in the north or south of Wales, but some people claimed it was in fact a slightly different dish, more akin to porridge using coarser ground oats and fresh milk. Brwes consisted of crushed oatcakes with hot beef stock poured over. (The term is pronounced in much the same way as the Gaelic word ‘brose’, which refers to the dish produced in Scotland by pouring boiling water over raw oatmeal.)

That other great staple of the Welsh diet, ‘cawl’, was traditionally described as a meat broth, flavoured with herbs and vegetables and thickened with whole grains that swell in the broth. The cawl served in homes and businesses across Wales today tends to resemble a thinnish lamb and vegetable soup with a few grains of pearl barley, but earlier recipes suggest there used to be a lot more grain and a lot less liquid. In North Wales and Liverpool, they have another meat broth with vegetables and grain called ‘lobscows’. Again most modern versions retain the broth and vegetables and grain is rarely included. Nineteenth-century Liverpudlian sailors used ‘hard tack’, or ship’s biscuits, to thicken it, but the old Welsh way was to add whole or simply crushed oat grains, or crushed oatcakes.

In 1811, an Irish woman explained cooking what was basically a frumenty over a peat fire: ‘I let

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