Victorian Scotland was not out here doing brunch. There was no smashed avocado or artisanal sourdough. There were oats, and there was making them stretch as far as humanly possible. The entirety of Scottish cuisine is built on the noble art of not wasting a single scrap of anything, ever, under any circumstances. None of this was “peasant food” in the romantic sense. It was simply what people ate when the alternatives were hunger.
Behold brose—the original five-minute meal, several centuries before that was a marketing slogan. Take oatmeal. Add hot water or, if you were feeling fancy, milk. Stir. Maybe, if the gods were smiling, add a knob of dripping or a splash of kale broth. Congratulations, you’ve made dinner; and you did it without lighting the stove, because stoves cost money and money was the whole problem to begin with.
For many working families, risen wheaten bread was more of an occasional than an everyday fare. Instead, everyone got extremely good at the griddle. Oatcakes. Tattie scones, which were just mashed potato, flour, and a bit of fat, slapped onto a hot girdle until spotted and glorious. Potatoes were doing so much heavy lifting in this diet they should have unionised.
Kale and cabbage showed up constantly and without apology, usually boiled into a thin broth that was doing its best to pass for a hearty meal. When meat appeared—and “appeared” is doing a lot of work in that sentence—nothing was wasted. Trotters, offal, bones, the works, all went into soups and into stovies, that glorious slow-simmered jumble of potatoes, onions, and whatever meat scraps hadn’t already been claimed by something else. Herring, salted or fresh, was often the only protein on offer, and it was fried in oatmeal because, again, oats—is there anything they couldn’t do?
Up on the northeast coast, fishing towns had their own party trick: cullen skink, born in the town of Cullen and built almost entirely out of smoked haddock that was too broken or battered to sell whole. Add potatoes, onions, milk, simmer until it thickens itself into something wonderful, and suddenly the fish nobody wanted is the best thing on the table.
And then, of course, there’s haggis—Robert Burns’s “great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race,” which is a magnificently grand title for a dish that is, at its core, offal and oatmeal stuffed into a stomach and boiled. Heart, liver, lungs, suet, onion, spice—everything a sheep had going spare, given the full theatrical treatment. If any dish sums up this whole approach to eating, it’s this one: take what nobody else wants, season it defiantly, and serve it like royalty.
Was it glamorous? Absolutely not. Was it varied? Also no. But it was resourceful in a way that would make modern zero-waste influencers weep into their reusable produce bags—a whole cuisine built on the radical idea that everything, and I mean everything, gets used, right down to the last available cavity.
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Down the Rabbit Hole
Books and links
Olive Checkland & Margaret Lamb (eds.), Health Care as Social History: The Glasgow Case (Aberdeen UP, 1982)
W. Hamish Fraser & Irene Maver (eds.), Glasgow, Volume II: 1830–1912 (Manchester UP, 1996)
B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1902)
Peter Greaves, “Regional differences in the mid-Victorian diet and their impact on health,” JRSM Open (2018) ↗
“Lifting the Lid on Scottish Food History” ↗ — National Library of Scotland
Tattie scones are a great way to use leftover mashed potato. Work in enough plain flour (some use self-raising; I don’t) to make a stiff dough that can be rolled without sticking to everything.
Roll it out to about the thickness of a pound coin, cut into whatever shapes your rolled-out pile of potato permits (mine always looks like Australia), and cook in a wee bit of butter in a hot, flat-bottomed pan until golden and spotted—about 3 minutes per side.