Bere – the barley landrace. Exploring its potential with growers. Forming a Bere network. Visiting sites in July 2023. Shared expertise and experience.
By Lawrie Brown
An exciting new initiative involving volunteer growers across Scotland is using a tricot participatory selection approach [1] with the purpose of understanding and selecting the best Bere varieties for different production systems and locations. We are building a growing network of interested growers, currently 16 in total, who were sent starter packs early in the spring. Each participant received seed for 3 barley types, 2 Beres (with different origins) and 1 control (a modern cultivar) which have been sown this season and observations, samples and measurements are being collected.
Taking the view on our bere barley trip around Scotland (Lawrie Brown)
Edinburgh to Orkney| Hebrides to Aberdeen
In June, we had the tough job of visiting as many of the participants as possible. This involved a road trip across Scotland visiting a range of sites from Edinburgh and Aberdeen to Stirling, Argyll, Oban and the Isles of Coll, Lismore, South Uist and Orkney. This was a fascinating trip as we learned of the various personal motivations and interests for growing Bere barley from bread making to distilling and heritage conservation to feeding cattle. We met some really interesting people along the way who opened their doors to us and it was great to see small pockets of Bere being reintroduced to sites around Scotland.
The trial sites this year were small (usually plots of 2 x 6 m) as we had a restricted amounts of seed for distribution. However, next year we will be able to supply larger quantities for larger trial areas and more volunteer participants. Growers were free to apply whatever treatments they wished with some applying seaweed and/or manure as fertiliser while others trialled different tillage treatments. Most were grown without any weed control.
Left – on a smallholding near Colintraive, Argyll, this newly cultivated land had been overrun with rushes and bracken. Centre – on the Isle of Lismore where different tillage methods have been trialled. Right – at Dunrobin Castle where bere is grown with wild flowers for traditional whisky making. (Lawrie Brown).
Shared experience | sharing knowledge
We are looking forward to collating all the data at the end of the season so we can see if specific beres prefer particular environments or treatments and the results will be shared with all growers through online groups and/or face-to-face workshops.
By working together and sharing experiences and information we hope we can all learn something new about the opportunities this ancient grain, Bere barley, can offer Scottish growers.
Left upper – at Glen Lonan near Oban, plots had a seaweed addition plus a kelp foliar spray. Right upper – at a croft on South Uist, bere sown late but already showing advantage of fertilisation with seaweed. Left lower – enjoying the weather in Isle of Lismore. Right lower – plots near Stirling. (Lawrie Brown)
Join the Bere net?
If you would like to get involved in next year’s trials and join the network or find out more, feel free to contact me on lawrie.brown@hutton.ac.uk.
Lawrie works at the James Hutton Institute as a Research Scientist in the Plant Soil Interactions group of Ecological Sciences. Lawrie’s colleagues Molly Brown and Tim George were also involved in visiting the disperse and remote locations around Scotland.
References | sources | links
[1] ‘Tricot’ is short for Triadic comparison of technology options – “a research methodology that helps farmers to identify the most suitable technologies for the local conditions of their farm .… engages farmers as ‘farmer researchers’ in the testing or validation of new crop varieties and other promising technologies”. To find out more about the Tricot approach, visit the Alliance Bioversity & CIAT site at Tricot Aproach. Guide for large-scale participatory experiments. The 2020 report by van Etten and co-authors can be downloaded there. The Alliance’s wider aims in climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation and malnutrition an be viewed at their home page.
[2] For more about bere on this web site: Bere barley at the Living Field gives a introduction to the plant and crop . Bere country shows areas grown with bere and barley in the first crop census in Scotland, 1854. Bere in Lawson’s Synopsis for the different forms of bere and other old barley varieties trialled by the Lawsons (seedsmen) near Edinburgh in the 1800s. For links to all this web site’s articles on bere, including recipes, see Bere line – rhymes with hairline.
