When Rabbie Burns denounced fancy French fare in favour of a sack of sheep’s liver and lung, he taught his kinsfolk to elevate and celebrate the ordinary, guts and all. Thanks to Burns, culture and cuisine continue to complement each other across the country – on special occasions the Scots will be found among the poetry and pantry shelves, searching for the perfect full-bodied blend to fill both the belly and heart.
Naturally, the reduction of any culture to a few morsels must be taken with a pinch of salt. Key ingredients as whisky and haggis may be, they’re not the whole dish. And just as Scotland caters for a variety of tastes, so too does its literature. Work your way through the menu and the nation’s different flavours start to reveal themselves: the delicious and deplorable, our hungers and longings, what sates and sustains us.
In this new issue of The Bottle Imp, we invite readers to take their place around the table for an all-you-can-eat literary feast.
Editorial
Articles
- ‘“Let us to the wark”, she cried’: Gender, Gastronomy and Intertextual Play in The Cook and Housewife’s Manual (Lindsay Middleton)
- ‘Better byde the cuiks, nor the mediciners’: food and poetry in medieval and early modern Scotland (c. 1400–1650) (Roslyn Potter)
- Dreaming Bread and Flourishing Folklore (Amanda Edmiston)
- Oysters and Aqua Vitae: Food and Drink in Robert Fergusson’s Poems (Amy Wilcockson)
- Vegetarianism in Contemporary Scottish Fiction (Gina Lyle)
Upon Another Point
- The Itinerant Poets (Graham Fulton)