in the garden
By the time we were served the Garden Plate, my partner and I were already giddy from the view of Old Castle Lachlan from our bothy room, the complimentary rhubarb schnapps sat next to the record player, the walk to the castle where house martins swooped above our heads through the empty stone dwelling, the glasses of brioche-rich champagne and amuse-bouche (where we had our first ever oysters, but not our last!), and the pet-nat cider made in Fife that had been fermented in sherry butts. I was still in awe that a plastic bench could be left on the wooden walkway by the river and remain unvandalized, and that such delicate antique stemmed glasses had been left for the schnapps with full trust they would remain. We had never before been in a place where every single object, architectural feature, and edible element was designed for pleasure and happiness, rather than economy or theft-prevention. Everything, from the food to the bench cushions to the flowers in their bud vases, was a love letter to small-scale Scottish growers, farmers, makers, and the land itself.
Including and most especially the Garden Plate, whose elements were grown in the nearby garden of Kate Glasgow and explained to us gently: two each of sweet cherry tomatoes, frilly chrysanthemum leaves, spicy radish seed pods, tiny fresh knobbly cucumbers the size of two peas put together, round mallow leaves, pink-green tips of goosefoot, perfect French beans that were tender and tasted somehow grilled, a leaf each of cavolo nero and a ragged-form of kale, with a dollop of bread miso for dipping. They were all laid on one plate, individually, barely touching one another, and we were encouraged to use our hands. (Eager in my excitement, I asked if the cavolo nero variety was “Dazzling Blue”, and when our lovely waiter didn’t know, I saw myself living the beginning of that Portlandia sketch with the heritage-breed chicken called Colin.)
The Garden Plate stayed on my mind as we enjoyed trout and tomato broth, then the beefsteak tomato wrapped in golden pastry with Cora Linn cheese sauce, and I heard other tables around me being introduced to their own Garden Plates. I was conscious, as I heard the elements described, that my experience with the Garden Plate was somewhat unusual: I had come to it with the joy of familiarity, excited to see friendly forms (recognisable to me from own garden and others’) arranged so beautifully, delighted by the playful scale of such small cucumbers and the beauty of mallow leaves. We ate each element individually, with deep attention to the complexity of their flavours and the dynamism of their texture, and I had time to think about the things I knew: as I ate the kales, I thought about the social history of kale and kailyards in Scotland that I’ve written about before; as I ate the goosefoot, I thought about how seeds of goosefoot (or fat hen) have been found in Iron Age crannog remains and the medieval drain of Paisley Abbey. Each new taste simply led to me to greater love and familiarity in my pre-existing relationship with these plants, and I felt myself moved.
But for other diners, perhaps, the thrill of unfamiliarity with some of these plants and their raw forms might have been the point. The luxury of Inver, this magical place on the shores of Loch Fyne, comes from the novelty of experiencing things grown and made and cooked at such a small-scale, in direct contrast to the impersonal and industrial-largeness of our day-to-day lives. Everything was made or grown or foraged “just up the road”, and each successional dish formed a parade of celebration for Scottish materials, produce, traditions: not the stereotyped triumvirate of venison, salmon, and whisky, but an honest and fervent blend of hyper-local ingredients, heritage recipes, and old-and-new methods of preservation, fermentation, and growing, dressed in modern clothes for modern people.
The great injustice of it all, of course, is that such a hyper-local food experience should be an unfamiliar or rare luxury for modern-day Scots. This is the argument poetically made by Inver’s chef Pam Brunton in her new book, Between Two Waters: Heritage, Landscape, and the Modern Cook. Blending her own familial history with the land of Scotland and British-colonised places like Zimbabwe, whilst deftly outlining the philosophical and political histories that have shaped our current food systems, Brunton explores what constitutes normal Scottish food versus modern Scottish food and the vital importance of bringing the former closer to the latter. Normal Scottish food, defined in a funny but exasperating opening anecdote about a caller to the restaurant when it was new, being things like “fish and chips, steak pie, lasagne”; food that, while it reflects the cross-cultural culinary influences of British colonial violence as well as human migration to Scotland, is made and farmed and fished at unsustainable industrial scales within systems that are almost entirely opaque to consumers, obscuring our rich pre-industrial relationships with food and land. In contrast, her version of modern Scottish food takes shape at a more local-scale, a scale that can be measured by human hands and time rather than money made and environments ravaged, mindfully moulded at the intersections of heritage, landscape, and decolonisation.
