Rumbledethumps and Clapshot: Scotland's Regional Potato Mashes

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 dishes themselves are well recorded by F. Marian McNeill's The Scots Kitchen (1929), Annette Hope's A Caledonian Feast (1987) and the Dictionaries of the Scots Language. The weak points are the names. "Rumbledethumps" has a popular explanation that fits the sound but has no documentary proof, and the Scots Language Centre notes several competing spellings and guesses. "Clapshot" has no agreed etymology at all. The early history of both dishes before the printed record is not known, and both are best treated as regional names for very old ways of using leftover vegetables.

Rumbledethumps

established The dish. McNeill's recipe in The Scots Kitchen (1929) is short. Use boiled potatoes and cabbage in roughly equal quantities, mash them together with butter, pepper and salt, and add chopped chives or cooked onions if liked. The mixture may be put in a pie dish, covered with grated cheese and browned in the oven. She marks it as a Borders dish.

established Annette Hope's recipe of 1987 uses a pound each of potatoes and white cabbage, spring cabbage or kale, boiled separately and drained, three ounces of butter or a quarter pint of cream, and the white parts of two leeks or an onion. The leeks are softened in the butter, the roughly mashed potato and cabbage are added and seasoned, and the whole is beaten with a wooden spoon for a minute. She recommends the leeks or onions and notes that cooks disagree about butter versus cream.

established The Ettrick Shepherd's recipe. The dish's most famous appearance is in the Noctes Ambrosianae, the imaginary tavern dialogues published in Blackwood's Magazine between 1822 and 1835, written chiefly by John Wilson under the name "Christopher North". McNeill quotes the passage. North asks "with all due solemnity" what rumbledethumps are. The Shepherd, a comic version of the poet James Hogg, tells him to take a peck of potatoes, put them in a large pot, and go at them with a beetle (a wooden masher), a dab of butter, the beetle again, then cabbage, more potato, beetle and butter, salt and black pepper, until cabbage and potato are mixed through. Taste, he says, and "you'll fin' them decent rumbledethumps".

traditional The name. The usual explanation, given by the intangible cultural heritage wiki run by Museums Galleries Scotland, is that the name comes from the noise in the kitchen as the potatoes and cabbage are "rumbled" and "thumped". The Shepherd's beetle certainly does the thumping. That is a reasonable reading, not a proven one.

shared Spellings and guesses. The Scots Language Centre notes many forms: rumbledethumps, rummle-thumps, rumilty-dumps, with "rumblethumps" becoming standard later. It reports one chef's guess that the name, like "clapshot", refers to the dish's effect on the digestion. That is a joke as much as an etymology.

established Decline and return. The Scots Language Centre records that the dish was fairly common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that the Scottish National Dictionary marked the word "obsolescent" by 1968, and that it has since reappeared in newspapers and on menus, perhaps from nostalgia.

Kailkenny and colcannon

established Rumbledethumps has close relatives in other parts of Scotland. Hope describes potatoes mashed with cabbage or other greens as a sort of vegetarian bubble and squeak, with different names by region: colcannon in the Highlands, as in Ireland; kailkenny in the north-east; rumbledethumps in the Borders. The basic recipe is the same.

established Kailkenny. McNeill's Aberdeenshire version mashes equal quantities of boiled cabbage and potatoes with a cupful of cream, pepper and salt, served very hot. She heads it with the old song "There's cauld kail in Aberdeen". She calls the name probably a corruption of "colcannon".

established Highland colcannon. McNeill's Highland colcannon is richer: two cabbages chopped fine, carrots, eight or ten potatoes and two turnips, all boiled, mashed and mixed in butter, seasoned, with a spoonful of brown sauce.

shared Irish colcannon. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) calls colcannon originally an Irish dish of boiled potatoes and cabbage or kale mashed together, flavoured with onions, shallots or leeks and cream or butter. It derives the name from Gaelic cál ceannann, white-headed cabbage, though the second part may come from an old Irish word for garlic, onion or leek. One of its earliest descriptions is by William Bulkeley of Anglesey, who ate "Coel Callan" of cabbage, potatoes and parsnips in Dublin on 31 October 1735. In Ireland colcannon was a Hallowe'en dish, with charms hidden in it to foretell marriage.

established Bubble and squeak. The Companion explains that English bubble and squeak was at first fried beef and cabbage. Potatoes appear in recipes only from the mid-nineteenth century, probably under Irish influence. It adds that combinations of potato and cabbage recur in Scottish and Iberian cookery, but that frying the two together seems to be English. Rumbledethumps is mashed or baked, not fried.

Clapshot

established The dish. McNeill, who was born in Orkney, gives clapshot as an Orkney dish: equal quantities of boiled potatoes and boiled turnips mashed together, with chopped chives, a good piece of dripping, pepper and salt, served very hot. She adds that few people realise what a difference it makes to mash the two vegetables together, and that clapshot goes admirably with haggis. The Companion follows her recipe.

established First records. The Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) define clapshot as potatoes and turnips boiled separately and mashed together. Their earliest quotation is from John Firth's Reminiscences of an Orkney Parish (1920), where kail or turnips boiled with potatoes and mashed together were eaten with bere bannocks under, as Firth put it, "the curious name of clapshot". A newspaper of 1933 reported that "the islanders call it clapshot". The DSL records the dish in Caithness in the 1930s too, and a Caithness source of 1938 describes it as a Hallowe'en dish of potatoes, turnips, cream and pepper.

established A harvest dish. The Third Statistical Account of Orkney, describing the county in 1957, lists clapshot among the old-fashioned dishes served at a harvest home or "muckle supper". The Orcadian in 1995 could speak of the "clapshot season", when the new turnips were ready to mix with the potatoes.

