The Food of Orkney and Shetland: Bere, Fish and the Northern Larder

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 main sources are two cookery classics and one reference work. F. Marian McNeill, who spent part of her childhood in Orkney, collected northern recipes and quoted island writers such as James Omond, John Firth and Jessie Saxby in The Scots Kitchen (1929). The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) summarises the islands' food, drawing on Catherine Brown and on Alan Davidson's own research in Lerwick kitchens. Protected-name status comes from official UK registers. The Companion contains some errors on the islands, which are corrected below: Shetland is not closer to Bergen than to Aberdeen, bere is six-rowed, and Up Helly Aa is in Shetland, not Orkney. The idea of a direct Norse inheritance is real but easily overstated; many island foods are shared with the rest of northern Scotland. Annette Hope's social history A Caledonian Feast (1987) adds period witnesses, from agricultural reporters of the 1800s to Jessie Saxby; the sources she quotes are treated as evidence, her own interpretations as shared.

Two island groups, two kitchens

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) quotes Catherine Brown's Scottish Regional Recipes (1981) on the contrast. Orkney's green, fertile land, she wrote, has more in common with Moray, Easter Ross and Caithness than with Shetland, and is fine country for cattle, sheep and pigs, oats, barley and turnips. In Shetland, acid soils, cool summers and salt-laden gales restrict farming, so people turned to the sea, and in this they are closer to the Hebrides. Shetlanders were described as fishermen with a croft, Orcadians as farmers with a fishing boat. Brown counted nearly four times as many fishermen in Shetland as in Orkney, while Orkney farms were four times the size. Those figures are from around 1980.

established The saying is older than Brown. The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), gives it as an old remark that Orcadians were farmers with boats and Shetlanders fishermen with a bit of land, and traces the difference back to the eighteenth century. Orcadians then fished almost entirely for their own households. Shetlanders fished commercially and in season: for saithe, cod and haddock close in, and for larger cod and especially ling far offshore. Some of the catch was dried for the islanders' own winter and spring food, and there was already a trade in fish-liver oil.

established The Companion opens its entry by saying that Shetland lies closer to Bergen than to Aberdeen. For Lerwick that is not true: it is about 340 km from Aberdeen and about 357 km from Bergen, great-circle distance. Only the far north of Shetland is closer to Norway than to Aberdeen. The underlying point stands. Shetland is as near to Norway as to the Scottish mainland.

The Norse inheritance

established Both groups were settled by Scandinavians from the ninth century and stayed under Norwegian rule until they were pledged to Scotland as security for a royal dowry in 1468 and 1469. The Norse language, Norn, lasted into the eighteenth century, and food vocabulary is one of its clearest legacies. The Oxford Companion to Food gives vivda for wind-dried meat, sassermaet for a spiced, salted beef mince, and brïnies for the patties made from it. McNeill notes that the Orkney oatmeal gingerbread broonie, which she had assumed meant a brown cake, was one of "the many Norn words" surviving in Orkney dialect; the Shetland form brüni means a thick bannock.

established The Companion compares the islands with the Faroe Islands, settled in the early ninth century by people from southern Norway and Orkney. Faroese food was built on wind-drying in a slatted drying shed, the hjallur. Its two national dishes are semi-dried fish (ræstur fiskur) and dried mutton, both semi-dried (ræst kjøt) and fully dried (skerpikjøt), which can be eaten without cooking. The Companion notes that the Faroese skill in using every part of a sheep or fish matches that of Icelanders and Shetlanders. The Shetland words reestit and vivda belong to the same world.

shared Annette Hope gives a longer list of Norse-derived food words, with their roots. Scrae-fish, from Old Norse skreið, was fish dried in the sun. Cuids were young coalfish stuffed with fish livers. Liver muggies, from Old Norse magi, "stomach", were fish stomachs stuffed with seasoned livers and steamed. Vivda, which she links to a Norwegian dialect word for leg muscle, was mutton dried without salt in an open stone hut. Bronies, from Norwegian bryne, "a slice", could be a kind of scone or a meat patty. Strubba was coagulated milk whipped until thick. In her view Nordic elements in the everyday diet of the Northern Isles "survived virtually unchanged until the Second World War". The etymologies are hers and are not checked here against a dictionary of Norn.

