The Perfect Diet Re-Visited

Last week in my post on "The Perfect Diet" I introduce three dietary principles for building and maintaining health and energy.  The third dietary recommendation, and a subject I am re-visiting today, is to eat the foods our ancestors ate.

What is your particular food culture?  What foods did your ancestors eat?

REVIVE AND THRIVE

Those of us who are fortunate will easily remember a family food heritage and need only look as far as a grandmother or aunt, with a ready cache of recipes, who are the repository of all the family food ways.  Many of us, though, in order to pick up the dropped stitch of food heritage will find it necessary to go on an investigative food adventure, so to speak, and gaze out into the distant pre-industrial past, to a time before the advent of standardized homogenous food fare, in order to locate their real food roots.  The real food and food preparations of our ancestors, before commercial food processing removed every trace of regional flavor and distinctiveness not to mention food value, are relics of the past that contain the gems and nuggets of generations of food wisdom that we can revive and celebrate today.

FOOD CULTURE

My grandmother hailed from the clan Chisholm. She was 100% Scottish.  My father, Papa, a big-boned sturdy man, is 1/2 Scottish.  I am 1/4 Scots. My daughter Carrisa, who is 1/8 Scots, is the one I call our "Scottish Gathering."  She is the one, with auburn hair, blue eyes, and fair, freckled skin, that all the Scottish genes "gathered" in.  She has always preferred a Seattle-like climate, runs for cover when the sun is out, and looks inordinately well in tartan.  Dare I mention, though I hear Scotland is very hip these days, that she would like to drag all of our Scottish DNA back to Scotland - to live and work one day?

So we in this family dig our "sheep and neeps" as the saying goes.  Imagine my surprise when I began investigating Scottish cuisine and traditional foods and discovered that we had already been tucking into quite a number of regional Scottish dishes.  I have always been inordinately fond of roast leg of lamb, rack of lamb, fresh wild-caught salmon, root vegetables of all sorts, berries of all sorts (I grew Tay berries when I lived in Seattle), cream, butter, and oatmeal for as LONG as I can remember.

With the Scots genius for quaintly naming their national dishes who would have known that I already enjoyed clapshot?  bashed neeps?  as well as a variation of rumbledethumps?

I still have cullen skink on my list of foods to try.

Unbeknownst to me we had already elevated bashed neeps (aka rutabagas), though it sounds like something a hockey player would eat, to a place of honor in the family.  Papa is quite passionate about his dish of rutabagas.  It would be unthinkable for us to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner without the traditional dish of rutabagas at hand.  Only we never knew what to call the dish did we?

I should have known, when my nephew Matthew and his wife Sydney returned from a visit to Glasgow and Edinburgh commending, though I must have lost something in the translation, a Scottish national dish called neeps, that we were on to something.

So for all you Scottish fans out there here is my recipe for bashed neeps.  I hope to post a picture later.

Bashed Neeps


1 pound rutabagas, peeled and diced
butter
pinch of sea salt


Steam the rutabagas until they are tender.  Though the traditional method is to bash the neeps by hand.  I prefer to bash my neeps in the food processor, with a good knob of butter and a pinch or two of sea salt, for a really creamy smooth texture.

I think I need to make a dish of bashed neeps for Papa today.

For an interesting and informative discussion of the traditional Scots diet I refer you to Katherine Czapp's article "The Good Scots Diet" at the WAPF website.