Jottings page copied from PUOP
Intended as a jottings page for a potential recipe book.
Circa 1960 What time of year was this?
The contractor would arrive with the threshing mill early - or even the night before, but after setting up would need some calories to start a hard day. Menfolk, farmers, labourers and neighbours would assemble. The women's role was to feed sheaves in at the top of the thresher, and get the meals ready - keeping production moving. After breakfast, the corn stack would be disassembled and the sheaves forked up to the waiting feeders on the top of the threshing machine. The straw and chaff would fall out of one side of the machine, to be moved out of the way to use as animal bedding material, and the grain would come out of another shute, bagged into hessian sacks, and moved to storage. The noise would be deafening for all those close up to the machinery, and the dust was thick around them.
Threshing Day Menu
Scottish Breakfast served at 10:30?
Home cured bacon
Free range fried eggs
Home made sausage
Bread
Tea
Mid day meal (or at tea time?)
Must ask Morag - but ours was a pie made in the roasting tin (ie BIG). Stewed steak in the bottom, mashed potato, then a pastry crust.
Vegetable, home grown carrots and cabbage.
Gravy
Apple cake, or apple sponge pudding and custard served from a ‘Blueband’ jug.
Harvest Supper
Decorative bread in the shape of a sheaf of corn
Mashlam scones
Ham
Dunlop cheese
1866 Sunday Lunch
From the Auchinleck churchyard post, the break in the church service would find many in the local Inn enjoying a drink with Mashlam scone. Mashlam is a term for a mixed grain - sometimes with peas.
Feast days
Easter
Carlin Sunday - carlins (black peas) and Ham. Boiled black peas with melted butter, salt and pepper.
Palm ?
Easter Sunday ?
Pasche eggs?
Christmas
Roast goose
Apple sauce
Plum pudding?
Clootie dumplin?
Scots didn’t really celebrate Christmas except for going to church. It wasn’t a big festival. They just treated it as another day. Even in the 1960s people worked Christmas Day. (RMcG)
Any more feasts?
Are there local speciality dishes?
Hogmanay. This was the big event in Scotland. Scotch Broth, steak pie and tatties, pot of peas made with ham and for pudding there was always trifle.
Meal before the Bells to put a lining on your stomach then celebrate until the morning. More soup and peas with vinegar in between celebration drinks and first-footing..and of course shortbread and various kinds of bun. Many Scottish couples married on the 31st December so that they greeted the New Year as husband and wife. (RMcG)
Breakfast - oatmeal? Every day?
Sowens?
Curds and cream - old folks day out in blog at Pedens cave area.
Green grozet cake (in pastry)
Blackcurrant cake
Goose egg sponge cake - when geese lay, it is usual to number the eggs so you know how old they are before incubation. You can pinch a couple for a chicken (clocker) to hatch, but a special treat woul be to take the freshest and make a vast sponge cake - ingredients measured to the weight of egg.
Oat cakes
Nothing deep fried until the invention and common ownership of the primus stove, fish and chips from a takeaway!
Set pot used for huge family soups with suet pudding boiled in a muslin sheet - tied up. (My mother was horrified when her granny suggested they put a ‘buoy’ in the set pot soup!) - (set pot, boiler usually used for washing day, a pot with a fire under it set in brickwork.)
And more.....
Porridge would be made to last for a few days. It would be very thick and it would be put into a drawer and slices cut every morning to take as a ‘piece’. My uncle who worked on a farm told me this was normal practice. (RMcG)
Scottish farmer’s wives are well-known for their skills at baking. Scones, tarts, bread and mouth-watering cakes. Soups of all kinds, meat and of course tatties. Back then they had to work with the ingredients to hand which during the winter would be difficult .So soup would be the main meal albeit with loads of kail added (now a superfood!) . Sometimes soup would be served with a side dish of mashed tatties. (RMcG)
Recipes
Many old recipe collections only give quantities required, oven temperature (if you are lucky), and length of cooking time. They were actually aide memoir rather than precise instructions, hence the “one or two eggs” and “ half a teacup or less” in the examples below. So much depended on the experience of the cook, and her knowledge of her own oven temperatures. To cook on a range, a big stick would be added to the fire early on, and the recipes requiring a hot oven, such as bread and pastry would be cooked first. As the oven cooled, the cakes etc, that needed a moderate oven would be baked, and lastly, a slow cooked roast for an evening meal.
These recipes are from Edith Mary Stevenson’s ( nee Meikle ) personal file, the first one being an economical method for a classic sponge. Usually equal weights of butter, sugar, flour, and eggs would be used, with the addition of a raising agent if using plain flour. This method introduces lots of air in the mixing to make the sponge rise -does anybody want to have a go at it? And the almond fingers perhaps? Raspberry buns recipe for the base of the almond fingers is in the bero book....
The port of Ayr would be the source of the treacle, sugar, and ginger. There are long established links with the sugar plantations, and spice trade, and treacle was a known medicinal for bovine ailments.
I baked this in a 21cm square baking tin, oven 150 (fan) for one hour and twenty minutes. The sugar I used was soft, brown, as I wasn’t sure what Edith means by “moist”. The fruit, ginger, and cut peel have a tendancy to fall to the bottom, but it does not suffer for that. Try it, the flavours are fabulous! It’s going in my book - Thank you Edith!
Versatile too!!
Oat cakes were routinely served with a good Dunlop, which could be a meal in itself.
The raising agent - in this case Baking Powder - will work better with the addition of an acid, found in cultured yoghurt for example, as Edith suggests when there is no buttermilk, thus making a lighter scone.
Potato scones are very versatile, with jam or cheese, and are very probably the origins of the American hash brown - as they equally welcome with breakfast bacon and eggs!
Another common snack would be a buttered pastry square - often made from the left over pastry on baking day, - or served as a topping for stewed garden fruits such as gooseberries (grozzets) or blackcurrants.
For a bit of fun here’s a recipe from an old cook book
To Preserve a Husband
Select with care
Young and green varieties take longer to prepare
But often are excellent when done
Those too crusty take a long time to make tender
One neither hard nor soft gives best satisfaction
Do not pickle or put in hot water
Or prick to test tenderness
As this leaves a mark
Even poor varieties may be made sweet and tender
by this method -
Wrap in a mantle of charity
And keep over a steady fire of loving domestic devotion
Garnish with patience - sweeten with smiles
Flavour with kisses to taste -
Serve with peaches and cream
Thus prepared they will keep for years
‘Life’s a pudding full of plums
- let us take it as it comes’
And another one
A Recipe for Happiness
Ingredients
4 cups of Love. 2 cups of Loyalty
3 cups of Forgiveness 1 cup of Friendship
2 spoons of Hope 2 spoons of Tenderness
4 quarts of Faith. 1 barrel of laughter
Method:
Take love and loyalty, mix thoroughly with faith. Blend it with tenderness, forgiveness and understanding. Add friendship and hope. Sprinkle abundantly with laughter. Bake it with sunshine and serve daily in generous helpings.
Spring cleaning
After the New Year killing of geese, the wing tips of the birds would have been kept, and the cut end swinged in the fire so that the integrity of the wing would be preserved. These made excellent brushes to get into corners, and later used to sweep out the ashes in the range.
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