Upper – Lauriston Farm, Edinburgh, the first to be sown back in March 2023, the grain to be supplied to a local bakery. Middle -at Granton Walled Garden, Edinburgh, where the modern cultivar was showing signs of manganese deficiency. Lower – on the Isle of Coll, where the modern cultivar was struggling to survive. (Lawrie Brown)
Ed: thanks to Lawrie for introducing the Bere net – pleased to hear that the article has helped to recruit more growers (11 Oct 2023)
A summary of various articles on bere and other barleys from the Living Field project. First records of barley in the late stone age (neolithic). Structure – six-rowed, two-rowed (and four-rowed?). Origins of bere uncertain. Its name – from bere to bigg. Bere not exclusively Scottish – similar forms reported from mainland Europe in the early 1800s. Geographical distribution mostly to the north in the 1850s. Bere’s decline in the 1900s.
Bere – an ancient grain
Bere is one of a group of cereal or corn crops grown at the Living Field garden near Dundee [1]. It is a landrace of the barley group. As a landrace [2], it is maintained from year to year from saved seed – and has been for centuries in Scotland. Each year, plants suited to the climate will leave more seed than others less suited, so gradually the characteristics of the population may shift. The bere grown in a particular region may become adapted to the climate and soils of that region.
The Living Field got its bere seed from Orkney – from the Agronomy Unit at Orkney Collage and from Barony Mills – and though very little bere is now grown outside a few fields in Orkney, collections held at the James Hutton Institute include bere and other landraces from several northern locations. Bere is quite distinct from other old barley varieties such as Spratt and Old Cromarty.
Bere maturing in a field on Orkney mainland, taken 3 August 2018, showing (left) stems and downward curving ears, most leaf now withered, and (right) single ear with its vertical rows of grain and long awns.
Barley originated to the east of the Mediterranean Sea. Seed was gradually brought across Europe until it eventually reached Britain 5000-6000 years ago [3]. Barley ears with grains are first recorded at neolithic or late stone age settlements, and repeatedly through Bronze and Iron ages and onwards [3]. They are best preserved where the ears holding the grain had been charred in a fire.
Bere and similar types of barley therefore have a long history in these Islands. Yet it is unclear whether those grown by neolithic settlers started a line that led directly to the bere recorded in the 1800s and that present today. There was repeated migration of people from Europe from the earliest times, and it is not hard to imagine that seed would have been brought across the sea on many occasions.
Bere and other barleys have been one of the main staple grains of the region, along with oat and pea [4]. These ancient grains have sustained people for thousands of years, even up to the early 1900s. Today, bere is a heritage crop, but now getting needed recognition as a source of breeding material and a nutritious food.
The rest of this article presents some of the history of bere, including its fate after the 1700s, its relation to barley and the degree to which these two crops have been considered different.
Grains of bere, pea and oat (from left)
Structure – six-row, two row, four-row, naked and clothed?
To appreciate the various records from pre-history to the present, it is necessary to know a little of the structure of the barley ‘ear’ that holds the grains. Cultivated barley is defined by the row-structure in the ‘ear’. Grain sites are formed in triplets, on both sides of the ear’s rachis, a kind of stem. There are types in which all grains in the triplets fill. As the two set of triplets fill along the length of the ear, they form six vertical rows and are named six-rowed. There are also types where only two of the six fill, and these are named two-rowed. The unfilled grain sites appear as little ‘pegs’. The difference is clear when 2-rowed and six-rowed are shown side by side as in the photographs below.
Bere is generally included within the six-row group, because all six grains form and fill, but bere types have also been named 4-rowed, for example by the Lawsons, Edinburgh seed merchants, working in the 1800s [5], and also in a modern definitive UK flora [6]. In the four-rowed class, six grains form, but the outer two (the lateral ones) on opposite sides of the rachis merge into one row, so there are two rows of central grains and what appear to be just two rows of the four outer grains. The structure of bere can change on the same ear, leading to the Lawsons naming bere six- and four-rowed barley [5, see also 6].
