Grouse Soup

‘But, oh! my dear North, what grouse-soup at Dalnacardoch,’ says one of the cronies in Blackwoods magazine column, Noctes Ambrosia (1822-35). ‘You smell it on the homeward hill, as if it were exhaling from the heather…. As you enter the inn the divine afflatus penetrates your soul. When upstairs, perhaps in the garret, adorning for dinner, it rises like a cloud of rich distilled perfumes through every chink on the floor, every cranny of the wall.’