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Scottish cuisine encompasses the cooking styles, traditions and recipes associated with Scotland. It has distinctive attributes and recipes of its own, but also shares much with British and wider European cuisine as a result of local, regional, and continental influences—both ancient and modern. Scotland’s natural larder of vegetables, fruit, oats, fish and other seafood, dairy products and game is the chief factor in traditional Scottish cooking, with a high reliance on simplicity, without the use of rare, and historically expensive, spices found abroad. Scotland, with its temperate climate and abundance of indigenous game species, has provided food for its inhabitants for millennia. The wealth of seafood available on and off the coasts provided the earliest settlers with sustenance.
Agriculture was introduced, and primitive oats quickly became the staple. From the journeyman down to the lowest cottar, meat was an expensive commodity, and would be consumed rarely. For the lower echelons of mediaeval Scots, it was the products of their animals rather than the beasts themselves which provided nourishment. This is evident today in traditional Scots fare, with its emphasis on dairy produce. Scotland was a feudal state for the greater part of the second millennium. This put certain restrictions on what one was allowed to hunt, therefore to eat.
Before Sir Walter Raleigh’s introduction of the potato to the British Isles, the Scots’ main source of carbohydrate was bread made from oats or barley. Wheat was generally difficult to grow because of the damp climate. The mobile nature of Scots society required food that should not spoil quickly. During the Early Modern period, French cuisine played a role in Scottish cookery due to cultural exchanges brought about by the “Auld Alliance”.
With the growth of sporting estates and the advent of land enclosure in the 18th century, harvesting Scotland’s larder became an industry. English menus shortly after the Glorious Twelfth. These were published posthumously in 1909 as The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie. The availability of certain foodstuffs in Scotland, in common with the other parts of the United Kingdom, suffered during the 20th century. Rationing during the two World Wars, as well as large-scale industrial agriculture, limited the diversity of food available to the public.
Imports from the British Empire and beyond did, however, introduce new foods to the Scottish public. During the 19th and 20th centuries there was large-scale immigration to Scotland from Italy, and later from the Middle East, India, and Pakistan. These cultures have influenced Scots cooking dramatically. The Italians reintroduced the standard of fresh produce, and the later comers introduced spice.
These dishes and foods are traditional to or originate in Scotland. Fish and chips—fried fish in crispy batter, served with chips. Blaeberries—not identical to US blueberries, cf. Burnt cream, also known as Crème brûlée or Trinity cream. In recent years Haggis pakoras have become popular in Indian restaurants.