The barley grown at the Living Field tends to hold its ears upright when they emerge from the top leaf, then they gradually bend towards the horizontal as the grains start to fill and as maturity approaches the ears move to hang down towards the vertical: bere (left) in early grain fill, showing three of its rows; and maturing two-rowed barley (right) where two of the four unfilled grain sites are visible as short pegs, one next to each filled grain.
The distinction is also made between naked barley in which the grains do not adhere tightly to the surrounding protective tissue, and hulled barley, in which the protective layers remain and are difficult to separate off.
The barley that has been found at prehistoric sites is six-rowed and variously naked or hulled. Bere today is mostly classed as a hulled barley, but as recently as the 1800s naked 4-rowed were still cultivated [5].
Bere in the historical records – is it uniquely Scottish?
The word bere and its variations have been in use for at least 9 centuries. Macleod [7] writes that in the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), covering usage from the 12th century to 1700, bere occurs also as bear, bair and beir. The other name by which it is known, big or bigg (from Old Norse Bygg) “does not seem to be in the DOST record” which implies it was pre-dated by bere and not recorded in use before 1700. It is also unclear whether bere and barley mean the same or different things in these early writings. Macleod cites the use of ‘barley beir’ for example.
Bere and barley were both in common usage in records of the agricultural improvements after 1700, for example in Andrew Wight’s account of travels around Scotland, 1778 – 1784 [8] and in the Old Statistical Account, 1791-1799 [9]. Sometimes both names are used when referring to crops at the same location, implying they were regarded as different crops, but at other times the distinction is unclear.
Large areas of lowland Scotland are barley country, as here on the Tarbat peninsular. Traditionally used for food, alcohol and livestock feed, but now only the latter two, with few exceptions.
By the early 1800s, the published information on crops had been greatly expanded, especially through the various descriptive lists prepared by the Lawsons’ seed company in Edinburgh, notably in 1836 and 1852 [5]. Most of the barley varieties were named under two groups. One they define as Four-rowed, of which there were 12 types, some local and some from overseas including those named African, Bengal, Himalayan and Peruvian. The second group, recorded as a different species [10] was Two-rowed or Long-eared barley of which there were 26 types, again some sourced overseas. They also distinguished what they called true six-rowed, comprising one or possibly two types and an unusual form named Spratt (which is shown among the images on this page).
Common Bere was among the four-rowed and was also named Barley, Bigg or Rough Barley. So the Lawsons are implying that bere was also referred to as barley among farmers and merchants. It seems that around that time, the term ‘barley’ referred to two-rowed types, but could also be used for the four-rowed, and was therefore a general name for all cultivated barleys, whereas ‘bere’ referred to the local representative of the four(six-)-rowed types.
One of the most interesting pieces of information in the Lawsons’ account shows that Scotland’s ‘common bere’ was by no means unique. One other type, named Victoria bere, was stated as being received from the Belfast Botanic Gardens in 1836 and undergoing improvement by field trialling and selection. Another type, named Square, was received by the Lawsons from M. Vilmorin and Co., Paris, and had the following character: “Differs from the Common Bere in being three or four days sooner ripe, and having a thinner skin; properties which it may have acquired by being grown successively in the more genial climate of France, and is probably the same variety.” It is likely but not certain that Square was grown in France but the authors report ‘it was cultivated extensively in some parts of Germany’.
So even as recently as the mid-1800s, bere was not seen to be a uniquely Scottish form of barley. Something very like it was grown elsewhere in Europe. Also, they include in the four-rowed group, two naked types – the Naked or Siberian (“Ear similar in shape to the Common Bere, but rather more distinctly six-rowed … “) and an earlier form named Old Scottish Four-Rowed Naked, neither of which were much grown at that time.
In the Lawsons’ account therefore, naked and hulled forms of 6- or 4- rowed barleys were still grown in the mid-1800s, as they were in the neolithic.
