Food History

I have a bunch of work to be done by tomorrow lunchtime, but my brain has switched into research mode and the next posts (broken up because one post would be way too big) are the result. It certainly adds some social contexts to my blog and introduces us to some rather curious characters to boot.

My purely historianish name for this little series of posts is “Mentions of scones and biscuits in National Library of Scotland Broadside Ballads”
http://www.nls.uk/broadsides/search.html

Ballads are one rather cool type of source for what scones and biscuits used to be. A rather different facet of culinary history. Though the ballad collection ranges from the 17th to the early 20th centuries, all the mentions of scones or biscuits were from the nineteenth century.

Why the nineteenth century? It doesn’t necessarily mean that scones and biscuits weren’t known earlier. It could mean that earlier ballads mentioning them are lost, though the fact that *none* of the ballads earlier than 1820 contain the words argues against this. It could mean that the stuff of earlier ballads (their themes and style) didn’t allow those particular comestibles. And there are other possible reasons.

We know that scones and biscuits went along with certain other foods in nineteenth century English-speaking Scotland (these poems tell us nothing definitive about the non-English speaking areas) and that some were savoury (buttered, or bought alongside cheese) and that some had fruit in. Some biscuits were chewable (which maybe suggests the doublecooking) and some were flavoured with cinnamon. And there was a thing called a biscuit van, though that song wasn’t in the collection. We have scones on ships and biscuits on ships, in quite different contexts that really demonstrates that they were different things in Scotland in the nineteenth century. There more in it than this, but I just wanted to show how wonderful popular literature can be for finding out about common foodstuffs.

For more on broadside ballads, the National Library of Scotland website has some good introductory material. The NLS has the complete text of each ballad - I’ve just given you the appropriate culinary bit. Some of ballads in the collection (though not necessarily containing scones and biscuits) are to songs which are still popular in folk circles, so you, too can sing historical tunes containing culinary terms. For more on scones and biscuits, watch this space because as I come across things, I will post them until utter confusion is the order of the day. Then I’ll sort it and make sense of it all. Maybe.