Dreaming Bread and Flourishing Folklore
‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘I’m very happy to have shortbread broken over my head… I can think of worse things.’
The shortbread – dreaming bread – round, encrusted with almonds, fresh out of the tin, baked the night before according to Florence Marian McNeill’s instructions in The Scots Kitchen (1929), shivered a little and started to show signs of a crack routing across its top as the woman spoke. I paused, but the prescience of McNeill’s belief in the significance of the folklore attached to food, alongside my own firm belief that produce farmed with care and consideration by people, grown from our land, crafted into ingredients, baked into symbolic foodstuffs, is beholden to the seasons and the days that it honours, and the opportunity to play with this time-worn ritual with this engaged and enthusiastic audience, was too bewitching.
I held the dreaming bread aloft and broke it, as The Scots Kitchen instructed, over the woman’s head. Did it have the potential for having cellular knowledge of her hidden future, her fate as the audience now ascertained it might?
It broke down the fault line, into two. After a moment’s hesitation the bigger piece split again. Then the smaller piece, as if on reflection, also split.
She laughed. She had two children with her first husband, she said, and although recently remarried she had no plans for more children. The rest of the audience participating in this enactment all oooh-ed and smirked knowingly, certain that the decorated treat had indicated a different future.
I picked up my gran’s copy of The Scots Kitchen later that evening and went back over what I thought were familiar passages…
The Infar-Cake or Dreaming-Bread. A decorated cake of shortbread is still the national bride’s cake of rural Scotland. The breaking of the Infar-cake over the head of the bride, on the threshold of her new home, is a very ancient custom, having its origins in the Roman rite of confarratio… Portions were distributed to young men and maidens ‘to dream on’.
There had been no mention of predicting marriages or children. I went back over my own notes from the evening workshop in which the dreaming bread ritual had been enacted. Sure enough, the future foretelling elements had been dreamt up, so to speak, by the audience as the shortbread had been shared. I smiled internally – intangible heritage, oral storytelling and folklore reminiscence is fluid in nature, ever changing, determined in part by the folk practicing its dark arts and listening to its loose design.
My own copy of McNeill’s The Scots Kitchen was handed on to me by my gran, my mum’s mum. She in turn had been given it by her mother-in-law when she had married my grandfather, Scottish sculptor Richard Ross Robertson. By the time I inherited it, it already had a magical quality. Faded leather, holding aromas of vanilla and butter, published by Blackie and Son in 1929, this edition, over the course of ninety years, had had its recipes annotated by three generations of women: recipes had been adapted, notes added on the thick, soft margins, successful additional ingredients recorded, brambles suggested for adding sweetness to vitamin C-rich rowanberry jam, and ginger cakes sized up for family gatherings. I had used it myself, conjuring up its recipe for nettle broth for parties whilst I was studying herbal medicine and helping my daughter bake her first oatcakes for a Burns Night party at nursery.
Over the next two years my relationship with The Scots Kitchen developed. It was a constant companion as I toured schools, museums and gardens as a herbal storyteller. I shared recipes for fate-revealing bannocks at Hallowe’en with folk at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, brewed Birks wine with Wild Food Festival workshop participants, took barley water flavours to the Scottish diaspora in upstate New York. Each recipe invited in layers of reminiscence and family lore from participants – it felt like they were adding their own traditions, stories and recipe tweaks to the incredible folkloric cultural culinary foundation left by McNeill.
I met American families who had the same edition of the book, a treasured item on the kitchen shelves, offering a thread of connection to one strand of a complex heritage, that was still turned to at Christmas and New Year for homely recipes for Yuletime festive ale and black bun. We talked about the provenance of our copies of the book – it was always handed on…
The notes of previous generations now gave me permission to add my own. Carefully expressed in very best handwriting, ink pen chosen to better resemble the more gentle hand of yesteryear, I added the discoveries from my explorations of storytelling and folklore, imagining that in some way McNeill’s original intention – to share recipes and attached lore at a pivotal point as traditional ways were being lost – might be best served by allowing it to continually grow and organically develop, inviting in new sharings and future reflections.
It had, since my gran’s death, not only informed elements of my own cooking and offered time-honoured tastes to grown-ups attending workshops, but also accompanied me into schools, where I had invited children to muse on their own favourite vegetables. Broccoli, tomatoes and sweetcorn were regularly mentioned, and I would pause for comic effect, point out tomatoes are fruit and corn a grain, then share the ‘Vegetables’ chapter from the 1929 book. Not a stem of broccoli in sight.
