9. Cloutie Dumpling

‘She tried some ham and a bit of the dumpling, sugared and fine, that Mistress Melon had made. And everybody praised it, as well they might, and cried for more helpings, and more cups of tea, and there were scones and pancakes and soda-cakes and cakes made with honey that everybody ate.’ This description from Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, of the food at the novel’s heroine Chris Guthrie’s rural Aberdeenshire wedding in the early twentieth century, sho