Occurrence in the 1850 agricultural census and later
The area and yield of crops in Scotland were first recorded in a major agricultural census in the 1850s. The statist Thomas Thorburn presented averages of sown area and yield for each of the Old Counties and they have been were arranged by the Living Field on a map of Scotland [11].
The circles on the maps below represent the area of crops placed at the centres on the old counties. For reference, the internal boundaries show current administrative areas. Bere is shown on the left and barley on the right. Over the whole country, barley occupied about 10 times more area than bere, but at that time even barley covered a much smaller area than the main corn crop, oat. Bere, though present in most counties, was mainly grown in the north.
Distribution of bere (left) and barley (right) from the 1854 census. Each circle represents the area of crop in one of the pre-1890s counties. For a circle of given size, crop areas are 10 times greater for barley. Orkney and Shetland formed one area in the census: bere represented by the large circle just above Orkney; the arrow on the right pointing to the small area grown with barley. Full description at Thorburn’s Diagrams [11].
The 1850s census recorded yield in bushels, a measure of dry volume. A bushel does not necessarily measure the same weight in different grain lots since it varies with the density of the grain and the amount of chaff [11]. Converting census records from bushels and using the same conversion for both bere and barley indicates that bere yield was 80-90% of barley yield over Scotland as a whole but similar in northern counties at 1.5 to 2.0 t/ha. (Modern barley yields are typically 5 to 6 t/ha.)
One of the fields sown by Barony Mills on Orkney in 2010, the harvest used to make beremeal (flour): for the main image, a photograph of a green crop (as inset) has been reduced to grey but with the infra-red accentuated to show the structure – the characteristic ‘leaping fish’ (www.livingfield.co.uk).
Decline
The agricultural census continued in the 1880s, after a break. By 1912, bere occupied 5.4% of the total barley, so quite a bit down as a proportion of the total from the 1850s. The total barley itself was only 20% of the area sown with oats.
During the 1920s, 1930s and up to 1944, bere was still mentioned in the census, its area was not given separately but included with barley. In the 1950s bere was no longer mentioned – barley area alone was given alongside oats, wheat and rye.
[To be updated as further information on bere becomes available.]
[5] The Living Field article Bere in Lawson’s Synopsis summarises work by the Lawsons, seed merchants working from Edinburgh in the 1800s. Their main works are: (1) Peter Lawson and Son 1836. The Agriculturist’s Manual. Edinburgh, London and Dublin, (2) Lawson and Son. 1852. Synopsis of the vegetable products of Scotland. Edinburgh: Private Press of Peter Lawson and Son. Copies are available online via the Biodiversity Library and Google Books.
Of the four-rowed types they write – “middle grains on each side forming a distinct straight row; lateral ones forming a kind of double row towards the base, but uniting so as to form one row towards the extremity of the spike; so that instead of being named four or six-rowed, they might with more propriety be named four and six-rowed barleys.”
On the definition of naked: “The difference in naked and other barleys, consists in the palea, or husk, separating from the grain in thrashing, as in common wheats.”
[6] Stace C. 1991. New Flora of the British Isles (second edition 1997). Cambridge University Press. The following appears: “Usually the three fertile florets per triplet produce 6 vertical rows of caryopses in the spike, but in some cultivars the 2 lateral rows of triplets on opposite sides of the rachis are superimposed producing four vertical rows (Four-rowed barley)”.
[7] The Living Field article Bere, Bear, Bair, Beir, Bygg summarises the use and origin of words for bere as related in – Macleod, I. 2005. Cereal terms in the DOST record. In: Perspectives on the Older Scottish Tongue. Eds Kay CJ, Mackay MA, pp 73-83, Edinburgh University Press. Reproduced online in the Scottish Corpus of Text and Speech Document 840.
[8] Wight, A. 1778-1784. Present State of Husbandry in Scotland. Extracted from Reports made to the Commissioners of the Annexed Estates, and published by their authority. Edinburgh: William Creesh. Vol I, Vol II, Vol III Part I, Vol III Part II, Vol IV part II, Volume IV Part II. All available online via Google Books. For more at the Living Field on Wight’s observations – Great quantities of Aquavitae, Great quantities of Aquavitae II and The Mill at Atholl.