The children would then hear about the tattie howking holidays and learn about tumshie lanterns, unsure as I revoked the modern adoption of the pumpkin and shared the Hallowe’en use of the turnip, which was featured in McNeill’s recipe for:
Turnip Purry
(Stewed turnips, Meg Dods’s recipe) turnips, fresh butter, white pepper, salt and ginger. Pare off all that would be hard, woody and stringy when boiled. Boil them in plenty of water for from three quarters of an hour to nearly two hours according to age and size…
She adds that the Cleikum club, the dining and literary club started by Walter Scott in 1798 in Peebles, which was hosted by Meg Dods (of recipe fame), specifically chose yellow, juicy turnips and seasoned the dish with ginger, as according to Dods it ‘corrects the flatulent properties of this esculent’. The audience would then listen as I shared a traditional folktale about neepy heid lanterns and explained the humble turnip’s nutritious benefits and immune system restorative potential when used in a seventeenth-century cough linctus recipe.
The more I worked with The Scots Kitchen the more each chapter became filled with family memories and folklore sharing. Whilst working with a group in a sheltered housing complex in Aberdeen, I was joined by a resident, a mother in her late eighties whose daughter also came along. When I shared my own memories of my gran’s book and reflected on the value of simple things handed on, whether a family tradition or a treasured recipe book, the woman nodded and mentioned her own copy, again wreathed in notes from generations passed. Her daughter affirmed that these ‘kitchen table memories’, handed-on cookery books and cooking tips from loved ones, were truly worth their weight in gold. It felt like Florence Marian McNeill had curated and created a book that had become an iconic, cultural bequest at a personal family level, the recipes conjuring flavours and intimate memories of loved ones and happy occasions.
After The Scots Kitchen, Florence Marian McNeill’s work continued to chronicle Scottish food and the attached traditions and literature. The Silver Bough (1957–68) cites traditions which flesh out our relationship with food and share its impact on our culture, empowering cooking processes with intention and purpose beyond the basic need to refuel – something that we are increasingly overlooking as we drive our desire for ‘functional food’. Looking back on her upbringing in Orkney, McNeill mentions how the skeely wife goes to the shore with a pail and waits as nine waves roll in. As the last passes, she takes three gowpens of water (that which can be held in cupped hands) and then carries them home in her pail. The water is then added to the churn along with the milk to ensure a good supply of butter.
In ‘An Orkney Childhood’, written for The Scottish Companion in 1955, she recounts her own childhood memories of food:
To feed his ever-growing family, my father farmed twenty acres that grew oats for the porridge-pot and the girdle and vegetables for the kail-pot; and he kept a few beasts and birds that supplied us with milk and butter and eggs, as well as wool for blankets and tweeds.
I feel something of this close family connection to food and its role in our lives carries through her books and into the world of the people who love them, she somehow created a meaningful legacy that continues to carry the importance of food.
Two years later the woman from the Dreaming Bread workshop and I passed each other again, strangely enough on Ellersley Road in Murrayfield, where sixty years earlier McNeill and her friend Helen Cruikshank – fellow political activist, supporter of the Scottish Women’s Suffrage movement, and poet – had enjoyed a sherry in the sunshine as they co-hosted a celebratory luncheon for the publication of Cruikshank’s poetry collection Ponnage Pool and McNeill’s four-part study of Scottish folklore The Silver Bough. Bizarrely, I was on my way back from the National Library of Scotland, where I had been reading McNeill’s diaries, tiny leather-bound pocket editions gifted free by a local dairy and filled with simple one-line observations. Notes on lunch dates, financial trials and tribulations, award ceremonies for her Scottish renaissance writer cohorts etched across the pages, alongside the dairy’s printed notes on the value of milk and cream and recipe ideas. I had been in search of insights into her personality for a piece I was creating for a First World War Armistice Day centenary project.
The dreaming bread woman was pushing twins in a pushchair and she just laughed as she saw me approach. ‘Do you remember that shortbread?’ she asked, and gestured towards the twins…. We passed a few moments musing on the ability of folklore to hold truths and reveal aspects of the human condition, and how accurate this can become when food is involved, food which is so integral to our traditions, our familial groupings, to culture, to notions of self. I didn’t mention that there had been no mention of the dreaming bread’s predictions in The Scots Kitchen – it seemed more poetic to leave the possibility there. I felt that its creation by the audience gave the prophecy credence; it had been infused into the shortbread in part due to a secretly held awareness coming from the participant. The memory, the story, was too sweet to shatter.
I felt that Florence would have approved. Her pragmatic recount of folklore-embellished recipes and traditions in hospitality, alongside poetic notes of memorable meals from literature, facilitates the sharing of traditional Scottish fare to become part of the fabric of our memories and festivities, a cultural waymarker to be shared and handed on.
References & Further Information
McNeill, F. Marian, The Scots Kitchen: Its Traditions and Lore with Old-time Recipes. Blackie & Son. (1929).