established The Norse link did not end with the pledge to Scotland. Hope, following Alexander Fenton's The Northern Isles (1978), notes that merchants from the Hanseatic towns came to the Northern Isles every year from the fifteenth century, selling fishing gear, beer, wheat and rye flour, barley, tobacco and dried fruit, and buying salt fish and woollens. Fenton's point, as she reports it, is that such influences were seasonal and renewed each year rather than constant.

shared It is easy to overstate the Norse case. Oatmeal, kale, bannocks, potatoes and turnips are shared with the rest of northern Scotland, and many island recipes McNeill collected came through Scots-speaking households. The Norse inheritance is clearest in preservation methods and in vocabulary.

Bere and oats

established Bere (pronounced "bare" in the north) is an old barley landrace. The Scottish Government's Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture (SASA) describes it as a six-rowed spring barley. It ripens fast in the short northern summer. SASA reports that Orkney is now the only place where bere is grown for human consumption, mainly for bere meal ground at the Barony Mill at Birsay, with small amounts grown in Shetland and the Outer Hebrides. Bere was revived for ale, beer and whisky from 2006.

shared When bere arrived is uncertain. SASA dates it in Scotland to the eighth century and says it was probably introduced by the Norse. The two claims do not sit easily together, because Norse settlement of Orkney and Shetland is usually dated to the ninth century. An eighth-century date would mean bere came either with the earliest Norse contacts, before settlement, or from elsewhere before the Norse.

established The Oxford Companion to Food quotes Catherine Brown (1996) that bere has four ear rows rather than the usual six. SASA's description of bere as six-rowed contradicts this, and the six-row classification is standard. Brown's other figures, from the 1990s, were that 12 to 15 tons of bere were grown in Orkney a year and that every Orkney baker made a daily batch of bere bannocks, soft girdle-baked rounds about 15 cm across. She noted that before raising agents arrived in the nineteenth century, bere bannocks were thin and soft, like a modern potato scone. The site's bere bannock card covers the bread in detail.

established Grain was handled in ways that recall the Norse world. McNeill quotes James Omond's Orkney Eighty Years Ago (1911) on burstin: bere and oats roasted in an iron pot on hot peat embers until the grains "burst", then winnowed and ground on a quern into a rich brown meal "fine as dust". Stirred into soured cream or milk, it made a cooling summer dish, and in hot milk a drink called pramm. In Shetland, bere was husked by bruising it with a mallet in a hollowed knocking-stone and floating off the husks. The whole grains, knockit corn, were boiled with kale and a piece of pork or reestit mutton, a dish remembered in an old song, "Kail an' knockit corn". Bere-meal porridge was eaten across Caithness, Orkney and Shetland.

established The simplest oatmeal dish of all, raw meal stirred into cold water, had island names. Annette Hope records that it was drammach to Highlanders, glug or gluggo to Orcadians and krul to Shetlanders, who added a lump of butter. Sowens, the soured and boiled liquor of oat husks, could be dried into a paste and rolled in raw oatmeal; she writes that in that form it made many a "piece" for Orkney schoolchildren and could even be posted to relatives in the towns to be boiled up again. Sowens scones, a batter of oatmeal, milk and egg stirred into raw sowens and dropped onto a hot girdle, were popular in Caithness and Orkney. By the 1980s, she notes, bere bannocks were rarely made from plain bere meal; a little wheat flour, sometimes half and half, was usual.

Kale and potatoes

established Kale was the islands' essential green. The Oxford Companion to Food notes that it has thrived in the north for centuries and was traditionally preserved in barrels with fat and oatmeal, and that it is often paired with pork in Orkney. SASA records Shetland cabbage, also called Shetland kale, a landrace grown in the islands since at least the seventeenth century, first as a vegetable and later mainly as winter feed for cattle and sheep. Seedlings were raised in plantiecrubs, small circular drystone enclosures on the hill, and planted out into walled kale yards. The Shetland Amenity Trust notes that crofters often built their plantiecrubs out of the stones of older archaeological sites.