[10] The taxonomic naming of barley in not consistent. The Lawsons named four-rowed as Hordeum vulgare and the two-rowed as Hordeum distichon, as does Stace [6] who commented that they were ‘better amalgamated’. Most authorities today [e.g. 13] group them as one species, Hordeum vulgare, and distinguish the forms as sub-species.
[11] The Living Field article Thorburn’s Diagrams gives a summary of the 1850s crop census: Thorburn T. 1855. Diagrams, Agricultural Statistics of Scotland for 1854. London: Effingham Wilson. The Living Field article Bere Country gives maps of bere and barley in the 1850s based on Thorburn’s county averages. For more explanation of bushels and other measures of dry volume: Light on bushel and Grain measures in Ancient Greece.
[13] Wallace, M., Bonhomme, V., Russell, J. et al. Searching for the Origins of Bere Barley: a Geometric Morphometric Approach to Cereal Landrace Recognition in Archaeology. J Archaeol Method Theory26, 1125–1142 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-018-9402-2
Another comparison of bere (left) and a two-rowed barley, Golden Promise, both grown in the Living Field garden.
Contacts
All the bere and barley – except those photographed in Orkney fields – were grown at the Living Field garden at the James Hutton Institute near Dundee by Gladys Wright and Jackie Thompson. Geoff Squire assembled the text above.
Photographs by squire for the Living Field www.livingfield.co.uk and curvedflatlands www.curvedflatlands.co.uk web sites.
Author / contact: geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk and geoff.squire@outlook.com.
A note in the Bere-line – a survey of bere barley, an old corn landrace. Distribution of bere and barley in the 1850s: bere to the north and west, barley to the east and centre. Loss of bere and many other crops from the late 1800s. Declines in crop diversity.
Previous notes in the bere-line compared bere barley and the improved two-row barleys in several collections and census records from the 1800s. By the 1850s, bere was still recognised and catalogued in terms of several variants [1] but most named types of barley were of the two-row form.
In the crop census of 1854 [2, 3], itself a milestone in the description of agriculture, bere occupied about 10% of the area of barley, but was still recorded throughout the country.
Distribution of bere in the 1850s
The census of 1854 was based on the pre-1890s counties, administrative areas that had been in existence, though not unaltered, for many hundreds of years [4, 5]. A map of the counties is shown at Sources below.
The areas sown with bere and barley in 1854 are shown in Fig. 1. The centre of each circle is positioned near the centre of one of the old counties. The map is partitioned into present administrative areas [6].
The area of each circle represents the relative area of crop in each county. The largest circle in the bere map is about 3000 acres (1,200 hectares) while the largest on the barley map is 28,000 acres (11,300 hectares). The map appears to show no or little bere or barley was grown in the western islands, but they were part of mainland counties at that time, so the crops grown there were included within circleslocated on the mainland.
Fig. 1 Distribution of bere (left) and barley (right) from the 1854 census, each circle representing the area of crop in one of the pre-1890s counties. The largest bere circle is about ten times smaller than the largest barley. The dashed line near the top indicates Shetland is displaced downwards in this depiction. Orkney and Shetland formed one area in the census: bere on the left represented by the large circle just above Orkney; the arrow on the right pointing to the small area grown with barley. Click on the map to see a larger image. Original map outline from [6]. Source of data [3].
The distribution of bere confirms it was grown country-wide, from the Borders to Orkney and Shetland. Yet the areas sown to bere were very small in counties to the east and south east. It seems to have almost faded out in these places but remained strong in the north in Caithness, in the south-west in Argyll and in the northern islands, Orkney and Shetland. Bere was therefore grown in colder, wetter climates and poorer soils than could be profitably grown with the two-row types.
