Brose and Sowans: The Everyday Oat Dishes of Old Scotland

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 methods and vocabulary are well recorded. The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue and the Scottish National Dictionary date the words and their compounds, F. Marian McNeill's The Scots Kitchen (1929) collects recipes and local names from informants who still made the dishes, and The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) summarises them. What is weak is chronology. The origin of the word brose is unknown, claims that sowans is "ancient" or "Celtic" rest on the Gaelic name rather than on early descriptions, and the decline of both dishes was gradual and is poorly measured.

Brose: the simplest dish

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) calls brose "one of the most basic words in the vocabulary of Scottish cooks". Its basic form is a handful or two of oatmeal in a bowl with salt and a piece of butter, boiling water poured on and stirred roughly. McNeill specifies the shank of a horn spoon for the stirring, so that the meal forms knots, raw in the middle. It was supped with buttermilk ("soor dook") or sweet milk. The Companion makes the essential distinction: in brose the oatmeal is not cooked, while in porridge it is.

established The meal for brose was usually rough or medium oatmeal. The grading table that the Companion adapts from Catherine Brown's Scottish Cookery (1985) lists rough oatmeal for porridge or brose, and medium and fine for porridge, brose, skirlie and baking. Brose needed no pot and almost no fuel, only a kettle of boiling water. McNeill quotes a nineteenth-century Edinburgh memory of an apprentice who brought a handful of oatmeal to work and, with boiling water, a pinch of salt and a spoon, made it into brose for his dinner.

established Brose was eaten as a full meal, not a side dish. The Scottish National Dictionary records "brose" for a meal of which brose was the main part, and by extension for a person's living: an Aberdeenshire writer in 1909 warned someone that "yer brose is in danger". "Brose-time" meant mealtime; Scott uses it in Old Mortality (1816). An Aberdeenshire quotation of 1930 has a farm kitchen worker waiting "till I get the kettle bilet and the men broset", that is, until the men had been given their brose. The wooden bowls it was made in were brose-bickers or brose-caups, and "brose-caup" became a jocular name for a ploughman.

established Brose also stood for plain Scottish fare in general. McNeill quotes a Gaelic poem on the battle of Killiecrankie (1689) that mocks the beaten government troops as "men of kail and brose", and Burns has a wife tell her ageing husband "I've seen the day ye butter'd my brose". "Brose and Butter" was an old tune; McNeill pairs it with Burns's song "O gi'e my luv brose, brose".

established The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), shows where brose sat in the working day. In the eighteenth century, she writes, most ordinary people dined on kail or broth, rarely with meat in it; on the coasts and islands fish with brose or oatcakes made the main meal, and supper was sowans, porridge or more brose. On the big nineteenth-century farms the horsemen rose at about 5.30, fed their horses and then breakfasted: on porridge if they lived in the farmhouse or a married cottage, on brose, made with boiling water and eaten with a little salt and milk, if they looked after themselves in the bothy. Emigrants carried the habit to sea. Hope describes steerage families on nineteenth-century ships to Canada breakfasting on porridge and tea and supping on oatmeal brose with butter or treacle.

established Hope also records the coldest relative of brose, oatmeal simply stirred into cold water. Highlanders called it drammach, Orcadians glug or gluggo, and Shetlanders krul, where it came with a lump of butter. It was the food of drovers, shepherds and fugitives who could not light a fire; Stevenson's David Balfour in Kidnapped calls it "the chief stand-by of those who have taken to the heather".

The many kinds of brose

established Brose could be made with almost any hot liquid and any meal to hand. The Oxford Companion to Food, following McNeill, lists versions made with barley meal or peasemeal, and mixtures of meals. McNeill's catalogue is the fullest:

• Fat brose: oatmeal with the fatty broth of an ox head, cow heel or shin of beef. McNeill heads her recipe with the couplet "The Monks of Melrose made fat brose / On Fridays when they fasted".
• Kail brose: the same, with chopped kail boiled in the broth. The Oxford Companion to Food describes it as meat stock with kail poured over the oatmeal.
• Neep brose (Aberdeenshire): oatmeal stirred with the liquor from boiled swede.
• Mussel brose: the liquor of mussels or cockles poured over toasted oatmeal, a dish of the Forth shore celebrated by Robert Fergusson.
• Milk brose, called madlocks in Renfrewshire, made with hot milk instead of water.
• Blind brose or water brose, made without butter. Jamieson's dictionary explains that it has none of the "eyes" that melted butter makes on the surface.
• Aigar brose, of oatmeal or mashlum meal (equal parts oatmeal, bere meal and peasemeal). McNeill says beggars mixed the different meals they were given in one bag.
• Cadger's brose, like aigar brose, and pot-brose (Banffshire), handfuls of meal dashed into boiling milk and boiled briefly.
• Knotty Tam (Caithness), brose of beestings (the first milk after calving) and oatmeal.
• Wirtiglugs (Shetland), brose made with wort, the sweet infusion of malt used in brewing.