shared Annette Hope adds Orkney detail. There kail and cabbage were grown in planticrues, which she describes as raised beds walled against the cattle, and cabbage was sometimes preserved in the manner of sauerkraut and sometimes simply boiled and eaten with butter. She dates "kail and knockit corn" in Orkney and Shetland to at least the sixteenth century. Orkney pork and kale, originally made with pickled pork, she thinks is probably a variant of the Norwegian fårikål, mutton in cabbage, because of its method and seasonings and because the dish is not found elsewhere in Britain. That derivation is her suggestion, not a documented descent.

established Even tender vegetables could be grown. Robert Shireff, reporting on Orkney and Shetland for Sir John Sinclair's General View of Agriculture in 1812, claimed that globe artichokes did better there than anywhere else in the country. Hope was sceptical until an Orkney grower, Miss E. R. Bullard, told her that globe artichokes would indeed crop in Orkney, even untended, and suggested that Shireff wrote during a run of warmer years.

established Potatoes and turnips arrived later but became staples. McNeill's recipe for clapshot, which she labels Orkney, mashes equal quantities of boiled potato and turnip with chives and dripping; she says it "goes admirably with haggis". The Oxford Companion to Food also gives clapshot as the recommended partner for haggis. In Shetland, liver koogs were potatoes hollowed out and stuffed with seasoned fish livers, once cooked among the hot peats of the hearth.

established Hope notes that in Orkney and Shetland first turnips and then swedes were taken up as field crops by the early nineteenth century, and that Orcadians sometimes made clapshot with kail in place of turnip. She quotes the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown, who called clapshot "one of the best things to come out of Orkney, together with Highland Park and Orkney fudge and Atlantic crabs", and ate it with sausages, corned beef, bacon and mealy puddings. Orkney also bred potatoes: Hope lists Orkney Reds among the famous Scottish varieties raised after the blight years of the 1840s.

Fish: dried, salted and wind-cured

established The saithe, or coalfish, was the islanders' everyday fish, and they had names for each size. The Oxford Companion to Food records that Shetlanders call the smallest saithe sillocks and the year-old fish piltocks; in Orkney the year-old fish are cuithes. McNeill describes sillocks rolled in salted oatmeal and fried in butter, eaten in the small hours after a night's fishing, and sillocks hung in bunches on a fish-hake outside until hard and eaten raw by Shetland schoolchildren with their buttered bere bannock. Orkney cuithes were split, salted and dried, and eaten boiled or broiled with buttered bere bannocks and tea.

traditional The Companion adds that fully dried cuithes, hung in large numbers from the rafters over the peat fire, were slightly phosphorescent, so that in some houses people could read by their light. It is a striking story, but the Companion gives no source for it.

established Prime fish often left the islands. The Companion explains that fresh fish was gutted and sent to the mainland for sale, leaving islanders to make a range of dishes from heads, livers and innards. Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), describes the summer haaf, the deep-sea fishery for ling and cod, which ran from May to August. It was worked from open Norse-pattern boats: the sixareen, with six oars, went 30 or 40 miles west into the open sea, and the smaller fourareen made shorter trips to the east. Crews rowed eight or ten hours to the grounds, shot and hauled their lines two or three times, and gutted and beheaded the catch as they went, before the long row back. The curing stations were run not by the fishermen but by the landlords or tacksmen whose tenants they were, and were often placed well away from the men's own homes.

established Hope explains why the islands had so many dishes of heads and livers. Cod from the haaf could not reach the mainland fresh, so it was all salted and dried, and the fishermen began the work at sea, removing heads, roes, livers and guts before the catch reached the station. These parts were the crew's perquisite. Dried white fish also served as a substitute for bread in Shetland when the grain crop was short.