I have so much to say about this beautiful book, which has written plainly and deeply things I have been thinking and feeling for years about Scottish food and (my least favourite phrase) it’s “national larder”. Like the Garden Plate, I came to it with familiarity, intimate with its subject matter, but have been led by its limber prose and deep care into greater love and knowledge for this place, its history, and its peoples. Reading Between Two Waters so soon after having visited Inver, and in the midst of writing my own book that weaves the history of one place with the history of Scotland as a whole, I am frankly very moved. Moved by the joy and relief of being able to gesture to this one source to explain everything when I (a naturalised American immigrant) find myself passionately explaining pre-industrial Scottish food to baffled Scottish people. Moved by spending time in the world of someone who is also constantly thinking about the connections between then and now, who finds joy and meaning in being grounded in that way. (And who also finds any opportunity to quote the wonderful Alexander Fenton.) Moved by the constant awareness of what we have lost in the course of colonisation and industrialisation, and by the preservation of techniques and land management that hold onto to a little of what we once had more of. But most of all, moved by the belief that the hyper-local, deeply respectful, and warmly generous relationships with land, food production, and each other that are experienced at Inver can be once again cultivated in modern Scottish society, for all modern Scottish people, eating modern Scottish food.
(P.S. My partner came home from work last week and proudly announced, “It was Dazzling Blue kale!”, having realised, in the course of conversation, that a coworker at the hospital is partner to Kate Glasgow, the gardener who supplied Inver with the contents of our Garden Plate.)
in the past
I had every good intention of writing something about scale in gardens versus agriculture, and the failure of much archaeology to account for domestic gardens in pre-historic landscapes. But to be completely honest with you, I went down a rabbit hole of newspaper archival research that irresponsibly and joyfully ate up my writing time. In the process, I found references to “Roy’s Garden” on my old street in Battlefield, Cartvale Road. It took a weird amount of digging to finally find this 1965 article about the man himself, Roy Johnston, who ran a corner shop at the now-demolished 141 Cartvale Road and built a garden alongside.
His plot, filled with benches for elderly neighbours to sit and chat with one another, was a response to other similar places having been built over in the area. Roy died a year after the article was published, on July 20, 1966; if I’ve found the right death record on Scotland’s People, he was a mere 46 years old. According to other articles, he had come back from the war disabled. The maintenance of his garden was taken over by the Glasgow Tree Lovers’ Society, and they record having planted the trees currently at the wee site in the 1980s. But it’s certainly not a maintained or publicly accessible garden anymore; just a side garden in front of a bin shelter. There is evidence of it once having been cared for in the many pots that do still sometimes flower, a small trellis against the brick wall, a large lavender that has grown through the fence. But no benches, no welcome.
I was already quite fond of this patch for its lavender and (before it was all removed) the gorgeous ivy that climbed over the bin shelter. In front of its fence was where I found the most self-seeded kale escapees from my old garden the spring after it was so unfairly destroyed. I am quite overwhelmed now by the bittersweet discovery of what this place used to be, and by knowing my own small garden was part of a larger history of Cartvale gardens. But I am frankly haunted that Roy’s garden (and the memory of him) should have faded so drastically in the last 58 years; an inevitably, I know, that ordinary people’s impact on urban environments are held lightly and swiftly repurposed, built over. But a tragedy nonetheless that such a welcoming garden has been lost and its gardener forgotten by the neighbourhood.
Oh my gosh, the garden plate! I will be dreaming of this all week.... and researching bread miso! My partner and I went to Inver when we got engaged and, despite the fact I can only remember a couple of the dishes clearly, I still count it as one of my most memorable meals because of how it made me feel. So much respect was given to every single ingredient and it was created and served with such passion, love and interest. A truly special place! Going to have to get my hands on that book now too.