The Plenishing of the Kitchen

In most countries, even today, one finds the rudest forms of art coexisting with the highest, the earliest stage of civilization with the most advanced. It is not, therefore, surprising that while the banqueting halls of Linlithgow and Holyrood vied in elegance with any in Europe, elsewhere in the kingdom the most primitive methods of cookery prevailed.

‘I have been assured,’ writes Burt, in the early eighteenth century, ‘that in some of the Islands the meaner sort of People still retain the Custom of boiling their Beef in the Hide, or otherwise, being destitute of Vessels of Metal or Earth, they put Water into a Block of Wood, made hollow by the help of the Dirk and burning, and then with pretty large Stones heated red-hot, and successively quenched in that Vessel, they keep the Water boiling till they have dressed their Food.’