Scotland's Early Cookery Books: Mrs McLintock, Elizabeth Cleland and Meg Dods

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 books themselves are well documented: copies survive in national and university libraries, and their title pages give places, printers and often the author's address. The authors are not. Mrs McLintock is a name on a title page. Mrs Frazer's first name is unknown. Even Elizabeth Cleland and Susanna MacIver are known mainly from their books and from newspaper advertisements. Much of the detail used here on the contents of the books comes from Annette Hope's A Caledonian Feast (1987), a well-researched social history; the period texts she quotes are treated as reliable, but her interpretations are labelled as hers. Some dates differ between sources, often because writers used later editions, and those differences are noted.

Manuscripts and accounts: the kitchen before print

established Long before any Scottish cookery book was printed, well-off Scottish women wrote their own. The National Library of Scotland says the earliest known manuscript recipe books kept by Scots date from the mid-seventeenth century. Most were compiled by wealthy women as aids to memory, built up over years and often passed from mother to daughter. Compilers seldom wrote their own name or the date. Kitchen recipes sit beside household and medical ones, the books are rarely organised, and until the mid-nineteenth century recipes were usually written as continuous text with few quantities. The Library's digitised collection includes books of Katherine Bruce, Lady Saltoun (1668), and Helen Gordon, Countess of Sutherland (1683), and a 1722 "Large collection of choice recipes for cookrie, paistrie, milks, sauces, candying" from Dumfries.

established The best-known early Scottish manuscript is the receipt book of Martha Lockhart, Lady Castlehill, dated 1712 and kept in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. Annette Hope found it more modern and domestic than the printed books that followed. It has dishes "the French way", the "friggassys", "ragoos" and "compoos" of the period, a recipe for veal "Olives the French Way", a "Rice Florendine" baked in puff paste, and "Pampurdy", which is the French pain perdu. Its biscuits and sweets, Hope notes, came mainly from English sources, and its mead, metheglin and hippocras look back to the Middle Ages.

shared Hope set out the difference between the two kinds of source. A manuscript records only what its compiler cooked or meant to try: true to life, but narrow. A printed book offers counsels of perfection, but a run of them shows what was fashionable and how taste moved, with perhaps a twenty-year lag between a dish's appearance and its arrival in print. These are her working rules, not settled law.

Household accounts: Lady Grisell Baillie and the Clerks of Penicuik

established Account books are not recipe books, but they show what a household bought and served. The Household Book of Lady Grisell Baillie, 1692–1733, edited by Robert Scott-Moncrieff for the Scottish History Society in 1911, records the spending of Lady Grisell (1665–1746) and her household. Hope draws on it heavily. In April 1717 Lady Grisell set down a dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Montrose served in separate courses, still an innovation in Scotland. On 20 November 1722, at Lord Carlisle's house, she noted "Five Ashiets" as the third course, the earliest Scottish ashet that Hope found. The accounts record fricassées ("friassy"), "ragows" and "bisket", use the French canelle for cinnamon, and in 1709 show her paying £1 for six dozen lemons and two dozen oranges. Her directions to her housekeeper give proportions for "best" and "second" shortbread.

established The book is often misdescribed as a recipe book. The much-quoted "taiblet for the bairens" comes from the 1911 editor's introduction summarising purchases, not from a dated recipe. Hope also repeats the family story that the twelve-year-old Grisell Home smuggled a sheep's head from the table to her father, hiding in a church vault after the Restoration; that is family tradition.

established The Clerks of Penicuik left one of the richest family archives in Scotland, now divided between the National Records of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. John Clerk (1611–1674), a Montrose merchant, settled in Paris in 1634 and made a fortune there, partly as agent for Edinburgh merchants, before buying the barony of Penicuik. His General Account Book, 1663–1674, published by the Scottish History Society in 2021, records household purchases, his children's education and payments to labourers, servants and doctors, often with blunt comments. Published summaries mention a new oven at Newbiggin House built of North Berwick tufa, a dovecote of 1672, plum trees for the orchard and food for servants' weddings. His wife, Mary Gray, kept her own household book, which does not survive.

shared Sources differ on when Clerk bought Penicuik. The Scottish History Society's publisher gives 1654; another summary says he returned to Scotland in 1646 and bought it then. The family has held the estate ever since.

established A third record, The Ochtertyre House Book, edited by James Colville for the Scottish History Society in 1907, gives the daily dinner and supper menus of Sir William Murray of Ochtertyre's family for 1737–39, at Ochtertyre in Strathearn and at Foulls near Dundee, and shows what was bought and what came from the estate. Hope found its food plainly Scottish: mutton "boyld joints" and "rost joints", spinach and eggs even in January, an occasional fricassée of rabbit or tripe, and several entries for an "omlit of eggs". Hope prints the date once as 1727–29, a slip; her other references give 1737–39.