established The Companion adds green brose, made in spring with young nettle tops, spring onions or whatever was to hand. Hope adds beef brose, in which the oatmeal was well toasted before rich stock was poured over it. The Scottish National Dictionary records "birse brose", enriched with whisky instead of cream, which an Aberdeenshire contributor to The Scotsman in 1912 said had been common a generation before.

Pease brose and peasemeal

established Peasemeal is flour made from yellow field peas that are roasted, which darkens them and caramelises some of their sugar, and then ground fine. The Oxford Companion to Food describes it as brown-yellow, strong and earthy, and mainly produced and used in Scotland, where it had a long history as food for the common people, as brose and as bannocks. For pease brose, peasemeal was mixed with boiling water or stock and eaten at once, with butter and pepper or salt, or with sugar and raisins. The Scottish National Dictionary records "brose-meal" as heavily parched peasemeal made for exactly this purpose; an Edinburgh price list of 1861 quotes "Glasgow brosemeal".

established The Slow Food Foundation, which lists peasemeal in its Ark of Taste, says commercial production disappeared in the 1970s and was revived in the 1990s in the Highlands. The last known producer was Golspie Mill in Sutherland, a water-powered mill. The Northern Times reported in November 2022 that its millers had given up their tenancy and stopped trading at the end of October 2022.

Atholl brose

established Atholl brose borrows the name for a festive drink. Oatmeal is soaked in water, the creamy liquor is pressed out and the meal discarded, and the liquor is mixed with honey and whisky, with cream as an optional extra. McNeill notes that "the original Athole Brose" was simply meal and whisky. It has its own card.

traditional The legend that a rebel was captured in 1475 by filling his well with the mixture is told in many versions. The Oxford Companion to Food gives it to "the Duke of Atholl". That is an anachronism: there was no Duke of Atholl until 1703, and the Atholl title in 1475 was an earldom.

Kail and brose

established Kail, the hardy curly-leaved cabbage, was the everyday greenstuff of Scotland, and kail and brose went together. The Oxford Companion to Food notes that "kail" became a general Scots word for dinner, so that "kail bells" rang at dinner time whether or not kail was served, and that the Kailyard school of writers, J. M. Barrie among them, took its name from the kail-yard, the cottage vegetable patch. The Companion explains that kale was the ordinary green vegetable of European country people until headed cabbages were bred, and that it survived in Scotland because it grows where cabbages fail.

Brose at the feast

established McNeill quotes Sir Walter Scott: "In olden times, all, gentle and simple, had fat brose on Yule Day morning." She says that in the Lowlands the midwinter festival dish was "a rich brose, known as the Yule Brose", while in the Highlands it was a special kind of sowans. The Scottish National Dictionary records "brose-day", or "brosie", in Banffshire and Moray as Shrove Tuesday (Fastern's Een), when brose was a feast dish; one Aberdeenshire memory of about 1830 recalls cock-fighting on "Brosie". McNeill also describes a Shrovetide "matrimonial brose" with a ring hidden in it: whoever found the ring would be the first to marry.

Sowans: the method

established Sowans began at the mill. McNeill explains that in the days of local mills, the miller returned a bag of "sids" with the customer's meal: the inner husks of the oat grain, with some of the finest meal still clinging to them. These were put into a sowan-bowie, a narrow-mouthed wooden tub, or an earthenware jar, covered with twice their bulk of lukewarm water, pressed down until wet, and left in a warm place to sour. That took four or five days in hot weather and up to a fortnight in cold, a week on average.

established Then came what McNeill calls "the syein' o' the so'ons". The contents were poured through a fine sieve into a wide vessel and the sids squeezed by hand to wring out the goodness. The spent husks went to the hens. The liquid stood for two more days while the starch sank. The clear liquid on top, the swats, was poured off, and the sediment was the sowans. To serve, a gill of sediment per person was boiled with two gills of water and salt, stirred constantly, and cooked gently for ten minutes or more until thick and creamy. It was eaten like porridge, with cream or rich milk. The Oxford Companion to Food gives the same method and adds that it was sometimes served with butter.

