Hardship cooking

In the second excerpt from "Bittersweet," Matt McAllester explains cooking in rural Scotland.

Matt McAllester May 8, 2009 11:43Updated May 30, 2010 11:54

(Courtesy of Matt McAllester)

PORT AN DROIGHIONN, Scotland — There is no need for Elizabeth David’s or anyone else’s cookbooks in the kitchen at Port an Droighionn, the location of our vacation home. The cooking there is very basic.

My mother shares some of the challenges faced by British women after World War II: The west coast in the early 1970s is not a place where garlic and olive oil are to be easily found. So tins of Spam, baked beans, tomatoes, corn, peas, haricot beans and any other kind of meat and vegetables my parents can ﬁnd in the supermarket two hours’ drive away mount up on the shelves.

Anything in a can or a tin or a jar, or anything dried and nonperishable, is stockpiled. Anything fresh is cooked and eaten fast.

My mother is limited to two gas rings fueled by an orange canister that leans against the house outside the kitchen and an outdoor barbecue that my father built from stones and a metal grill. And she has the Esse.

With no electricity, a solid-fuel stove is the only option. The hulking white-painted metal Esse — a pygmy Aga, really — squats along a wall in the kitchen, hungry for coal and spewing smoke out of a chimney and, often, into the house. Coal is the dirtiest fuel, and once a week my father spends two hours on his knees, raking and gouging, cleaning the innards of the Esse. My sister and I keep out of the way when it is cleaning day.

The Esse has two settings: incredibly hot and so tepid it may as well be off. On the “incredibly hot” setting of the Esse, my mother tries out a traditional Scottish recipe that requires just such a ﬂat, hot metal surface as the “girdle” — the Scots dialect name for griddle — on the top of the Esse. Drop scones are little pancakes made from a batter of self-rising ﬂour, golden syrup, salt, milk or buttermilk, sugar and eggs. She stands in the warmth of the kitchen and mixes the ingredients in a ceramic bowl until it forms a light-yellow batter. The coal in the Esse has made the girdle so hot that a drop of water sizzles into nothing in a panicked instant.

She lightly butters the girdle and immediately starts to drop the batter onto the surface from a tablespoon. The drop scones form in rounds, a dozen of them ﬁtting on the girdle at once. She watches the batter on the upper side begin to bubble slightly and then she ﬂips them over. The sweet warm smell ﬁlls the kitchen. When the drop scones are done, she piles them up on a plate, in a tea towel, and covers the pile to keep them warm.

She reaches for the brass bell with the black handle that sits always on a side table in the kitchen, walks outside and onto the slight hill behind the house, where the single, weather-beaten hawthorn tree clings on against the Atlantic winds. She rings the bell, and the noise carries across the hills and the bog to wherever we are. We know that there must be something good on the kitchen table.

We spoon honey and jam onto the warm drop scones and eat dozens, until we can eat no more.