viii: Botanica Fabula
Beltane, bannocks and baking Amanda Edmiston It all started with me sitting on the yellow linoleum floor underneath my gran’s kitchen table, over forty years ago. The Aberdeen granite chill of the patterned floor contrasted with the hot draught of confection-scented heat as she opened the oven door, revealing an autumn-hewed gingerbread, ruby-crusted with glacé Cherries (at my behest) and scenting everything with its soft Cinnamontinged aroma. The brown-and-cream mason bowl beside me was licked clean, every last trace of creamy batter devoured. With the cake still too hot to be cut, I vividly remember picking the crusted remains of ancient, splattered, buttery sugar from the heavy and yellowed lignin pages of Florence Marian McNeill’s Scots Kitchen, too young to understand the words but wholly appreciative of the cake-infused rituals that it cast into my young life. I remember being a year or so older, standing up on a kitchen stool, learning how to rub butter into flour— sensing the way it warmed and then melted ever so slightly between my fingers, coming together as a fine crumb. I learnt to make a well into which would be poured deep, brown, molten treacle and sugar, and when to beat in the eggs with a wooden spoon or to fold in Oats with a metal one. I remember watching my gran write notes in the book’s margins about the quantities, calculating weights and measures for events and tea parties I knew nothing of. When my gran died, her cookery books were what I reached for. My mother is a weaver of 46
stories and, as together we cooked up a steaming pan of Carrot soup and smelled its gingery tones mingle with the scent of freshly baked cheese scones, I learnt from her how my gran had been given the book by her mother-in-law when she had married. I felt that I held a tangible link to my forebears: my great-gran’s book, then my gran’s, and now mine. It’s fair to say that Florence Marion McNeill has been my near-constant companion, entwining folklore and food deep beneath within me since I first started poring over my grandmother’s self-annotated copy of The Scots Kitchen all those decades ago. As I got older, something of the domestic world glimpsed between its yellowing leaves gave me the sense of a mycelian connection between us, a tactile bond shared on Almondand-Vanilla-scented lignin and baked into a dreaming-bread. She too was a recorder of Scots lore— domestic lore associated with kitchen food. I wanted to know more about this writer, about her personal life. I wanted to understand how an Orkney minister’s daughter achieved so much that is now at risk, fading from our collective memory. So I read what I could gather of her work. She was— albeit quietly —one of twentieth-century Scotland’s greatest female voices: a graduate of the Edinburgh College of Art and the Universities of Glasgow and Paris; an organiser of the Scottish Women’s Suffrage movement at a time that we now recognise as