At this time, barley was the preferred crop in the east central and south east, which are now the typical, high-yielding grain producing regions of the country. Barley was not the major cereal in the 1800s. Oat was still grown over a much greater area. But the regions occupied by barley in the 1850s are those in which it rose to dominance in the period 1940-1960 to become by far the most widely grown cereal.
Bere’s decline
One of the main difficulties with charting the fall of bere is the absence of reliable records before and in the early 1800s.Even its decline into the early 1900s is obscure because barley and bere were combined in the annual census of area and yield [7].
The reasons for bere’s later decline to near extinction are uncertain and would have differed between regions. The improving two-rowed barleys were probably easier to manage and more reliable yielders than bere in most parts of the country. There were regional variations – in Shetland, for example [10] the barleys as a whole declined fourfold from 1890 to 1930 and then continued to fall due to a rise in rotational grass and sheep.
Many changes occurred in the 150 years from the 1854 census, including major reductions of other crops – other than grass – grown for animal feed, including turnips and swedes, forage (leaf ) brassicas, grain legumes and mashlum, a traditional crop mix of oats and beans [8]. The loss of bere was part of that change.
Yet bere did not die out. This traditional landrace is still grown and finding high-value uses in food and drink [9, 10]. There’s hope still – buy some bere meal and get cooking!
Author/contact: geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk. Gladys Wright and Jackie Thompson grow the bere and barley crops in the Living Field Garden.
[3] Thorburn T. 1855. Diagrams, Agricultural Statistics of Scotland for 1854. London: Effingham Wilson. More at this Living Field article on Thorburn’s Diagrams. Original available in part through the web.
[5] Shires of Scotland (Scotland historic counties before 1890) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shires_of_Scotland gives the history of the counties and map. The map opposite showing counties by number, except Orkney and Zetland (as it was then named) is from Undiscovered Scotland at Scottish Counties until 1890.
[6] Scotland map, outline with modern administrative regions: www.d-maps.com, free map, edited by the author.
[7] Agricultural Statistics 1912. Acreage and live stock returns of Scotland. Board of Agriculture for Scotland. HMSO. A useful starting point since it gives crop-areas back to 1902.
[10] For a summary of cereal growing on Shetland, its decline and potential: Martin, P. 2015. Review of cereal growing in Shetland. Agronomy Institute, Orkney College. To find the PDF online, search for ‘cereal shetland agronomy institute 2015″.
Our correspondent Grannie Kate sent these recipes for scones made with a flour mix that includes bere meal. Bere is a traditional landrace of barley grown mainly in northern Scotland but now confined to a few fields in Orkney.
Find out more about the bere plant, its origins and its products, and also Grannie Kate‘s other recipes, at the links at the bottom of the page.
Grannie Kate’s fruit and nut scones with bere barley
Makes about 6/7 scones
Ingredients
3 oz (75g) self raising flour
3 oz (75g) bere barley flour
1 heaped teaspoon of baking powder
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 oz (25g) soft brown sugar
1 oz (25g) butter or margarine at room temperature
1 large egg
2 oz (50g) sultanas or sliced cherries or mixed fruit (whatever you have in the cupboard)
2 -3 tablespoons milk
Flaked almonds
What to do
Pre-heat the oven to 200/220 C or gas mark 8
Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl
Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs then add the fruit
Beat the egg in a small bowl, add the milk to the egg and then add both to the mixture, stirring it all in. If the mixture is a bit stiff add in a little more milk
Turn the dough out onto a floured worktop and make into a round about 1 ½ – 2 cm deep, patting it with your hand until smooth
Use a cutter (whatever size you like ) to cut out the scones, putting them onto baking parchment on a tray. Add flaked almonds to the top of each scone
Brush a little milk onto the top of each scone
Bake for 12 – 15 minutes until golden brown with slightly singed almonds.
