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 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 Almond-and-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 pivotal; a woman who travelled alone to Germany in 1914, Greece in 1918, and who went on to write, in 1929, what is probably the best known collection of Scottish cooking heritage. This she created ‘to capture a moment’, fearing that the unrecorded, personal and local nuances of cooking were at risk of becoming homogenised— a flicker of insight into the future world of mass-produced foodstuffs that she would struggle to recognise.

It's been over three years since I wrote those words examining my relationship with my gran's treasured copy of The Scots Kitchen. I wrote it for 'Feasting, Folklore and Florence', an interactive performance piece for The Scottish International Storytelling Festival, and creating the piece sent me on a fascinating journey beyond my memories of McNeill’s recipes, beyond my discoveries about her life and work, and into the magical world of Oats (Avena sativa) and the iconic place they hold in Scotland's culture. Their calm, restorative, nutritious profile hides an enchanted quality, one with a soothing air of domesticity.

The Scots Kitchen contains recipes aplenty for sowens, porridge and whisky-augmented brose, but it's the Oatcakes and bannocks that fascinate me most. There are so many subtle variations, and an Oatcake for every occasion. One variant, it was claimed, would give the person who ate it prophetic dreams: the heavily salted Bonnach Salainn should be eaten on Halloween with no food or drink taken after ingesting it, nor a single word spoken, in order to let the charm take effect. McNeill mentions Oatcakes for celebrating St Columba's Day, Teethin’ Bannocks and Cryin’ Bannocks to soothe children, and Mill Bannocks a foot in diameter with a hole in the centre. But the Oatcake I'd like to share with you today is a Quarter Cake— a Bonnach Bride or St Bride’s Bannock to celebrate the arrival of spring. The Cross-Quarter Days of Imbolc (St Bride’s Day), Beltane, Lammas and Samhain marked the start of each season, and each had a Quarter Cake and ritual associated with it. MacNeill had found reference to these and detailed information about the ritual associated with the Bonnach Bealltain or Beltane Bannock, but could not find anyone still baking them in the early twentieth century.

The Beltane Bannock was an Oatcake dressed with a caudle of eggs, butter and cream, according to one source; alternatively, it could be divided into nine sections, each with a square protruding knob which was then dedicated to a vital domestic animal or a disruptive wild one, and thrown into the fire to protect or deter accordingly. Alas, we don’t have a ritual or story to go with the Bonnach Bride, but maybe that gives us the opportunity to find our own, to associate it with hopes and wishes for the forthcoming brighter days. A homemade soft Oatcake is the ideal comfort food to eat whilst browsing through gardening notes, re-awakening our seed collections, and planning for spring growth, so maybe you'll join me as we look towards spring and bake a Bonnach Bride!

Florence Marian McNeill’s Bonnach Bride

You will need:

4 ounces of Oatmeal

A teaspoonful of fat or dripping (plant-based oil works just as well)

A pinch of baking soda

A pinch of salt

Hot water

McNeill claims that you will also need four special implements, but I think we can probably manage without! But, if you wish to follow the recipe to the letter, collect:

A spurtle for stirring the mixture

A notched bannock stick or rolling pin which leaves a criss-cross pattern

A spathe; that is, a long-handled heart shaped iron implement for transferring the cakes from board to griddle

A banna-rack to cook the bannocks on

Mix the ingredients into a firm dough, then knead and bake over a smokeless fire.

References

McNeill, F.M. (1929) The Scots Kitchen: Its Traditions and Lore, with Old-time Recipes. Blackie and Sons: Edinburgh