The fish-liver dishes of Shetland

established Shetland developed fish-liver cookery further than anywhere else in Britain. The Oxford Companion to Food says the art of using fish livers had been developed by the Shetland fishing community "to an extent which is unimaginable" for city dwellers, citing Alan Davidson's own research in Lerwick kitchens. McNeill gives a set of recipes and notes a special pan, the pannabrad, used to melt fish livers and store the oil for winter. Among them:

• Stap: haddock livers melted slowly in a crock set in boiling water, mixed with the flaked flesh from the boiled heads.
• Krappin (or kroppen): fish liver and meal mixed and seasoned and stuffed into a fish head, then boiled. It is the island version of crappit heids.
• Haggamuggie: a fish's stomach (muggie) stuffed with liver and toasted oatmeal and boiled, which McNeill calls "a sort of piscatorial haggis".
• Slot: cod roe beaten with ling liver and barley meal, dropped in spoonfuls into boiling fish stock.
• Liver krus: a cup of oatmeal dough filled with livers and baked on the hearth.
• Gree'd fish: boiled fish with melted fresh livers strained over.

established McNeill also records kiossed heids, fish heads wrapped in cloth and wedged into the crevice of a stone wall until gamey, then roasted and eaten with butter and potatoes. Air, salt and time did the work that elsewhere was done by smoke.

established Annette Hope adds more of the family. Liver-bannock was a sandwich of fish livers baked between bannocks. Liver-piltocks were young coalfish roasted on the fire with the livers left inside. Her liver-muggie, or crappin-muggie, was a cod's stomach stuffed with liver, flour and spices and baked, where McNeill's haggamuggie was boiled with oatmeal. For slott she quotes Jessie Saxby's Food of the Shetlanders Langsyne: the roe was beaten with a spoon "till it was like cream", mixed with a little flour and salt, shaped into rough balls and boiled, then sliced cold and fried in butter. That differs from McNeill's version with ling liver and barley meal, which suggests the dish varied from house to house. Writing in 1987, Hope said most of these dishes survived only in the memories of old people, though stap and slott were still sometimes eaten.

shared Tastes in fish differed between the two groups. Walter Scott, visiting the Northern Isles in 1814, wrote in his diary that Shetlanders "would not touch skate" and said dog-fish was "only food for Orkney men" (as quoted by Hope). A century later Jessie Saxby, herself a Shetlander, wrote that skate was regularly salted and dried for winter.

The shore

established The foreshore was a larder from the beginning. The Oxford Companion to Food notes that Stone Age middens in Orkney show limpets were once eaten in enormous numbers. In the 1680s, the clergyman James Wallace wrote that ordinary Orcadians thought the meat of sea urchins, ivegars, a great rarity and used it instead of butter; the Companion says the practice has died out and that Orcadians now call the urchin "scarriman's heid". Razor clams are spoots in Orkney, where the Companion says the cult of eating them has reached its height, and the ocean quahog is coo shell, because children used the shells as cows in their games.

established Seaweed was eaten as well as burned. McNeill records that Orkney children ate the stems of sea tangle raw, like rhubarb. The Companion notes that cooked dishes of the edible kelp Alaria esculenta are recorded from Orkney, and that the burning of kelp for its ash, a source of iodine and potash, was an important industry in the nineteenth century before cheaper sources were found.

Sheep and reestit mutton

established The island sheep are unlike lowland breeds. Catherine Brown, quoted by the Companion, describes the Shetland sheep as small, hardy and self-reliant, closer to Norwegian, Swedish and Russian breeds than to other British ones, living on hill grass and heather and in hard times on seaweed from the shore, which gives its meat a stronger, faintly gamey flavour. Shetland Lamb was registered as a protected designation of origin in 1996 and remains on the UK register.

established North Ronaldsay, Orkney's most northerly island, has the most extreme case. A drystone dyke, about 12 to 13 miles long and built around 1832, encircles the island and keeps its native sheep on the foreshore for most of the year, where they live mainly on seaweed. Historic Environment Scotland's Category A listing records that the flock was managed by a sheep court, and that ewes and lambs were brought inside the dyke only for lambing. The Companion notes that one island breed, kept on the foreshore for centuries, shows physiological adaptations to a seaweed diet. Island producers sought protected status for North Ronaldsay mutton in 2016; this card has not confirmed that it was granted.

established Reestit mutton is the islands' signature cure. The Companion explains the name: after brining, the meat is hung to dry from the rafter, or reest, over the peat fire. VisitShetland's account gives the modern method: the meat is rubbed with salt and steeped for two or three weeks in a brine strong enough to float a potato, then hung to dry for several weeks more, now usually in temperature-controlled cells rather than over peat. Slow Food UK, which lists it in its Ark of Taste, says it was once made across the crofting counties of Scotland but is now produced only in Shetland. Boiled for hours, it gives the stock for reestit mutton soup, eaten with bannocks at New Year and in large quantities on the night of Up Helly Aa.

