Subject: Re: Scottish Cooking

From: [email-masked] (david director friedman)
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 1994 01:39:21 GMT

On the unlikely chance that any of the comments on English food in
this thread are intended to be taken seriously, I would like to point
out that what we think of as English cooking is a relatively modern
development. Judging by the cookbooks, English and French cooking are
really one cuisine at least into the fifteenth century.  And a pretty
tasty cuisine too--even if not quite up to the level of thirteenth
century Andalusian.

If any of you happen to be in York, there is, or at least used to be,
a restaurant there ("Pines") that served good English food. That is
sufficiently unusual that when I mentioned having found such a
restaurant in York to an acqaintance in London, he named it.

David Friedman

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From: [email-masked] (Iain G Liddell)
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 1994 10:07:35 GMT

One or two posts have referred to the sameness of Scots (or Viking, or
English, or ..) cooking. But aren't we in danger of thinking ourselves
into anachronisms? I mean, to put it at the blatantly silly end of the
spectrum, the Vikings went in search of Betty Crocker mixes, no??

Scots cooking down the ages has borrowed from many sources - where would
Glaswegian "tablet" be without the sugar trade from a bit farther down
the Clyde than Millport? The Auld Alliance (Scotland+France v England)
brought a French accent to Scots kitchens, and there was some degree of
trickle-down. Our fish cookery has links with the Vikings - there's even
a hint of lutefisk in some recipes from the north and west.

The "dreadful" cooking of these islands is a throwback to institutional
cookery, from schools to Little Chef roadside restaurants. After the
Second World War, many grocery lines were not available to the general
housewife, and in fact this informed the cooking skills of many people
of my parents' generation (born in or after WW1, lived through the 
Depression, then WW2, saw Consumption as a capital offence). An inverted
snobbery was fostered by press and people alike to maintain this
"Britishness": our tabloids still rage against European Union attempts
to "ban the British banger" etc. today.

To get back to Scotland in particular, sheer geography does limit the
range of growing crops, but the sea provided a rich harvest, as did the
rivers in the south, where salt water was a little farther away. More
people are now celebrating this culinary heritage - people like Catherine
Brown ("Scottish Regional Recipes", "Broth and Bannocks: Scots Cooking
>from  1690 to the Present Day") acknowledge the history and develop the
cuisine at one and the same time. All we need to do is rescue the coming
generations from sixty years' neglect of kitchen skills.

Iain