established Kail or turnip. Firth's 1920 clapshot could be made with kail as well as turnips. Hope notes that Orcadians sometimes put kail in place of turnip in what amounts to their national dish. In that form clapshot comes close to rumbledethumps.

established George Mackay Brown. Hope prints a passage from the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, who called clapshot "one of the best things to come out of Orkney", along with Highland Park whisky, Orkney fudge and Atlantic crabs. He ate it at least once a week, with sausages, corned beef, bacon or mealy puddings, and tried it, with an onion added, alongside a grilled steak. He used Golden Wonder potatoes, mashed with butter, a dash of milk, salt and plenty of pepper.

traditional The name. No one knows why clapshot is so called. Wikipedia states only that the name is Orcadian, and The Scotsman's food history of the dish adds nothing more. Any explanation built from the separate words "clap" and "shot" is guesswork.

established Clapshot and neeps and tatties. Clapshot is often confused with the "neeps and tatties" served at Burns suppers. The difference is in the mashing. Neeps and tatties are two separate mashes side by side on the plate; clapshot mashes them together. The intangible cultural heritage wiki lists clapshot, also called clapshaw, as a traditional Orkney food and accompaniment to haggis.

Potato, kail and neep

established Kail. Kail, the curly cabbage, was the Scots vegetable long before the potato. McNeill notes that it thrives all over Scotland, in the most exposed places and the coldest weather, and that frost improves it. "Kail" also meant broth and, by extension, dinner. Rumbledethumps and kailkenny are what happened when the old vegetable met the new one.

established The potato. Potatoes were known in Scotland by 1683 and became a general field crop in the Lothians from the 1760s, as Hope records. In the north-east, the failure of the grain harvest in 1782 brought them in, at first mainly for animals. Ayrshire and Dumfriesshire took to them early. In the west Highlands they became the main food of the poor, with terrible results when blight struck in 1846.

established The swede. Clapshot needs a vegetable that is newer still. In Scotland "turnip" or "neep" usually means the swede, Brassica napus, not the white turnip, Brassica rapa. The Companion notes that "neep" is a contraction of an early form of "turnip", and that in Scotland swedes prevail. Hope gives Sir John Sinclair's account of the swede's arrival: in 1781–2 a Mr Knox from East Lothian, settled in Gothenburg, sent seed to a friend, and by about 1788 swedes had reached Dumfries. East Lothian people long called them "bagies", from rutabaga. By 1812 Sinclair could quote a farmer calling the Swedish turnip "perhaps the best winter vegetable we have except the potatoe".

shared Burns and the neep. Hope makes a striking point. Burns, who died in 1796, probably never saw, let alone ate, the swede that is now haggis's inseparable companion. The older white turnip was known, and Smollett praised Scottish turnips in 1771, so a mash of potato and turnip is possible earlier. But the clapshot and bashed neeps of today are a nineteenth-century combination.

established Turnips and Improvement. Hope explains why turnips spread. They let farmers keep cattle fed through the winter, so beasts no longer had to be slaughtered at Martinmas or lifted weak from the byre in spring. Improvers such as the Earl of Rothes and Cockburn of Ormiston grew them from about 1716, but turnip husbandry was general only by the 1830s. In Orkney and Shetland, Hope notes, turnips and then swedes were grown, while the Highlands and the north-west showed little interest.

Making them

established Rumbledethumps. Boil equal weights of floury potatoes and cabbage or kale, separately, and drain well. Soften sliced onion or leek in plenty of butter. Mash the potatoes roughly, mix in the cabbage and onion, and season well with salt and black pepper. Serve at once, or put it in a dish, cover with grated cheese and brown in the oven. McNeill and Hope both allow either version.

established Clapshot. Boil equal weights of floury potatoes and swede, separately or, as George Mackay Brown did, in the same pot. Drain thoroughly; swede holds water. Mash together with butter or dripping, chives or a little onion, salt and plenty of pepper. Serve very hot, with haggis, sausages or cold meat.

shared Cheese. Many modern recipes treat a cheese crust as essential to rumbledethumps. McNeill's recipe offers cheese as an option, and Hope's leaves it out. Both forms have a claim to tradition.

• In the Noctes Ambrosianae, the Ettrick Shepherd mashes rumbledethumps with a "beetle", a wooden masher.
• The Scottish National Dictionary called rumbledethumps obsolescent in 1968; it has since returned to menus.
• Kailkenny is probably a corruption of "colcannon".
• The earliest record of clapshot by name is from 1920.
• George Mackay Brown ate clapshot at least once a week.
• In Caithness, clapshot was a Hallowe'en dish.
• The swede reached Scotland in 1781–2, sent from Gothenburg.
• Robert Burns probably never ate a swede.

• Disputed: That "rumbledethumps" comes from the noise of mashing. It is the usual explanation and fits the Scots words, but no early source states it.
• Myth: Clapshot is just another name for neeps and tatties. Neeps and tatties are served side by side; clapshot is mashed together.
• Disputed: Where the name "clapshot" comes from. No etymology has been established.
• Myth: Rumbledethumps and clapshot are ancient Scottish dishes. Both depend on the potato, common only from the later eighteenth century, and clapshot on the swede, which arrived in the 1780s.
• Myth: Burns ate neeps with his haggis. The swede reached Scotland only in the 1780s, and Hope thinks Burns probably never tasted one.
• Disputed: That true rumbledethumps must have cheese. McNeill gives cheese as an option; Hope leaves it out.
• Myth: Rumbledethumps is Scottish bubble and squeak. Bubble and squeak began as fried beef and cabbage and is fried; rumbledethumps is mashed or baked.