McNeill, F. Marian, The Silver Bough: a Four Volume Study of the National and Local Festivals of Scotland, vols. 1–4. William MacLellan, Glasgow. (1957–1968).
Spence, Rhoda (ed.), The Scottish Companion, Richard Paterson (1955).
With thanks to The National Library of Scotland and The University of Edinburgh Library and University Collections.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘I’m very happy to have shortbread broken over my head… I can think of worse things.’
The shortbread – dreaming bread – round, encrusted with almonds, fresh out of the tin, baked the night before according to Florence Marian McNeill’s instructions in The Scots Kitchen (1929), shivered a little and started to show signs of a crack routing across its top as the woman spoke. I paused, but the prescience of McNeill’s belief in the significance of the folklore attached to food, alongside my own firm belief that produce farmed with care and consideration by people, grown from our land, crafted into ingredients, baked into symbolic foodstuffs, is beholden to the seasons and the days that it honours, and the opportunity to play with this time-worn ritual with this engaged and enthusiastic audience, was too bewitching.
I held the dreaming bread aloft and broke it, as The Scots Kitchen instructed, over the woman’s head. Did it have the potential for having cellular knowledge of her hidden future, her fate as the audience now ascertained it might?
It broke down the fault line, into two. After a moment’s hesitation the bigger piece split again. Then the smaller piece, as if on reflection, also split.
She laughed. She had two children with her first husband, she said, and although recently remarried she had no plans for more children. The rest of the audience participating in this enactment all oooh-ed and smirked knowingly, certain that the decorated treat had indicated a different future.
I picked up my gran’s copy of The Scots Kitchen later that evening and went back over what I thought were familiar passages…
The Infar-Cake or Dreaming-Bread. A decorated cake of shortbread is still the national bride’s cake of rural Scotland. The breaking of the Infar-cake over the head of the bride, on the threshold of her new home, is a very ancient custom, having its origins in the Roman rite of confarratio… Portions were distributed to young men and maidens ‘to dream on’.
There had been no mention of predicting marriages or children. I went back over my own notes from the evening workshop in which the dreaming bread ritual had been enacted. Sure enough, the future foretelling elements had been dreamt up, so to speak, by the audience as the shortbread had been shared. I smiled internally – intangible heritage, oral storytelling and folklore reminiscence is fluid in nature, ever changing, determined in part by the folk practicing its dark arts and listening to its loose design.
My own copy of McNeill’s The Scots Kitchen was handed on to me by my gran, my mum’s mum. She in turn had been given it by her mother-in-law when she had married my grandfather, Scottish sculptor Richard Ross Robertson. By the time I inherited it, it already had a magical quality. Faded leather, holding aromas of vanilla and butter, published by Blackie and Son in 1929, this edition, over the course of ninety years, had had its recipes annotated by three generations of women: recipes had been adapted, notes added on the thick, soft margins, successful additional ingredients recorded, brambles suggested for adding sweetness to vitamin C-rich rowanberry jam, and ginger cakes sized up for family gatherings. I had used it myself, conjuring up its recipe for nettle broth for parties whilst I was studying herbal medicine and helping my daughter bake her first oatcakes for a Burns Night party at nursery.
Over the next two years my relationship with The Scots Kitchen developed. It was a constant companion as I toured schools, museums and gardens as a herbal storyteller. I shared recipes for fate-revealing bannocks at Hallowe’en with folk at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, brewed Birks wine with Wild Food Festival workshop participants, took barley water flavours to the Scottish diaspora in upstate New York. Each recipe invited in layers of reminiscence and family lore from participants – it felt like they were adding their own traditions, stories and recipe tweaks to the incredible folkloric cultural culinary foundation left by McNeill.
I met American families who had the same edition of the book, a treasured item on the kitchen shelves, offering a thread of connection to one strand of a complex heritage, that was still turned to at Christmas and New Year for homely recipes for Yuletime festive ale and black bun. We talked about the provenance of our copies of the book – it was always handed on…
The notes of previous generations now gave me permission to add my own. Carefully expressed in very best handwriting, ink pen chosen to better resemble the more gentle hand of yesteryear, I added the discoveries from my explorations of storytelling and folklore, imagining that in some way McNeill’s original intention – to share recipes and attached lore at a pivotal point as traditional ways were being lost – might be best served by allowing it to continually grow and organically develop, inviting in new sharings and future reflections.
It had, since my gran’s death, not only informed elements of my own cooking and offered time-honoured tastes to grown-ups attending workshops, but also accompanied me into schools, where I had invited children to muse on their own favourite vegetables. Broccoli, tomatoes and sweetcorn were regularly mentioned, and I would pause for comic effect, point out tomatoes are fruit and corn a grain, then share the ‘Vegetables’ chapter from the 1929 book. Not a stem of broccoli in sight.