established The result tasted slightly sour. McNeill admits that some found it unpalatable at first, but says it "grows on" one, and that it was thought an ideal food for invalids. She notes that sowans appears on the 1798 dietary list of the Dundee Royal Infirmary. Because the husks themselves are discarded, sowans is close to pure oat starch, with a smooth texture quite unlike porridge.

established Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), adds what each stage was used for. The swats made a mildly sour, refreshing drink. The washed sediment before cooking, raw sowens, could stand in for milk or beer when times were hard and was given as a cooling drink to fever patients; in Ross-shire raw sowens served with boiled sowens was called "sowens and sowens to them". Boiled sowens was eaten hot or cold, with milk, cream or even beer. She reports that people she asked described it variously as "a delicious dish" and "horrible".

Sowans in many forms

established Sowans could be kept for months by pouring off the swats and adding fresh water. It could also be dried. McNeill quotes the Gaelic singer Hugh Mackay, from Sutherland, whose uncle emigrated to America under sail with a supply of sowans dried until it could be "cut like cheese" and diced into cubes for the voyage. The Oxford Companion to Food cites the same practices.

established McNeill gathers local variants. In Skye a mixture of mill chaff (pronn) and coarse oatmeal, three to one, sometimes replaced the sids. In Caithness, quoting J. Horne's The County of Caithness, sowans cooked like porridge was "brownplate sowans", simply heated it was "gaun-thegither sowans", poured raw into boiling water with a little butter it was a lighter dish called duochrea, and the creamy deposit was made into sowan scones. Drinking-sowans was the sediment thinned to the consistency of milk. Hugh Mackay remembered it at Golspie as a winter substitute for milk with porridge and as a thirst-quencher in the hayfield. In Shetland, stooradrink was hot swats with oatmeal stirred in.

established Hope adds Northern Isles and emigrant uses. Dried sowens paste, rolled in raw oatmeal, made a "piece" for Orkney schoolchildren, and could be posted to relatives in the cities to be dissolved and boiled up as a taste of home. Sowens scones, a batter of raw sowens with oatmeal, milk and eggs dropped on the girdle, were popular in Orkney as well as Caithness. North-east families emigrating in the nineteenth century took lumps of dried sowens on board ship. In 1844 James Thomson, a baker's apprentice from Aberdeen working in Montreal, wrote home before Christmas that "I do not expect to get any sowens this year".

established Sowans was not only food for the poor. Hope notes that in Angus and Caithness it was a supper dish even in quite well-to-do families, and that in the late seventeenth century the Duke and Duchess of Hamilton sometimes had sowans for supper in place of bread and milk.

established Sowans had its own vocabulary. The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue records the word from 1551, in spellings such as sowannis, sowyndis and suins, and defines it as food made by fermenting oat husks or bran with some fine meal. It derives the word from Gaelic, citing Dwelly's definition of water impregnated with the juice of corn-seeds, with an Irish cognate meaning sap or juice. McNeill gives the Gaelic as sùghan, pronounced "soo-an", and calls the preparation before fermentation begins the serf, from Gaelic searbh, sour.

Sowans at the festivals

established Burns's "Halloween" (1786) ends with the company setting off home after "buttered so'ns wi' fragrant lunt", that is, steaming buttered sowans. McNeill explains that this was the traditional Hallowe'en dish in which the "matrimonial ring" was hidden. In Aberdeenshire and the north-east, Christmas Eve by the old calendar was Sowans Nicht, when friends gathered round a big bowl of sowans, usually laced with whisky. A note in the Annals of the Cleikum Club, printed with Meg Dods, says that in Aberdeen half-boiled sowens did duty on New Year's morning for the hot spiced het pint of Edinburgh and Glasgow. McNeill's calendar of festival dishes duly lists sowans at both Yule and Hogmanay.

established Hope, drawing on the ethnologist Alexander Fenton's study "Sowens in Scotland" (1974), dates Sowans Nicht in the north-east as late as 1905, with young people going from house to house to drink sowans and ale and eat bread and cheese. Christmas morning had earlier been "Sowin Morning", when, as an Aberdeenshire farmer put it, "many people delights in running about from Town to Town, and drinking sowins and getting fun and making a noise". A proverb she quotes was a hostess's hint to a lingering guest: "Our Sowins are ill sour'd, ill seil'd, ill salted, ill sodden, thin, an' little o' them. Ye may stay a' night, but ye may gang hame if ye like."

shared McNeill went further, linking the Highland Yule sowans to a Celtic midwinter gruel symbolising the cauldron of plenty. That is her interpretation; there is no early description of such a rite.