Pigs and geese

established Orkney had none of the old Scottish dislike of pork. Annette Hope quotes an agricultural reporter's description of Orkney pigs running loose over the meadows and cornland in winter, so that "many a time has the Orcadian farmer sown his lands, without bestowing any other preparation than that given by the snouts of his pigs". In her survey, Orkney and Aberdeenshire are the only parts of Scotland with pork recipes that can be called indigenous. Geese, she notes, were commoner than hens in Orkney, smoked in the chimney like fish and pork, and goose feathers were a significant export in the eighteenth century.

Dairy: butter, cheese and blaand

established Orkney was dairy country. McNeill prints a recipe for Orkney farmhouse cheese from Jessie Tait of Holm, pressed in a wooden chessit for eight days and dried at an open window, and notes that on small crofts it was made with skimmed milk and kept buried in oatmeal until needed. The Oxford Companion to Food says Orkney is famed for its sour milk products and cheeses.

established Orkney's creamery cheese began after the Second World War. The Scotsman and DairyReporter report that it was first made in 1946, when tens of thousands of service personnel left the islands and dairy farmers had surplus milk. Orkney Scottish Island Cheddar, made by a "dry stir" method, was granted protected geographical indication by the European Commission in November 2013, after an application in 2011. Highlands and Islands Enterprise reported in 2021 that the Orkney Cheese Company, the sole producer, was then owned mainly by Orkney Milk, a co-operative of 14 dairy farms, and based at Hatston in Kirkwall. Orkney Beef and Orkney Lamb also hold protected designation of origin.

established Shetland's distinctive milk drink was blaand. McNeill describes it as the whey of buttermilk fermented in an oak cask until it sparkles "like champagne", used in every Shetland cottage, and once prescribed by fashionable doctors as the "Sour Whey Cure". Left too long, it turned flat and vinegary.

established Annette Hope adds that blaand (she spells it blaund) was thought best just as fermentation began, when it had a slight fizz, and that fishermen drank a great deal of it at sea; it was also given to consumptives. She describes other Shetland milk dishes with Norse names. Strubba was soured milk whipped to the thickness of cream and eaten with rhubarb or other fruit. Kloks, a dish for special occasions, was new milk simmered for hours until it clotted and turned yellowish-brown, then flavoured with cinnamon and sugar; she likens it to condensed milk. Klabba was junket, set with butterwort juice when rennet could not be had.

established Butter was also rent. The Shetland reporter to the General View of Agriculture, quoted by Hope, wrote that Shetland butter carefully made was equal to any, but that when made in part payment of rent, "the chief purpose for which it is manufactured, the quality is bad to a proverb".

Baking

established Orkney has a strong griddle tradition. The Oxford Companion to Food lists Orkney pancakes made with oatmeal and buttermilk, "sour skons" flavoured with caraway, and fatty cutties, rich griddle cakes like the Northumbrian singin' hinnies. McNeill gives broonie, an oatmeal gingerbread with treacle and buttermilk, which she collected as a child from an island schoolmate, and sweetie-foals, gingerbread rounds sprinkled with coloured caraway comfits sold at the Lammas Market in Kirkwall. The Companion adds that Orkney water biscuits have a high reputation.

established Shetland's festive bakes had their own forms. McNeill describes the Yule-brunies of Shetland as round with a hole in the centre "to keep the trows (trolls) away" and edges pinched into points, and the Bride's Bonn, a large round of caraway shortbread with a sweet set in the middle. Quoting Jessie Saxby's Shetland Traditional Lore, she records that each unmarried wedding guest broke off a piece, and whoever touched the sweet would stay unmarried.