The children would then hear about the tattie howking holidays and learn about tumshie lanterns, unsure as I revoked the modern adoption of the pumpkin and shared the Hallowe’en use of the turnip, which was featured in McNeill’s recipe for:
Turnip Purry
(Stewed turnips, Meg Dods’s recipe) turnips, fresh butter, white pepper, salt and ginger. Pare off all that would be hard, woody and stringy when boiled. Boil them in plenty of water for from three quarters of an hour to nearly two hours according to age and size…
She adds that the Cleikum club, the dining and literary club started by Walter Scott in 1798 in Peebles, which was hosted by Meg Dods (of recipe fame), specifically chose yellow, juicy turnips and seasoned the dish with ginger, as according to Dods it ‘corrects the flatulent properties of this esculent’. The audience would then listen as I shared a traditional folktale about neepy heid lanterns and explained the humble turnip’s nutritious benefits and immune system restorative potential when used in a seventeenth-century cough linctus recipe.
The more I worked with The Scots Kitchen the more each chapter became filled with family memories and folklore sharing. Whilst working with a group in a sheltered housing complex in Aberdeen, I was joined by a resident, a mother in her late eighties whose daughter also came along. When I shared my own memories of my gran’s book and reflected on the value of simple things handed on, whether a family tradition or a treasured recipe book, the woman nodded and mentioned her own copy, again wreathed in notes from generations passed. Her daughter affirmed that these ‘kitchen table memories’, handed-on cookery books and cooking tips from loved ones, were truly worth their weight in gold. It felt like Florence Marian McNeill had curated and created a book that had become an iconic, cultural bequest at a personal family level, the recipes conjuring flavours and intimate memories of loved ones and happy occasions.
After The Scots Kitchen, Florence Marian McNeill’s work continued to chronicle Scottish food and the attached traditions and literature. The Silver Bough (1957–68) cites traditions which flesh out our relationship with food and share its impact on our culture, empowering cooking processes with intention and purpose beyond the basic need to refuel – something that we are increasingly overlooking as we drive our desire for ‘functional food’. Looking back on her upbringing in Orkney, McNeill mentions how the skeely wife goes to the shore with a pail and waits as nine waves roll in. As the last passes, she takes three gowpens of water (that which can be held in cupped hands) and then carries them home in her pail. The water is then added to the churn along with the milk to ensure a good supply of butter.
In ‘An Orkney Childhood’, written for The Scottish Companion in 1955, she recounts her own childhood memories of food:
To feed his ever-growing family, my father farmed twenty acres that grew oats for the porridge-pot and the girdle and vegetables for the kail-pot; and he kept a few beasts and birds that supplied us with milk and butter and eggs, as well as wool for blankets and tweeds.
I feel something of this close family connection to food and its role in our lives carries through her books and into the world of the people who love them, she somehow created a meaningful legacy that continues to carry the importance of food.
Two years later the woman from the Dreaming Bread workshop and I passed each other again, strangely enough on Ellersley Road in Murrayfield, where sixty years earlier McNeill and her friend Helen Cruikshank – fellow political activist, supporter of the Scottish Women’s Suffrage movement, and poet – had enjoyed a sherry in the sunshine as they co-hosted a celebratory luncheon for the publication of Cruikshank’s poetry collection Ponnage Pool and McNeill’s four-part study of Scottish folklore The Silver Bough. Bizarrely, I was on my way back from the National Library of Scotland, where I had been reading McNeill’s diaries, tiny leather-bound pocket editions gifted free by a local dairy and filled with simple one-line observations. Notes on lunch dates, financial trials and tribulations, award ceremonies for her Scottish renaissance writer cohorts etched across the pages, alongside the dairy’s printed notes on the value of milk and cream and recipe ideas. I had been in search of insights into her personality for a piece I was creating for a First World War Armistice Day centenary project.
The dreaming bread woman was pushing twins in a pushchair and she just laughed as she saw me approach. ‘Do you remember that shortbread?’ she asked, and gestured towards the twins…. We passed a few moments musing on the ability of folklore to hold truths and reveal aspects of the human condition, and how accurate this can become when food is involved, food which is so integral to our traditions, our familial groupings, to culture, to notions of self. I didn’t mention that there had been no mention of the dreaming bread’s predictions in The Scots Kitchen – it seemed more poetic to leave the possibility there. I felt that its creation by the audience gave the prophecy credence; it had been infused into the shortbread in part due to a secretly held awareness coming from the participant. The memory, the story, was too sweet to shatter.
I felt that Florence would have approved. Her pragmatic recount of folklore-embellished recipes and traditions in hospitality, alongside poetic notes of memorable meals from literature, facilitates the sharing of traditional Scottish fare to become part of the fabric of our memories and festivities, a cultural waymarker to be shared and handed on.
(c) The Bottle Imp