Scotch Broth: Barley, Mutton and Dr Johnson's Approval

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.

Johnson's remark is recorded by Boswell in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). Recipes vary widely, and no single recipe is "authentic". Much of the older detail here comes from the folklorist F. Marian McNeill's The Scots Kitchen (1929; revised 1963), which quotes Meg Dods, Elizabeth Cleland and travellers; those quotations are reported at second hand. Background on broth, barley, kale and turnips comes from Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, ed. Tom Jaine, 2014), a standard reference whose Scottish material draws heavily on the food historian Catherine Brown. Where it and McNeill describe the same early recipe differently, both readings are given.

A pot of broth

established For centuries, the main meal of many Scottish households was cooked in a single pot over the fire. Broth made from barley and kail, with whatever meat was available, was a staple. Scotch broth, as it came to be called, is made by simmering mutton, lamb or beef with pearl barley and dried peas or lentils, then adding diced carrot, turnip, leek, onion and sometimes kale or cabbage. In many households the meat was lifted out and served separately, followed by the broth.

established The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929), gives the traditional version: neck or shoulder of mutton, or beef, simmered with barley and soaked dried peas, with diced turnip, carrot and leek added after an hour, shredded cabbage ten minutes before serving and chopped parsley at the end. Where the meat was served on its own, she says, it came garnished with blocks of carrot and turnip from the pot and a caper or nasturtium-seed sauce. With beef, kail or greens could replace cabbage. She preferred old-style pot barley to the processed pearl kind, and notes that enough was usually made for two days. She quotes Meg Dods calling it "the comfortable pot au feu of Scotland", still the dinner of the manse and the farmhouse.

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) describes the typical modern version as beef boiled with barley, then carrot, swede, onion or the white of leek and parsley, with "a very little sugar". The chopped green of the leek and more parsley go in at the end, so that they keep their colour. The meat may stay in the pot or come out as a separate course. Some cooks add potatoes, cooked in the broth or apart. The Companion quotes the food historian Catherine Brown (1985), who says the broth "is often eaten with a large mealy potato making an island in the centre of the soup plate".

shared Beef or mutton? McNeill and Dods name both, and McNeill's recipe opens with neck or shoulder of mutton. The Companion treats beef as the usual meat today. Both are traditional, and lamb is now common too.

established The broth was cooked in the kail-pot, a round three-legged iron pot with a close-fitting lid that hung from the chain and crook over an open fire. McNeill quotes a housewife on sheep's head broth, which "disna gang wrang wi' owre lang boiling": hooked on high enough not to boil over, it could be left while the family went to church.

Kail: the old name

established In older Scots the soup was often simply "kail". McNeill quotes Jamieson's dictionary: kail was "the common name in Scotland for broth", even for the whole dinner, so that an invitation might run "Will you come and tak' your kail wi' me?" Edinburgh's two o'clock bell was known as the kail-bell. Her chapter on brose and kail gives the plainer family: barley kail, of hough (shin), barley and kail; water kail and muslin kail, made without meat, the second from shelled barley, greens and onions; and green kail, also called pan kail or Lenten kail.

Broth on the table, 1598 to 1905

shared The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), reads Fynes Moryson's much-quoted dinner of 1598 more kindly than most. His "great platters of porredge, each having a little piece of sodden meat" were, she argues, tureens of barley broth with pot-herbs and a piece of boiled meat, and the "pullet with some prunes in the broth" served to the knight's own table was a richer soup of chicken, vegetables and prunes. On her reading Moryson, an Englishman, misunderstood what he was eating rather than recording poverty.

established Household records quoted by Hope show broth opening dinner at every level for two centuries after Moryson. A King's Commission decree of 1602 for Glasgow University gave the masters, in Hope's summary, a choice of broth and kail or skink (a beef soup) before their boiled and roast meats, and the students a dish of pease or broth with one dish of beef. The Countess of Southesk's Edinburgh lodging bill of 1671 begins one day's account "To denner for broth", charged at fourpence, and her usual dinner was broth, boiled beef or mutton and one roast. The Ochtertyre House Booke of the Murrays of Ochtertyre records on 22 November 1737 "Dinner sheephead broth / Cold chickens / Pudding and hagas for servts." John Ramsay of Ochtertyre remembered that among the eighteenth-century gentry "broth, a couple of fowls newly killed perhaps, or a joint of meat, was thought no bad dinner".