Festivals

established Shetland marked Yule more than Christmas. The Companion describes whipkull, egg yolks whisked with sugar and rum, as the drink "with which Yule (rather than Christmas) has traditionally been celebrated", and compares it to Italian zabaglione. VisitShetland's modern recipe adds whipped cream and says it was traditionally eaten as a rich breakfast on New Year's Day; it describes the dish as thought to come from Scandinavia. Annette Hope's whipcoll is egg yolks and sugar beaten into thick sweet cream with "a not insignificant quantity" of brandy, rum or whisky, and she compares it with Dutch advocaat. McNeill also records the Bride's Cog of Orkney weddings, a three-handled wooden vessel of new ale laced with whisky, spiced and thickened with eggs, passed round like a loving cup.

established Up Helly Aa, the Lerwick fire festival held on the last Tuesday of January, is Shetland's, not Orkney's. Its torch processions date from 1881 and the burning of a galley from 1889. The Oxford Companion to Food, in its Christmas pudding entry, places the ship-burning rite in Orkney and presents it as a frank survival of the pagan solstice fire. Both points are wrong: it is in Shetland, and it grew out of nineteenth-century Yule customs in Lerwick.

A healthy diet?

established By late-Victorian standards the island diet was a good one. Annette Hope reports a survey of 1871 which found the diet of the Northern Isles excellent in most respects, apart from a marked lack of vitamin C. It rested on milk in various forms, fish, potatoes, bere meal and oatmeal; little alcohol was drunk, tea was extremely popular, and few vegetables were grown or eaten. In her account the Northern Isles, like the Borders and the north-east, escaped the decline in working-class diet that studies found in the industrial towns and the western Highlands towards the end of the century. She does not name the 1871 survey, so its scope is not known here.

• Lerwick is slightly closer to Aberdeen than to Bergen, despite a popular claim to the contrary.
• North Ronaldsay's sheep live mostly on seaweed, kept on the shore by a 12-mile drystone dyke.
• Shetlanders melted fish livers in a special pan called a pannabrad.
• Krappin is a fish head stuffed with liver and meal, the island cousin of crappit heids.
• Orkney cheese was once stored buried in oatmeal.
• Orcadians in the 1680s used sea urchin roe in place of butter.
• Broonie, Orkney's oatmeal gingerbread, takes its name from a Norn word.
• Shetland's Yule bannocks had a hole in the middle to keep the trows away.
• In Orkney geese were commoner than hens and were smoked in the chimney like fish.
• Haaf crews rowed sixareens 30 or 40 miles out into the Atlantic for ling.
• Shetland butter made to pay the rent was said to be "bad to a proverb".

• Myth: Shetland is closer to Bergen than to Aberdeen. The Oxford Companion to Food says so, but Lerwick is about 340 km from Aberdeen and about 357 km from Bergen. Only the far north of Shetland is closer to Norway. Shetland is as near to Norway as to the Scottish mainland.
• Myth: Bere is a four-rowed barley. The Companion quotes Catherine Brown to that effect, but bere is a six-rowed landrace, and the six-row classification is standard.
• Myth: Up Helly Aa is an Orkney festival and an ancient pagan survival. It is held in Lerwick, Shetland. Its torch processions date from 1881 and the burning of a galley from 1889, and it grew out of nineteenth-century Yule customs.
• Disputed: Whether the Vikings brought bere. The Norse "probably" introduced it, according to a Scottish Government agency, but the same agency dates bere in Scotland to the eighth century, before Norse settlement of the islands in the ninth.
• Myth: People read by the light of drying cuithes. The Companion says fully dried cuithes hung over the peat fire were slightly phosphorescent, but gives no source for the story.
• Disputed: Protected status for North Ronaldsay mutton. Island producers applied for it in 2016, but it is not confirmed that it was granted.
• Myth: All island food is Norse. The Norse inheritance is real, clearest in preservation methods and vocabulary. Oatmeal, kale, bannocks, potatoes and turnips are shared with the rest of northern Scotland.
• Disputed: Norse origins of particular dishes and words. Annette Hope suggests that Orkney pork and kale derives from the Norwegian fårikål, and she gives Norse etymologies for island food words. These are her suggestions, not documented descents, and the etymologies are not checked against a dictionary of Norn.
• Myth: The old island diet was nutritionally complete. A survey of 1871 reported by Hope found it excellent in most respects but marked by a lack of vitamin C.