Aberdeen Angus Beef: The Black Cattle That Conquered the World

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The breed's development and herd book history are well documented by the breed society. Labelling rules for "Angus beef" differ by country and scheme. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) supplies the wider context of British cattle breeding and Scottish beef cookery; it dates from 2014 and is used here as a reference for history, not for current labelling or trade figures.

Doddies and hummlies

established North-east Scotland had native hornless black cattle, known locally as "doddies" in Aberdeenshire and "hummlies" in Angus. In the early nineteenth century, breeders began to improve and standardise them.

established Landrace into breed. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014), in Laura Mason's entry on cattle, draws a useful distinction. A landrace is a local stock that has adapted over centuries to its own conditions. A breed is bred under control and documented in a herd book. The doddies and hummlies were a landrace; the Polled Herd Book of 1862 made them a breed. The Highland went the same way later, with its herd book in 1885. The Companion also suggests, more cautiously, that some of Britain's small, sturdy black cattle may descend from the stock of the first farmers, with a little blood of the wild aurochs. That is a shared suggestion, not a demonstrated line of descent.

established The wider improvement. The Angus was one product of a British movement. The Companion explains that beef quality rose greatly between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries thanks to fodder crops such as turnips and clover, which kept animals fed through the winter, and to selective breeding by gentlemen farmers such as Robert Bakewell of Dishley. By the end of the eighteenth century the improved Shorthorn led the field; a Beef Shorthorn bull could fetch 1,000 guineas when a labourer earned under £1 a week. The Angus breeders of the north-east were working in that market; a century later McNeill still found Shorthorns and Angus side by side at the Perth bull sales.

established Droving before breeding. The Companion notes that cattle droving to lowland England from Wales and the north of England was established by the thirteenth century, while droving from Scotland came later and lasted until the railways. The black cattle walked south from the Highlands and Galloway were lean store beasts for English graziers to fatten. The Angus belongs to the next stage, when Scottish farmers fattened and finished their own cattle and the railway carried the beef, or the bulls, to market. The droving trade itself is covered on the Industry card "Cattle & the Beef Trade".

Before the breed: the mart

established For most Scots, beef was once a winter food, salted rather than fresh. The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929; second edition 1963), quotes Edmund Burt's Letters from the North of Scotland (1730): among the poorer classes "Beef is eaten only at Martinmas, when a Mart or Ox is killed". Burt found the small Highland beef "very sweet and succulent" when fresh, but too lean to keep well in salt. The mart was the beast killed and salted at Martinmas (11 November), when fodder ran short. McNeill thought the word was probably simply Gaelic mart, a cow, rather than a derivation from St Martin, as the lexicographer John Jamieson had suggested. Her suggestion that the killing was "originally sacrificial" in honour of St Martin is her own speculation and should be treated as traditional.

established Salt beef was a store as well as a food. McNeill describes the sixteenth-century kitchen of the Manse of Stobo in Glasgow, whose inventory lists "eight marts, or salted carcases of beef", and quotes Martin Martin (1703) on the islanders who salted their beef in a cow's hide and sent it through Glasgow to the Indies, from cattle fattened in winter on seaweed. Haggis, black and white puddings and smoked beef sausages were all made at the killing of the mart.

established The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), explains why fresh beef was so seasonal. Before turnips and sown grass, Scottish cattle had almost nothing to eat in winter. The best beasts were chosen as marts and killed at Martinmas; the rest were kept through the winter on straw and lucky to survive until spring, when some were so weak they had to be lifted out to pasture. Cows calved only every second year, and plough oxen were so puny that eight to twelve were needed for the heavy Scots plough. John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, recalling the eighteenth century, wrote that "Beef was seldom fit for killing in open pastures till October or November, and even then was hardly to be got in the market in small pieces." In 1729 the Jacobite improver William Mackintosh of Borlum complained that in many Scottish towns for almost half the year there was "no Beef nor Mutton to be seen in their Shambles", and what there was looked "liker Carrion than Meat". Hope also corrects the English traveller Fynes Moryson, who claimed in 1598 that Scots ate beef without salting it: beasts were killed in November for pickling, she notes, and surplus young stock was eaten fresh as veal.

established The change came with the turnip. Hope dates the first Scottish turnip fields to Improvers such as John Cockburn of Ormiston and the Earl of Rothes from about 1716, the first convincing demonstration of fattening cattle on turnips to about 1754, and the general adoption of turnip husbandry to the 1830s. By 1800, she reports, Scottish cattle on average weighed twice what they had a century earlier. Aberdeenshire soils, dressed with bone meal, proved especially good for turnips, and fattening beef cattle became the county's chief farming business. "Without turnips," she writes, Aberdeen Angus beef "would not be in butchers' shops today".