established For the poor the broth was thinner. In the eighteenth century, Hope writes, most ordinary people dined on kail or broth, "rarely enough with meat in it". By the 1850s, with better wages on Lowland farms, even the cottar's Sunday broth might hold a piece of fresh mutton, eaten with potatoes once the soup was finished; the rest of the week stayed meatless. Patrick Neill's report on Scottish gardens (1813) noted that Scotch broth formed a considerable part of the peasantry's food, which Hope credits partly to the Improvers, nearly all of whom printed a recipe. The habit survived industrial poverty: a Dundee Social Union report of 1905 found that in families where both parents worked, the children's one proper meal of the day was usually broth. Emigrants carried it to sea, and on nineteenth-century steerage passages to Canada dinner might be broth from turnips or kail-stock brought on board.

established Travellers met it as the first Scottish dish. On the Wordsworths' tour of 1803 Dorothy recorded "barley broth, in which the sheep's head had been boiled", served with the singed head itself. The travel writer H. V. Morton, whose praise Hope quotes, wrote in the 1920s that a man who met nothing in Scotland but broth "has not travelled in vain". Morton insisted on mutton and dried peas; Hope adds that curly kale, though Morton used spring cabbage, is "not only more traditional, but better".

Old and regional broths

established McNeill collects several variants. Hen broth was barley broth made with a fowl. In Caithness and elsewhere, shilling broth was made from "shilled" corn, that is, grain freed from the husk. In Aberdeenshire, chacklowrie was mashed cabbage mixed into barley broth. An eighteenth-century recipe in Elizabeth Cleland's A New and Easy Method of Cookery (Edinburgh; McNeill cites the 1759 edition) used a leg of beef, a fowl, carrots, barley, celery, sweet herbs, onions, parsley "and a few marigolds".

shared The Oxford Companion to Food describes Cleland's recipe, which it dates to her first edition of 1755, more sparely: its only vegetables were heads of celery and some marigolds, and its meat was a boiling fowl or cock, not beef. McNeill's version, from the 1759 edition, has a leg of beef as well as the fowl. The two accounts may reflect different editions or different readings of the same recipe; both agree on the barley, the celery, the fowl and the marigolds. The point both make is that the early broth was not fixed to beef or mutton. The French geologist Faujas de Saint-Fond, in Mull in the 1780s, was given a "Scots soup" of beef, mutton and fowl broth thickened with a little oatmeal and full of peas, with slices of mutton and giblets in place of the French bread (as quoted by McNeill).

Johnson's verdict

established During their 1773 journey through Scotland, Johnson and Boswell were served Scotch broth, at Aberdeen according to McNeill's citation and The Oxford Companion to Food, which reprints the same passage. Boswell recorded that Johnson ate "several plates of Scotch broth, with barley and peas in it" with obvious enjoyment, and when Boswell asked, "You never ate it before?" Johnson replied, "No, sir; but I don't care how soon I eat it again."

Hotch-potch

established A summer variant, hotch-potch or hairst bree ("harvest broth"), was made with fresh young vegetables such as peas, beans, carrots and cauliflower with lamb. Meg Dods's Cook and Housewife's Manual (1826) praised it highly.

established The word is not Scottish in origin. The Oxford Companion to Food dates "hotchpotch" (or hodgepodge) in the sense of a mixed stew to the 16th century, with medieval forerunners such as "Goos in hochepot", and links it to the English hotpot. What was distinctive in Scotland was the insistence on young vegetables. Meg Dods gave recipes for both a Scottish and a Winter hotchpotch. For the turnips she recommended sweet white ones or the small, smooth yellow kind she thought "peculiar to Scotland" and almost equal to the French navet.

established McNeill says hotch-potch was made only when the kail-yard was at its best, and should be "almost as thick as porridge", though she notes it was usually thinner by her day. Lady Harriet St Clair, whom she quotes, thought eight hours' simmering "not too much". J. G. Lockhart, in Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819), called it "a truly delicious soup, quite peculiar to Scotland" (as quoted by McNeill).

traditional McNeill tells a story of Prince Albert, drawn to a Highland loch steamer's galley by the smell of hotch-potch, asking the cook what was in it and getting only "there's mutton intill't and neeps intill't", until an aide explained that "intill't" meant "into it". It is a comic anecdote, not a record.

Broth, stock and soup

established The Oxford Companion to Food explains that "broth" comes from a root meaning simply to brew. Early broths could be made from vegetables alone, but for centuries the word has usually implied meat. It sits between stock, which is an ingredient, and soup, which is more finished. The Companion repeats a Victorian observation that a broth improved by the cook usually changes its name and becomes a soup or a consommé. Scotch broth is the exception: famous and good, yet still a broth. It names sheep's head broth as another Scottish speciality, of equal standing but less widely eaten.