John Reid and the first recipes in print

established The first Scottish recipes in print are in a gardening book. John Reid's The Scots Gard'ner, published in Edinburgh in 1683, ends with directions for using what the garden produces. Hope treats this appendix as the first known Scottish collection of recipes and notes that it nowhere claims any knowledge of French methods, which she thinks Reid would have advertised if he had it.

Mrs McLintock, 1736

established Mrs McLintock's Receipts for Cookery and Pastry-Work was published in Glasgow in 1736. The National Library of Scotland calls it "the first Scottish published recipe book", covering the full range of dishes served in a wealthy household. A copy is held by Glasgow University Library. Nothing is known of Mrs McLintock herself; the Women's Print History Project lists the author simply as an unidentified woman. The Oxford Companion to Food notes that the book was unknown to bibliographers and food writers until the bibliographer Virginia Maclean brought it to light in the 1970s, which is why older histories, McNeill's included, do not mention it.

shared Five years later, in 1741, Mrs Johnston's Receipts was published in Edinburgh. The National Library of Scotland describes it as nearly identical in many respects to McLintock's and suggests the two may have been written by the same person. Whether "Mrs Johnston" was the same woman, a borrower or a publisher's reissue is not known.

established The contents are dated by the Scottish National Dictionary and by Hope. McLintock gives the earliest Scottish recipes for tablet, flavoured with orange, rose, cinnamon or ginger, and a shortbread still raised with yeast. She has "Beef Alamode, the French Way" and instructions "to boil Ducks, the French Way", but Hope found her on the whole more old-fashioned than Lady Castlehill, with elaborate dishes still close to medieval cookery: lavish with cream, eggs, almonds, spices and wine, and attentive to garnish. Her recipe "to dress a Leg of Mutton" skins the leg, minces most of the meat with black pepper, Jamaica pepper and nutmeg, stuffs it back into the skin, and serves it with forcemeat balls, cucumbers, capers, oysters, mushrooms and anchovies. Hope points out that she calls it a leg, not a gigot.

Elizabeth Cleland, 1755

established Elizabeth Cleland's A New and Easy Method of Cookery was published in Edinburgh in 1755, "printed for the author" by W. Gordon, C. Wright, S. Willison and J. Bruce and sold at her house in the Luckenbooths, the row of tenements beside St Giles on the High Street. Its title page says it is "chiefly intended for the benefit of the young ladies who attend her school", so Cleland is the first identifiable Edinburgh cookery teacher to publish. The book has six parts, from gravies, soups and broths and fish and their sauces to potting, pies and pasties, pickling and preserving, and made wines, distilling and brewing. A third edition followed in 1770. The University of Otago's copy of that edition is said to hold about 700 recipes, among them "To Stew a Lamb's Head" and "To Dress a Pig the French Way".

established The first edition is rare: when one was sold at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh in June 2024, the auctioneers found no other copy in auction records. A facsimile has an introduction by the food historian Peter Brears; its publisher notes that Cleland's recipes depend on English practice, while her vocabulary is Scottish.

established Hope used Cleland as a window on Scotland's trade with northern Europe. The book gives instructions for preserving beef in the Dutch manner, "To crimp Cod the Dutch Way", to be eaten with oil, mustard and vinegar, "A Neat's Tongue the Polish Way", stewed with preserved lemon, cinnamon, sugar and white wine, a "Meagre Broth" of vegetables, a "Ragoo of Mushrooms" and two recipes for quiddany, a set fruit paste of apples or plums. Hope dates the book 1759, apparently the edition she used; the first edition is 1755.