From the croft to the sale ring

established McNeill, writing in the 1960s, records how far things had changed: the main emphasis was now on quality beef, and "Shorthorns of the beef type and the Aberdeen-Angus black cattle" drew buyers from all over the world to the Perth bull sales. She quotes the Scots poet and scholar Douglas Young in The Scotsman (8 April 1961), who said that the progeny of the north-east "doddies" now commanded five-figure prices in the Americas and joked that the young bulls learned Spanish "almost in the byre", a nod to the Argentine trade. She also records a cousin's surprise, looking back on a Banffshire manse childhood, that the rough working farmers of the minister's congregation had been producing some of the finest beef in the world for Smithfield.

shared McNeill claims that the "roast beef of old England" at its best was Scots beef, which always fetched a higher price in the London market. Scottish cattle did command premium prices in London, but "always" is her patriotic generalisation, not a measured finding.

established McNeill also notes the Galloway, a second black, hornless breed of the Southern Uplands, and the hardier Highland cattle. Her sample bill of fare for a modern Burns Supper includes "Roastit Sirloin o' Aberdeen-Angus Beef".

Old Scottish cuts

established Scottish butchers once divided the carcass differently from English ones. McNeill reprints Mrs Dalgairns's list (1829) of the Scottish cuts of beef: the middle sirloin, the hook-bone, the round, the hough, the spare rib, the flank, the fore saye, the breast and nine-holes, the lair, the neck and sticking-piece, the knap, and the cheek and head. Hough, for the shin, is still everyday Scottish usage.

Beef in the Scottish kitchen

established Potted hough. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) defines hough as a northern English and Scottish word for the hock or shin, and calls potted hough a Scottish delicacy that is still highly popular. The shin is broken up and stewed for hours, the meat is picked from the bones and set in its own reduced stock until firm. The Companion quotes Dorothy Hartley's Food in England (1954), who had the recipe from a Scotswoman, the mother of four champion blacksmiths, whose instructions begin: "Take a hough and bash it well with an axe." It also notes that Scottish butchers' potted head, made from a calf's or cow's head, is now more likely to be potted hough under another name.

shared Skink. The Companion gives skink as another Scots word for the hough, from a Germanic word for ham or shank, and suggests that the archetypal skink was a soup of shin of beef, which fishing towns such as Cullen adapted into the smoked-haddock soup Cullen skink. The derivation is standard; the idea that the fish soup was adapted from the beef one is the Companion's inference.

established Collops and bridies. A collop is a slice of meat, and Scotch collops were a well-known dish from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the Companion says, though the way of making them changed over time; Hannah Glasse gives recipes. Annette Hope prints a Scottish recipe of 1712 from Lady Castlehill's manuscript receipt book in Glasgow's Mitchell Library, "To make Scotch Collops, either Beef, Veal, or Mutton": the meat sliced thin, beaten tender, fried in its own gravy and served with butter, vinegar, verjuice, lemon and dissolved anchovies, in a dish rubbed with garlic. Meg Dods ranked collops as a national dish in 1826. The Forfar bridie is the Companion's Scottish example of the pasty: rump steak cut small, with suet and chopped onion, in shortcrust pastry, looking like a Cornish pasty laid on its side. It notes that J. M. Barrie mentions bridies in Sentimental Tommy, and that the origin of the name is unknown: one legend credits a seller called Maggie Bridie of Glamis, while Catherine Brown suggests the bridie was eaten at the "bride's meal", the wedding feast. Both explanations are traditional.

established A whole ox for the winter. Wealthier households could still live on a single beast. Hope quotes Lord Cockburn's Memorials of His Time on Miss Menie Trotter of Mortonhall, who "generally sacrificed an ox to hospitality every autumn" and ate it "regularly from nose to tail", on Sundays only, so that it lasted half the winter; near the end she urged a neighbour to dine because "we're terrible near the tail noo". The Countess of Southesk's Edinburgh bill of 1671 shows the everyday form of beef in a grand household: "boylled beiff and kabishe" six times in six weeks, and roast beef very rarely.

established Grass and grain. The Companion records that grass-fed beef is generally thought to have the best flavour, though many cattle are finished intensively on grain, as in the cattle lots of North America. It contrasts the free-range ranch with the enclosed system of Britain and other northern countries, where cattle graze fields in summer and are housed and often fed concentrates in winter.

