Travel around Scotland through the pages of this book and discover a selection of the delicious traditional food of the area, as well as stories and fascinating facts behind the recipes. Your journey is given added flavour by the delightful historical images from The Francis Frith Collection, showing the people and places of Scotland in the past.

A Taste of Scotland includes 50 recipes, some traditional, some reflecting local products that Scotland is famous for, some linked to characters or historical personages or events, some versions adapted to suit modern tastes.

Feeling nostalgic, and hungry? This stunning NEW book release from The Francis Frith Collection, is now available for only $24.00.
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A Taste of Scotland is peppered with topic boxes of additional snippets and information about traditional customs and local trivia, to convey a true flavour of Scotland. Read on for a just a few of the fascinating facts from the book.

More about this book

• ISBN: 1-84589-462-6
• Compiled by Julia Skinner
• Printed to order and Despatched in 3-5 days
• Add your own inscription! - tell me more...
• 128 pages, Paperback
• Size: 246mm x 189mm (10" x 7")

• Cock-Leekie-Soup: This famous Scottish dish is more of a stew than a soup. It is a very old recipe, and was recorded in 1598 when Fynes Morrison described a dish he had eaten whilst dining at a knight’s house in Scotland: ‘… but the upper messe, insteede of Porredge, had a Pullet with some prunes in the broth’. There is a story that the soup originated in the days when cockfighting was a popular sport, and the losing cock was eaten after the contest, thrown into a stock pot with some leeks. The addition of prunes for extra flavour was a later refinement, although some cooks nowadays often omit these, or remove them before serving. The prunes can either be used whole, or stoned and roughly chopped if preferred.
• Herring were an important catch for Scottish fishermen in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Herring, known to fishermen as the ‘silver darlings’, are very nutritious and used to be a staple part of most people’s diet. Hunting the herring was a perilous business, but when the drift nets were hauled in, near bursting with fish, it was a time for rejoicing, as the Scottish poet Hugh Macdiarmid described:
  O it’s ain o’ the bonniest
  Sichts in the warld
  To watch the herrin’ come
  Walkin’ on board
  In the wee sma’ ’oors o’
  A simmer’s mornin’
  As if o’ their ain accord.
  Herring shoals were pursued in deep seas far from the harbour, and the journey home was too long for the fish to be sold and eaten fresh; some method of preserving them was essential, and the herring were usually salted and dried. The number of boats drifting for herring increased, and gutting and curing houses sprang up in the ports of north-east England and Scotland. The industry was seasonal, which led to migrations of labour from port to port; the fishing harbours would be thronged with men and women working hard to meet the sailing schedules, ensuring that catches were not forfeited and vital income lost. Gutting and packing the fish was done by women. This was a skilled job, and a good herring woman could gut 40 fish a minute. As the women were on piece-rate it was essential to keep their fingers nimble, which they did by continuously knitting in their free time.
• Haggis and Robert Burns
  Fair fa’ your honest sonsie face
  Great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race!
  (From ‘To a Haggis’, Robert Burns)
  Robert (Rabbie) Burns, thought by many to have been Scotland’s greatest poet, was born in a simple cottage at Alloway on 25th January 1759. The cottage, a ‘but and ben’, or two-room clay cottage, was built by the poet’s father, a gardener from Kincardineshire, and later became an inn. In 1881 the cottage was purchased by the trustees of the Burns Monument and opened as a museum. The pleasant village of Alloway is now the centre of pilgrimage for lovers of Burns’s poetry. Robert Burns died in Dumfries in 1796 at the early age of thirty-seven. The life and works of Robert Burns are celebrated each year in Scotland on Burns’ Night, 25th January, with a special Burns’ Night Supper. Much merrymaking takes place, special toasts are drunk and traditional dishes are eaten – especially Scotland’s most famous dish, haggis. Haggis is rather like a large, oval-shaped sausage, made from a sheep’s stomach stuffed with oatmeal and the minced or chopped parts of an animal which might otherwise be discarded, such as the heart, lungs and liver (the finest haggis uses liver from a deer, rather than a sheep). Haggis is traditionally served with Bashed Neeps – see page 70. At Burns’ Night celebrations the haggis is brought in to the accompaniment of a piper, and placed ceremoniously before the chief guest. ‘To a Haggis’ by Robert Burns is then recited, and the haggis is toasted with drams of whisky before being eaten. Queen Victoria was served haggis whilst staying at Blair Castle in 1844, and recorded her thoughts in ‘Leaves of a Highland Journal’: ‘There were several Scottish dishes, two soups and the celebrated haggis, which I tried and really liked very much.’
• Ben Nevis, known to both locals and visitors as ‘The Ben’, is the highest mountain in the British Isles. Popular with climbers, Ben Nevis is located at the western end of the Grampian mountains, near the Highland town of Fort William. The name of the mountain is an Anglicised version of the Scottish Gaelic ‘Beinn Nibheis’. ‘Beinn’ means ‘mountain’, but there are several possible meanings of ‘Nibheis’ – it is most commonly translated as ‘malicious’, but it may derive from ‘nèamh-bhathais’, meaning ‘heavens’ (from ‘nèamh’) and ‘top of a man’s head’ (from ‘bathais’), giving a more romantic interpretation of ‘the mountain with its head in the clouds’, or perhaps ‘mountain of Heaven’.
• Bridescake: A wedding custom from rural Scotland, and particularly the Orkney and Shetland islands, was associated with ‘bridescake’ (or bride’s bonn, or bun), a small shortbread-like cake flavoured with caraway seeds that was cooked on a griddle (called a girdle in Scotland) by the bride’s mother on the wedding day. As the bride entered her new home for the first time, her mother would hold the bridescake over her head, and then break it into pieces; if it broke into a number of small pieces, it was taken as a sign that the marriage would be happy, lucky and fruitful. The broken pieces were then given to the unmarried maidens in the wedding party, who would place them under their pillows that night so that they might dream about their future husbands – for this reason it was also known as ‘dreaming bread’.

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  A Taste of Yorkshire

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  A Taste of the North-East

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  A Taste of Lincolnshire and the Fens

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  A Taste of East Anglia

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  A Taste of the South-West

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  A Taste of the South-East

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  A Taste of the North-West

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  A Taste of Cumbria and the Lake District

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  A Taste of the East Midlands

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  A Taste of Wales

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  A Taste of The Thames Valley A Taste Of

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  A Taste of The West Midlands A Taste Of

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  A Taste of Gloucestershire and the Cotwolds A Taste Of