Susanna MacIver and Mrs Frazer

established Susanna MacIver ran a school of cookery and pastry for young women in Edinburgh. Her book, Cookery and Pastry, As taught and practised by Mrs Maciver, Teacher of those Arts in Edinburgh, was "printed for the author, and sold by her at her house in Stephen Law's close, back of the City-guard", and by several booksellers. The Wellcome Collection's first edition, of 238 pages, is dated 1774 on its title page; further editions appeared in 1777, 1782, 1787, 1789 and 1800, some with plans of dinner courses and a list of foods in season.

shared The date of the first edition is given as both 1773 and 1774. The book was advertised in the Caledonian Mercury on 4 December 1773, according to the local historian who writes as Threadinburgh, and its preface is dated 1773, but the earliest surviving title page reads 1774. Hope gives 1773. The same writer gives MacIver's dates as about 1709 to 23 August 1790, from newspaper and burial records; this card has not checked those records.

established MacIver's book has two firsts that matter for Scottish food history. It contains "A Good Scotch Haggis", among the earliest haggis recipes printed in Scotland. And, according to Hope, it is the first Scottish recipe book to use the word gigot, in a recipe telling the cook to "cut off the loin, and boil the gigot". Hope suggests that a new French way of dividing the joint may explain how the French word replaced the native "leg of mutton".

established Mrs Frazer described herself as MacIver's "several years colleague and afterwards successor", and as "sole teacher of these arts in Edinburgh". Her Practice of Cookery, Pastry, Pickling, Preserving, &c. was published in Edinburgh in 1791 by Peter Hill, with Thomas Cadell in London. It promised bills of fare from five to nineteen dishes, a full list of supper dishes, a list of what was in season each month, advice on choosing provisions, and two plates showing how to set a table and truss poultry. Later editions, of 1806 and 1810, were titled The Practice of Cookery, Pastry, and Confectionary. Her first name is unknown. Her bun of 1791, a yeasted fruit dough wrapped in plain dough, is the earliest recipe for what became black bun, and Hope adapts her recipe for haddocks stuffed with forcemeat and baked. Hope's bibliography calls the book Art of Cookery, which is a slip; her text gives the right title, though she spells the author "Fraser".

Meg Dods and the Cleikum Club, 1826

established The Cook and Housewife's Manual, by "Mistress Margaret Dods", was published in Edinburgh in 1826. Meg Dods was the landlady of the Cleikum Inn in Walter Scott's novel St Ronan's Well (1823). The real author was Christian Isobel Johnstone (1781–1857), born Christian Todd in Fife according to Historic Environment Scotland. After an early marriage to the printer Thomas McLeish ended in divorce, she married John Johnstone, also a printer, in 1815. Together they ran the Inverness Courier from 1817 to 1824 and then Edinburgh periodicals, and from 1834 to 1846 she edited Tait's Edinburgh Magazine; Historic Environment Scotland calls her the first woman to edit a major periodical. Her novel Clan-Albin (1815) was an early Scottish "national tale". A plaque marks 12 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, where she died.

established The Manual opens with a comic frame: the founding, at the Cleikum Inn, of a club of gentlemen devoted to cookery, whose arguments and notes run through the book. Cambridge University Press, which has reissued the second edition, says the two pieces on the club's founding and its last meeting were probably written by Scott himself. The second edition of 1827 added a compendium of French cookery, a larger section on confectionery and about 200 more recipes, and the book went through about ten editions, the eighth in 1847, giving Johnstone a steady income for the rest of her life. The 1847 edition carries the spine title "Meg Dods' Cookery".

established The Manual is the source of many "traditional" Scottish recipes. It has a section of national dishes, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, German and Oriental, and the dishes it records include the "Scotch Christmas Bun", petticoat tails with the Cleikum Club's note on the name, the New Year het pint, an "Old Scots White Soup or Soup à la Reine", fricadellans, which Hope identifies as the Danish frikadeller, and howtowdie, which Mrs Dods called "a very nice small Scots dish". It is also lively. Its mashed turnips were seasoned with a little powdered ginger, chosen "of the yellow, sweet, juicy sort, for which Scotland is celebrated". Hope writes that the book "caused a stir when it first appeared" and was still worth reading in her own day.

shared Hope also argued that in the nineteenth century Scottish and English cookery merged "until they are undifferentiated in the recipe books", naming Meg Dods (1826) and Eliza Acton (1845) as examples. That sits awkwardly with the Manual's separate section on Scottish national dishes and its many Scots recipes. A fairer reading is that the Manual is a general British cookbook of its time, with French and English made dishes, that also deliberately preserved Scottish ones.

