A PAS visit to the crannog at Kenmore last year left me driving home down the motorway thinking deep thoughts, pondering the eternal question - What Do I Give Them To Eat Today ? - and wondering how I would have resolved it, had I been a crannog dweller. They don't seem to have had a cauldron, which is a scunner; you can make a wide variety of food in a cauldron, including (theoretically) meringues, but if all your cooking utensils are clay, wood, leather or stone, cooking is more of a challenge. Mind you, the heat from a peat or wood fire is fairly gentle, so you can put a clay pot on the fire, which helps. According to Dr Dixon, they had oats, wheat and barley, and a quern to grind them, there was milk from the cows, sheep and goats, and one could assume that the tribe included some half decent hunter-gatherers.

A fire burned perpetually on the hearth; the wind whistled perpetually through the wattles. Under these conditions, common sense dictates certain cookery techniques; in a crannog you would tend to dry food in the through-draught, reconstitute it by soaking, then heat and flavour it to have a hot meal with the hassle of cooking kept to a minimum. The heating can be done, if necessary, by fire-heated stones, either by dropping hot pebbles into a beaker of liquid, or by baking on a bake stone, or ,indeed, the hearth stone itself.

The easiest early morning meal, for example, might be ground oatmeal, soaked overnight, with honey, hazelnuts, fresh or dried fruit, milk or cream added, as available. Sounds familiar? Or you could add some hot liquid to dry oatmeal in a wooden coggie, and stir it up with a knob of butter to make brose. There are countless variations on this, and it is, relatively speaking, instant. Nettle Kail (de luxe) would be easy too; you would take young nettles, fresh or dried, infuse them in heated water, thicken it with a little oatmeal, and bring it back almost to the boil, then - the piece de resistance - add some oysters or freshwater mussels. You certainly would not want to cook this too much; you would end up chewing bits of rubber. Salmon ,too , only requires enough heat to set the 'curd', so you could wrap fillets in burdock leaves , or sourocks, and poach it gently in stone heated water, flavoured with minced wild garlic, thyme and crushed juniper berries. The herbs would provide the sourness we would get nowadays from a spoonful of lemon juice or vinegar.

Your girdle for baking is either the bake stone, (set up vertically to absorb the heat of the fire, and then laid almost flat to bake on), or else the hearth, with the embers and ashes swept to one side. You can make barley bannocks (barley flour mixed with whey, best eaten hot); or you can make a sourdough, if you want leavened bread. Sour-scones might even be the prehistoric version of blueberry muffins. Oatmeal is soaked in buttermilk for two or three days until it starts to ferment, at which point you add some wheaten flour, honey and blaeberries, and shape the dough into small cakes. These rise dramatically as soon as they hit the hot surface, and might be rather nice with a goat-milk cream crowdie, which is like a rich cottage cheese. You can make a savoury crowdie with wild garlic and herbs.

Or how about spit-roasted game stuffed with dried mushrooms? Or smoked trout? Or a haggissey concoction made from bits of venison, hung up in the smoke from the fire? Graddan? Sowans? Cranachan with wild raspberries?

There's quite a lot of scope for the crannog cook, and it might be quite fun, as long as plenty of people were prepared to take a turn at the quern.

Sadly, I doubt if they had the technology for distilling, so whisky and fruit liqueurs are not on the cards, but mead, herb beers, heather ale, wines made from birch sap and berries, even fruit syrups and cordials are all possible. And a wide variety of drinks can be made from milk, either thinned with soorocks, or fortified with egg and oatmeal.

NOTE. I do not believe that nettles were introduced into Britain by the Romans so that they could keep warm by flagellating themselves. Nettle shirts come into legends from places where no Roman ever set hob-nailed sandal.

I do not believe that all Celts eschewed fish. The whole Scots culinary tradition is piscatorially slanted. Salmon features rather a lot in legends too, usually in the process of being eaten. I do not believe that smoking fish was a Viking invention - it's so very much a logical extension of the drying process. In any case, any substance kept more than three feet from a crannog floor would get smeekit automatically.

I do not believe that the secret of whisky was imported from Ireland or that it was invented by St. Patrick.

But I remain open-minded about what was used for seasoning in crannog times. Where would they get salt from? Could they have made their juice from crab apples, and used it as vinegar. What other pot herbs were used for flavouring? What effect would gorse tips, darnel or carmeal (wild liquorice) have when added to ale? If any Pict with a strong head and/or digestive system would care to experiment, (or, indeed, would like to know how to make meringues in a cauldron) please feel free to get in touch.

Molly Rorke.

Currently in Scotland there are a couple of us who think there is some evidence for distilling as early as the 6th/7th centuries! See Taliesin's Harrowing of Annwn and Adomnan's Life of Columba in which there is a reference to sicher - which means spirituous liquor! Ed.