The Table

In the early Scots kitchen the fare consisted of game or fish boiled or seethed in primitive fashion over the peat embers; barley bannocks and oatcakes baked on the ancient greadeal; cheese and butter; wild fruit, wild herbs, and the honey of the wild bee. In the Highlands, in particular, the ancient parsimony was long preserved. ‘The great heroes of antiquity,’ says Sir John Sinclair, ‘lived chiefly on broth. The water in which a piece of mutton or venison was boiled, thickened with oatmeal and flavoured with wild herbs, formed the morning and evening meal in the hall of a Highland chief.’¹