Sowans and its relatives

established Soured oat dishes were once common across upland Britain. The Oxford Companion to Food notes that Wales had a similar dish, sucan in the south-west and llymru in the north, a word anglicised as flummery. Flummery was popular in Cheshire and Lancashire and, as "wash brew", in the West Country. The Welsh folklife scholar Minwel Tibbott recorded that set llymru was served in a bowl of cold milk and, by tradition, swallowed without chewing. The Companion concludes that these oat preparations were largely forgotten in England long ago but "lingered on in Scotland".

established Gruel was the cooked, strained relative. The Oxford Companion to Food describes it as fine oatmeal soaked in water or milk, cooked and strained, smooth and jellying when cold, and the classic food of invalids. The word comes from French gruau, finely ground flour. The Companion notes that Scots regarded gruel as good for coughs and colds. McNeill reprints Meg Dods's recipe for gruel "in the Best Manner, as made in Scotland", sweetened with sugar, honey or wine. Crowdie, raw meal stirred into cold water or buttermilk, was the cold cousin of brose.

The Mafeking story

shared McNeill quotes the Orkney minister John Firth's Reminiscences of an Orkney Parish (1920) on the siege of Mafeking in the Boer War (1899–1900), where "a hardy Scot" is said to have kept the starving garrison alive on a dish made from the contents of the horses' feed-box, teaching his companions how to make something sustaining from bruised oats. McNeill places the story under sowans, and The Oxford Companion to Food repeats it as sowans. Firth's wording does not name the dish, and the story is second-hand.

Decline

shared Brose and sowans depended on home-ground meal from the local mill, on plentiful boiling water at a fire that was always lit, and on households with time to steep and strain. All three faded during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bread, tea, quick-cooking rolled oats (an American product of the 1870s, the Companion notes) and later breakfast cereals took their place, and the small mills that sent back bags of sids closed. McNeill was already recording sowans in the 1920s through older informants' memories. Brose lasted longer as a quick meal for farm workers, and a few cooks still make it, but no survey records when either dish ceased to be everyday food. Writing in 1987, Annette Hope judged that within fifty years sowans had become "unknown to all but researchers and the very old", which points to the 1930s onward as the decades of its final disappearance.

• Brose is not cooked: boiling liquid is poured over raw meal and stirred into knots.
• "Brose-caup", a brose bowl, was a nickname for a ploughman.
• In Banffshire and Moray, Shrove Tuesday was "Brose-day".
• Blind brose was brose without butter, so it had no "eyes" of fat on top.
• Sowans is made from the husks of oats, not the meal itself; the husks are thrown away.
• The liquid poured off sowans was called swats, and in Shetland it was made into a drink called stooradrink.
• A Sutherland emigrant took dried cubes of sowans on a three-month voyage to America.
• Burns's poem "Halloween" ends with buttered sowans.

• Myth: Brose is porridge cooked in a pot. In brose the meal is not cooked. Boiling water, milk or stock is poured over it and stirred into knots.
• Myth: Sowans is made from oatmeal. It is made from the inner husks of the oat ("sids"), with fine meal still clinging to them. The husks are soured in water and discarded, and the starch that settles out is cooked.
• Disputed: Where the word "brose" comes from. Its origin is unknown. Dictionaries record it from 1653 and note only a doubtful link with an older Scots word for broth.
• Myth: A Duke of Atholl captured his enemies in 1475 by filling their well with Atholl brose. There was no Duke of Atholl until 1703, and the title in 1475 was an earldom. The legend is told in many versions.
• Disputed: Yule sowans as a Celtic midwinter ritual. McNeill linked the Highland Yule sowans to a Celtic midwinter gruel symbolising the cauldron of plenty. That is her interpretation, and there is no early description of such a rite.
• Disputed: The Mafeking garrison saved by sowans. The story comes second-hand from John Firth's Reminiscences of an Orkney Parish (1920), whose wording does not name the dish.
• Myth: Peasemeal is still milled at Golspie. The mill, the last known producer, stopped trading at the end of October 2022.