We're so excited that Birlinn is bringing out a new 2025 edition of The Scots Kitchen by F. Marian McNeill in May. We know lovers of Scotland and Scottish food will be eager to thumb through it and become acquainted with this treasure of Scottish cuisine and lore, first published in 1929. (We've sold older editions in the past.) In anticipation and in celebration, we're posting a recipe for Rumbledethumps from the 2010 edition of this classic cookbook.
This is as good of an introduction to the style and tone of McNeill's book as any. She generally signals what part of the country a particular recipe is from, putting the region in parenthesis under the name of the dish. And then -- as often as not -- there's a snippet of something from literature to add some colorful and poetic context - and often some Scots dialect - for the dish in question. (Archaic spellings and notes are included.)
Her entry on Rumbledethumps begins like this, as many of her recipes do, with a literary excerpt, after establishing that the dish is from the Borders and that it consists of potatoes, cabbage, butter, pepper and salt:
'North: May I ask, with all due solemnity, what are rumbledethumps?
Shepherd: Something like Mr. Hazlitt's character of Shakespere. Take a peck of purtatoes, and put them into a boyne (large pot) -- at them with a beetle (wooden potato masher - a dab of butter - the beetle again - another dab - then cabbage - purtato - beetle and dab - saut (salt) meanwhile - and a shake o'common black pepper -- feenally, cabbage and purtato throughither - pree (taste), and you'll fin' them decent rumblethumps.'
- Christopher North: Noctes Ambrosianae
And, as is the case with this recipe, the actual nuts and bolts of the recipe - the ingredients, quantities, techniques and times - might end up being extra brief. These are gestural recipes in many cases, intended for cooks who know their way around the kitchen, who know how to freestyle, to substitute in creative ways, and to infer with regard to precise measurements. It's more a reference book with pointers and origin backstories on particular dishes than it is a cookbook you're likely to make a quick midweek dinner for the family from. Though there's plenty of inspiration for that, too.
If you're the kind of Type-A cook who needs and requires exact instructions -- fractional amounts of seasonings, to-the-minute durational cues, and ultra-specific breakdowns of every step -- then The Scots Kitchen may cause a little anxiety. But don't panic! -- learning to feel your way through a new and possibly ambiguous recipe is one of the ways to find out how to improvise in the kitchen, which is one of the most important cooking skills you can acquire.
McNeill may be best known for this cookbook -- it depends on who you talk to -- but she was equally accomplished as a folklorist and wide-ranging writer, both of history and fiction. She was also an activist. The introduction written by Catherine Brown to the 2010 edition will make many readers curious to learn more about McNeill and to track down some of her other writing. Even when it was published nearly 100 years ago, some literary critics told McNeill they thought it was "a masterpiece." That's a verdict that successive generations have shared.
As Brown writes of McNeill's distinctive style: "Her approach was fresh and original. She sets the scene: the people from the past speak to us. The recipes she chooses are rooted in a place and time according to social class, food resources, inventiveness and skills. They have defining features of nationhood which she traces in poems, ballads, rhymes, stories and quotes from other writers. She pioneers a new way of writing about a nation's food and creates an inspiring rich resource for all time."
Born in Orkney in 1885, McNeill came from a family that valued traditional Scottish culture, education and community. She studied in Glasgow and London and taught English in Europe, living in Greece for a time. She was friends with notable Scottish literary figures of the time.
Her book, as she wrote in her introduction to the first edition, was as much about cultural preservation as it was about instructions for cooks.
"The object of this book is ... to preserve the recipes of our old national dishes, many of which, in this age of standardization, are in danger of falling into an undeserved oblivion."