Barley, the backbone

established Barley (Hordeum vulgare) is, in the Companion's account, the oldest cultivated cereal of the Near East and Europe. Wild grains have been found at Tell Mureybat in Syria from about 8000 BC, and domesticated barley with firmly attached grains appears by the 6th millennium BC. It probably did not reach Britain until the Iron Age, around 500 BC. The English word comes from Old English bære, which survives unchanged in Scotland as bere, the hardy barley of Orkney and the north.

established Barley makes poor bread because it has little gluten, so in Britain it lasted longest in soups, porridges and ale. The Companion lists the grades used in broth. Whole grain with the bran intact, the cheapest kind, was once sold as "Scotch barley". Pot barley has some bran removed. Pearl barley is polished white and has little flavour of its own. That fits McNeill's preference for pot barley over pearl. The Companion concludes that the barley dish surviving most strongly in Britain is probably soup with pearl barley, "exemplified by Scotch barley broth".

established Hope tells how Scotland came to make its own pot and pearl barley. The old way to husk barley was to pound it in a hollowed stone or wooden trough, the "knocking" McNeill also records. The Dutch built mills to do the job, and Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, who had seen them in exile, sent his wheelwright James Meikle to Holland in 1710 under written articles to learn "the perfect art of sheeling barley, both that which is called French barley, and that which is called pearl barley". Meikle's mill at Saltoun in East Lothian, run with Fletcher's brother Henry, made "Salton barley" well known across Britain. shared Hope adds that the secret was so well kept, with Henry Fletcher's wife guarding the door, that no similar mill was built in Britain, Ireland or America for some forty years; that detail comes from her account and has not been checked further.

Kale and neeps

established Kale (Brassica oleracea var. acephala) is the older, open-leaved form of the cabbage. The Companion notes that it was the ordinary green of country people across Europe until headed cabbages were bred at the end of the Middle Ages. It survived in Scotland because it stands hard winters where cabbage cannot. Its importance shows in the language: "kail" came to mean dinner, the kail bells rang at dinner time whether or not kail was served, and the Kailyard school of writers, J. M. Barrie among them, took their name from the cottage kale-patch. Curly Scotch kale is the variety still most eaten.

established Recipes that say "turnip" need care. The Companion explains that the Scots word "neep" comes ultimately from the Latin napus, and that Scots generally mean the yellow swede when they say neeps. Swedes reached England in the 17th century and became a major crop in the late 18th. A Scottish broth's "turnip" is therefore usually swede.

established Annette Hope gives the Scottish dates. Sir John Sinclair recorded that swede seed was first sent to Scotland in 1781–2, by a Mr Knox of East Lothian living in Gothenburg, and East Lothian people long called swedes "bagies", from rutabaga. Within thirty years swede had entered the broth pot: Sinclair's Account of the Systems of Husbandry (1812) quotes a Mr Kerr that "5 pounds weight of beef or mutton will make richer Scotch broth, along with Swedish turnips, than 7 pounds along with an equal quantity of any other turnips". Earlier broths would have used the white garden turnip.

Broth today

established Scotch broth remains popular, homemade and in tins and cartons sold across Britain. It is often made with lamb, and vegetarian versions use vegetable stock.

• Samuel Johnson enjoyed Scotch broth in 1773.
• The meat was often served separately from the soup.
• Hotch-potch is a summer version with fresh vegetables.
• In Scotland it is often just called "broth".
• Barley gives the soup its thickness.
• Edinburgh's two o'clock bell was once called the kail-bell, because broth, or kail, was the heart of the midday dinner.
• An eighteenth-century Edinburgh recipe added marigolds to barley broth.
• Reheated second-day broth was once called cock-crown kail.
• Unpolished barley with its bran intact was once sold in England as "Scotch barley", the cheapest grade.
• The Kailyard school of Scottish writers, including J. M. Barrie, was named after the kale-patch.

• Myth: There is one authentic Scotch broth recipe. Recipes vary widely. Beef and mutton are both traditional, lamb is now common, and early recipes used fowl.
• Disputed: Whether "Scotch broth" is only an outsiders' name. It is used mainly outside Scotland, where the soup was often called "broth", "barley broth" or "kail", but Boswell, a Scot, already wrote "Scotch broth" in 1773.
• Myth: The Prince Albert "intill't" story is a record. It is a comic anecdote about the cook of a Highland loch steamer, not a record.
• Myth: The "turnip" in old broth was always a swede. Swede seed reached Scotland only in 1781–82, and earlier broths would have used the white garden turnip.
• Myth: Fletcher or Meikle invented pearl barley. Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun sent James Meikle to Holland in 1710 to learn the Dutch milling method, which they brought to Scotland.
• Myth: "Hotchpotch" is a Scottish word. It is an English and French term for a mixed stew, in use since the sixteenth century. What was distinctive in Scotland was the insistence on young vegetables.
• Disputed: What Elizabeth Cleland's early broth contained. The Companion, dating it to her first edition of 1755, gives a boiling fowl, celery and marigolds. McNeill, citing the 1759 edition, adds a leg of beef. The two accounts may reflect different editions.