Scotch Broths

Make a light stock pot broth one day (the starter to a substantial meal). The next day turn the stock into a more substantial Scotch broth (a meal in itself).

It is an affront to gastronomy to serve a sustaining broth, traditionally eaten as the focal point of the meal, as the opener to three courses: but it happens. It is also an affront to use some kind of commercial stock cube, tasting mostly of salt, monosodium glutamate and flavour enhancers. But that’s about convenience and saving time which you may, or may not, feel is a good enough reason. It seems to me that when women were released from the tyranny of Victorian kitchens they had every right to welcome the advent of convenience foods, and to consider the preparation of a meal, without such help, as a betrayal of their hard-won liberation. We still have the right, of course, to choose not to cook, to depend on the conveniences of the modern food-processing industry which beckon so alluringly from supermarket shelves. No one should be denied freedom from kitchen slavery, least of all those – of whichever sex – who are thirled to the treadmill of daily chores. But at the risk of sounding like an unliberated cookaholic (which I decidedly am not) I suggest that those in the kitchen might leave aside the little square packets, just occasionally, and see their way to cooking up some of the fresher tastes to be found in a simple broth.