The founders

established Hugh Watson of Keillor, Angus, began selecting the best black polled cattle in 1808 and is often called the founder of the breed. William McCombie of Tillyfour, Aberdeenshire, built on Watson's work from the 1820s onward, winning prizes at shows in Britain and France and promoting the breed. Sir George Macpherson Grant of Ballindalloch also developed an influential herd.

shared Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), says the first Aberdeen Angus cattle sent to Smithfield in 1829 "created a sensation", and calls William McCombie "the first breeder". The 1829 date fits Watson's early showing of Keillor cattle in London, but crediting McCombie as first breeder does not fit the breed society's account, which puts Watson's work two decades earlier. Hope's wider point is better supported: she saw the Scottish Shorthorn and the Aberdeen Angus as the joint achievement of a group of north-east farmers, and noted that by the 1980s "Scotch beef" on a restaurant menu was usually said to come from an Aberdeen Angus animal, whether or not it did.

Herd book and society

established The Polled Herd Book, recording pedigrees, was published in 1862, and the Aberdeen-Angus Cattle Society was founded in 1879. The breed won fame at shows such as the Smithfield Club and the Paris Exhibition of 1878.

Around the world

established George Grant, a Scot, brought Angus bulls to Kansas in 1873, and the breed spread across the United States, where it became the dominant beef breed. Angus cattle were exported to Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, and there are now many times more Angus cattle abroad than in Scotland.

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) puts this in perspective. British bulls, it says, were among Britain's most important exports, and the beef breeds whose genes are most widely spread are four British ones: the Beef Shorthorn, the Hereford, the Aberdeen Angus and the Devon, all influential since the nineteenth century. Only after the Second World War did lean continental breeds, the former draught or "traction" breeds such as the Charolais, Limousin and Simmental, become fashionable. Most calves born in Britain are now crosses of native and continental breeds.

What "Angus" means

shared In the United States, some "Angus beef" programmes require cattle to be at least predominantly black-hided and meet quality standards, rather than to be pure Aberdeen Angus. In Scotland, Scotch Beef has PGI status, covering cattle born, reared and slaughtered in Scotland, regardless of breed.

BSE and traceability

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) summarises the crisis that reshaped the British beef trade. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow disease") came to light in Britain in the mid-1980s. The recycling of dead sheep and cattle into animal feed, stopped in Britain in 1988, is widely seen as a prime cause. Millions of animals were destroyed, export markets closed, and traceability rules and restrictions on the age of slaughtered cattle followed. The foot and mouth outbreak of 2001 reinforced the same lessons. Breed and origin labels, including "Angus" and "Scotch", carry more weight with buyers partly because of this history.

• Aberdeen Angus cattle are naturally hornless.
• Local names for the old cattle were "doddies" and "hummlies".
• The breed's herd book began in 1862.
• Angus bulls reached Kansas in 1873.
• There are many more Angus cattle abroad than in Scotland.
• "Doddie" is a Scots word for a hornless cow.
• In 1730 Edmund Burt wrote that poorer Scots ate beef only at Martinmas, when the winter mart was killed.
• A Scottish butcher's "hough" is the shin of beef.
• One Scottish recipe for potted hough, recorded by Dorothy Hartley, begins by telling the cook to break up the shin with an axe.
• The Highland breed did not get its herd book until 1885, 23 years after the Angus.
• Most calves born in Britain today are crosses of native and continental breeds.

• Myth: "Angus beef" on a foreign menu comes from Scotland. Labels abroad, especially in the US, often require only that cattle be predominantly black-hided or of Angus descent, not purebred Scottish stock. In Scotland, Scotch Beef has PGI status for cattle born, reared and slaughtered there, regardless of breed.
• Disputed: Whether the Angus descends from prehistoric cattle. The Companion suggests, cautiously, that some of Britain's small, sturdy black cattle may descend from the stock of the first farmers, with a little blood of the wild aurochs. That is a suggestion, not a demonstrated line of descent.
• Disputed: Where the name "bridie" comes from. One legend credits a seller called Maggie Bridie of Glamis, while Catherine Brown suggests the bridie was eaten at the "bride's meal", the wedding feast. The origin of the name is unknown.
• Disputed: Who created the breed. Hugh Watson of Keillor began selecting black polled cattle in 1808 and is often called the founder, and William McCombie of Tillyfour built on his work from the 1820s. Annette Hope calls McCombie "the first breeder", which does not fit the breed society's account. Her wider point stands that the Angus was the joint achievement of a group of north-east farmers.
• Disputed: Why the mart was killed at Martinmas. McNeill's suggestion that the killing was "originally sacrificial" in honour of St Martin is her own speculation.