What the books show about French cooking

shared Annette Hope used the printed and manuscript books together to test the claim that French cookery came to Scotland with the Auld Alliance in the sixteenth century. On her reading, it did not. Lady Castlehill and Mrs McLintock have a few dishes "the French way" but none of the supposedly ancient Franco-Scottish dishes or words. French terms then spread through the eighteenth century: ashet in Lady Grisell Baillie's accounts from 1722, gigot in MacIver's book of 1773. By the 1790s, according to Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus, fashionable Edinburgh kitchens used Menon's La Cuisine Bourgeoise, and David Hume boasted in 1769 of a receipt for soupe à la reine in his own hand. Hope concluded that French influence came mostly in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as it did in England, helped in Scotland by Jacobite traffic with France. The argument rests on a small number of surviving books, but it is the best documented account available.

shared The books also show the pull of England after the Union of 1707. Hope notes that mid-eighteenth-century Scottish recipe books drew heavily on English food, and that even their French recipes were those popular in England. Yet they all kept Scottish dishes such as haggis and sheep's head.

McNeill and the later tradition

established The printed books were rediscovered and repackaged in the twentieth century. F. Marian McNeill (1885–1973), an Orkney-born Glasgow graduate, suffragist and researcher on the Scottish National Dictionary, published The Scots Kitchen: Its Traditions and Lore with Old-Time Recipes in 1929. It quotes Meg Dods, Mrs Frazer and other old writers at length and became the standard source for Scottish food history. She was appointed MBE in 1962 as a "writer on Scottish cooking".

shared McNeill did not know Mrs McLintock's book, which came to light only in the 1970s, and she repeated some romantic derivations, such as petticoat tails from petites gatelles, that the earlier books themselves treated with caution. Later historians, including Catherine Brown in the 1980s and Annette Hope in 1987, built on her work. Hope admired McNeill deeply, but she also tested McNeill's French derivations against the household books and found many of them wanting.

• Scotland's first printed cookery book appeared in Glasgow in 1736, more than a century after the first English ones.
• A second book, published in Edinburgh five years later under the name "Mrs Johnston", is nearly identical to Mrs McLintock's.
• Elizabeth Cleland sold her cookbook from her own house beside St Giles in the Luckenbooths.
• Mrs MacIver's book of 1773 is the first Scottish cookbook to use the word gigot.
• "Meg Dods" was invented by Walter Scott; the real author was the journalist Christian Isobel Johnstone.
• Lady Grisell Baillie's household book is an account book, not a recipe book.
• Elizabeth Cleland gave a recipe for "A Neat's Tongue the Polish Way".
• Lady Castlehill's 1712 receipt book calls pain perdu "Pampurdy".

• Myth: Meg Dods was a real Edinburgh cook or innkeeper. She was a character in Walter Scott's St Ronan's Well; the Manual was written by Christian Isobel Johnstone.
• Disputed: Walter Scott wrote part of the Manual. He probably wrote the Cleikum Club pieces at the beginning and end, but this rests on attribution, not a signed text.
• Disputed: Mrs McLintock's was "the first Scottish cookbook". It is the first printed book of recipes, but John Reid's Scots Gard'ner (1683) has an appendix of recipes and manuscript recipe books are older.
• Disputed: Mrs McLintock and "Mrs Johnston" were the same author. The two books are nearly identical, but no record shows who wrote either.
• Disputed: the date of Mrs MacIver's first edition. It was advertised in December 1773, but the earliest surviving title page is dated 1774.
• Myth: Lady Grisell Baillie's household book contains a recipe for tablet. It is an account book; the tablet reference is a purchase mentioned in the 1911 editor's introduction.
• Disputed: when John Clerk bought Penicuik. Sources give 1646 and 1654.
• Disputed: by the 1820s Scottish and English cookbooks were indistinguishable. Annette Hope argued this, but the Manual keeps a separate section of Scottish national dishes.
• Myth: the early cookbooks prove that French cooking arrived with Mary, Queen of Scots. On Hope's reading of these books, French dishes and words appear mostly from the late seventeenth century.