Page 60 - Spring2009

staple vegetable. His kail-yard was, in fact, to the old Scots crofter what for no reader of Shakespeare requires to be told
his potato plot was to the Irish peasant. There he planted cabbages for that some of the more uncontrollable passions of
summer and green kail for winter use, in addition, of course, to potatoes. human nature were supposed to be favoured by
. . . The vogue of kail, however, was originally confined to the Lowlands. its use…”
The Highlander preferred the common nettle in his broth, and appears to Turnips were introduced at about the same
have regarded the use of kail as a symptom of effeminacy.” time. Carrots, summer cabbages and other “cole-
Kail was so ubiquitous a vegetable that it lent its name to the vegetable worts” provided welcome variety in the diet.
garden in general (the kail-yard) as well as to the evening meal, regard-
less of what else might be served (“Will you come and tak’ your kail wi’ FISH AND SEAFOOD
me?”), and, by extension, the general term for broth or soup. The Scots have traditionally eaten more fish
The potato traveled to Scotland via Ireland, and its first recorded ap- than their carnivorous neighbors in England.
pearance there is in 1701. In his Domestic Annals of Scotland, published McNeill describes the vast bounty of fish and sea
in 1885, Robert Chambers tells us that “About 1773 it was beginning to be food available to the Scots: “The great salmon-
cultivated in gardens, but still with a hesitation about its moral character, rivers and innumerable lochs and trout streams,
TRADITIONS IN PORRIDGE PREPARATION

The old Scottish preparation of sowans resembles almost precisely the ancient Russian dish called oat kissel (pronounced
“kee-SYELL”)—made from whole oats, which also produced a smooth, soured gel that was understood to be easily digested
and especially nourishing for children, the elderly and convalescents. This complex method of preparation was certainly
a means to address all of the components in grain that have been a challenge for the human digestive anatomy.
Oats contain more phytates than almost any other grain—in fact their high phosphorus content is largely bound up in
their phytates. At the same time, oats possess relatively small amounts of phytase, the enzyme needed to neutralize phy-
tate. The usual means to reduce phytate content in wheat or rye—by soaking for eight to twelve hours in a warm, slightly
acid medium—is far less effective with oats. Germination and/or fermentation are the means to best convert phytate in
oats. The old, traditional harvest methods provided natural opportunities for the oats to start and stop germination after
harvest in their ripening and storage out doors, when in contact with light applications of dew or rain. The scythed sheaves
first stood in the fields for days or even weeks until the crop was fully harvested. The sheaves were then collected and
expertly piled in large, twenty-foot tall stacks and lashed down with ropes against wind, rain and snow. Of course it would
be a disaster if the oats were actually to sprout fully before they were needed, but it seems likely that natural conditions
allowed for some conversion of phytates while in storage. Drying in the kiln removed excess moisture and allowed for
better milling and removal of the outer hull. The “sids” that the miller returned to the Scots farmer would contain most
of the phytate still present in the oat groat—as it is contained in greatest concentration in the bran. The very long souring
process—a week or more on average—would give the sids the time they needed to ferment, while also converting the
gluten, starches and sugars into a nearly pre-digested form.
Another common preparation of oat porridge in the Scottish kitchen included the farm wife cooking a large pot of
porridge early in the week that would be poured into the drawer of the kitchen cupboard and left to cool and congeal. All
week, family members would cut a slice to take with them to the fields and eat cold under its new name, calders. Certainly
the calders soured pleasantly as the days went by. Slices were also fried in butter to accompany fish or eggs.
“Whey-whullions,” according to The Scots Kitchen, was “formerly a common dish among the peasantry of Scotland,
consisting of the porridge left at breakfast, which was beaten down among fresh whey, with an additional quantity of
oatmeal.”
Although one finds numerous references to the old tradition of soaking the oatmeal overnight before making breakfast
porridge, there are just as numerous old methods that do not employ a pre-soaking stage. In particular, the preparation
of brose is a very early version of “quick oats” if there ever was one: “Put into a bowl two handfuls of oatmeal. Add salt
and a piece of butter. Pour in boiling water to cover the oatmeal and stir it up with the shank of a horn spoon, allowing it
to form knots. [The oatmeal inside the knots is raw.] Sup with soor dook [buttermilk] or sweet milk, and you have a dish
that has been the backbone of many a sturdy Scotsman.”
Milk brose is made similarly, except with boiling milk instead of water, and sometimes the liquid left from boiling kail
was used to prepare kail-brose. At one time servants in straitened circumstances had to make do with plain brose three
times a day, with perhaps pease-meal brose or turnip brose on a Sunday and not much else. A skin ailment called Scotch
fiddle was also common at this time, so called because of the constant itching between the fingers of the sufferer. Whether
this was a kind of dermatitis or eczema brought about by an excessive near-raw oat diet, or a deficiency symptom because
of a general lack of nutrients, or even scabies mites from cramped and abject living quarters is now difficult to tell. At the
time, the cure was to stop eating oats and subsist on pease porridge until the skin cleared.
58 Wise Traditions SPRING 2009