Strawberry acid, cormorant soup and locust bread may all sound as though they are dishes from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party but in fact they are part of an edible archive of Scottish recipes which are being collected by the Scottish Council on Archives.
The body is inviting members of the public and Scottish organisations to submit old recipes to try and build a comprehensive picture of the food eaten in Scotland down through the ages.
As well as family recipes, the project has unearthed dishes such as a strawberry cheesecake served at a Royal Bank of Scotland board meeting in the Sixties and an 18th century submission from North Lanarkshire Council on how to cook a turtle.
One imagines that many of Scotland’s older hotels and restaurants probably have cookery books packed with recipes which would make for interesting contributions to the archive and could also generate some useful PR for the venues.
The eventual plan is produce an electronic recipe book containing all the submissions and the stories behind them. There is also talk of a possible dinner in Edinburgh recreating some of the more interesting dishes.
Scotland On Sunday had a good piece on the story last week.
A story in today’s Scotsman illustrates just why the edible archive is worth compiling. According to this report, many of Scotland’s traditional foods have vanished: ‘Campaigners estimate about 75 per cent of varieties in Scotland and throughout the UK have been lost forever in the past 100 years.’
The Scottish Crofting Federation are campaigning to have food stuffs such as Shetland cabbage and North Ronaldsay sheep recognised as being a unique part of the cultural heritage of the islands where they are farmed.