Grannie Kate’s cheese scones with bere barley
Makes about 6/7 scones
Ingredients
4 oz (110g) self raising flour
2 oz (50g) bere barley
1 oz (25g) butter at room temperature
1 heaped teaspoon of baking powder
2-3 tablespoons milk
3 oz (75g) grated strong cheese ( e.g. cheddar, Prima Donna aged Gouda)
1 large egg
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dried mustard powder
2 good pinches of cayenne pepper
A liitle extra milk
What to do
Pre-heat the oven to 180/200 C or gas mark 7
Mix the flours, mustard powder and salt in a large bowl but just one pinch of cayenne pepper
Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs then add most of the grated cheese. Leave a little to add to the top of each scone before putting in the hot oven
Beat the egg in a small bowl, add the milk to the egg and then add both to the mixture, stirring it all in. If the mixture is a bit stiff add in a little more milk
Turn the dough out onto a floured worktop and make into a round about 1 ½ – 2 cm deep, patting it with your floured hand until smooth.
Use a cutter (whatever size you like) to cut out the scones, putting them onto baking parchment on a tray. Or you could just leave it as a big round and make wedges by pushing down with a knife until it almost, but not quite, cuts the dough
Brush a little milk onto the top of each scone, then add a little remaining grated cheese and the last pinch of cayenne pepper
Bake for 12 – 15 minutes until golden with the cheese on the top melting down the sides.
Grannie Kate’s back with a new use of bere meal ….. she writes …
“Fed up of ‘days old’ fish from the supermarket? Try stopping a local fish van to see the beautiful produce on sale!
This was what I did last Friday morning at 9.50 a.m. precisely and bought some haddock (landed that morning) from a mobile fish merchant from Anstruther.
The van horn was tooted loudly in the Main Street and behold people silently appeared to purchase from a wide selection of sea food displayed in the back of the refrigerated van. The old word ‘fishmonger’ seems to be out of fashion these days, ‘fish merchant’ now the preferred description
Home made fish and chips then, for tea, using my mother’s recipe for coating the fish before frying in oil. Haddock (and other white fish) tend to break up in the frying pan if they are fried without coating them first.
Fresh haddock from the sea and …… earthy bere meal from Barony Mills!
What to do
Place a large tablespoon of bere barley on a plate and then (if preferred) mix with white flour, e.g. another large tablespoon or less depending on your taste.
Grind sea salt and black pepper into the flour to season it.
Crack a fresh free range egg into a small jug and whisk it until the yolk is well mixed with the white.
Wash the fish ( this is important especially if the fish is not as fresh as you would wish and actually smells; remember, fresh fish does NOT smell!). Cut the fish in half lengthways to give 2 portions. Then cut again diagonally across the portion to give two or three smaller pieces or goujons. You now have about 6 goujons of fresh haddock.
Dip each goujon into the egg, shake off the excess egg wash then place onto your flour, rolling it around until it is covered. Repeat for all the haddock pieces.
Add some light cooking oil into a frying pan and heat – to test the temperature is right add a little bit of flour to the oil and it should start to bubble up immediately.
Add all your goujons to the oil, fry for about two or three minutes on one side, then two or three minutes on the other on a medium heat.
Lift out with a fish slice onto some kitchen towel and blot lightly to remove excess oil.
The goujons should be light brown with a thin crispy coating of bere meal on the outside.
Serve with fresh garden peas and homemade chips. Add salt and vinegar or wedge of lemon and perhaps some tartare sauce!
The Living Field’s resident bread expert, Gill Banks, has been out and about, speaking to people on the merits of real bread, as part of The Crunch.
At the first event, at the Maxwell Centre, Dundee, on 1 July 2016, Gill and Linda Nell contrasted some of the ancient grains grown in Scotland, such as emmer wheat and bere barley, with modern cereal varieties, and showed how fine, nutritious bread could be baked from bere and other corn.
Here we look at the raw materials used to make bere bread ……. and also Gill’s experiments with somethingmore exotic.
Bere bread
Bere is an old form of barley, known by that name for at least a few hundred years. It is still grown in Orkney, from where the Living Field got its first stocks of bere seed. The crop is now grown in the Living Field garden each year. Seed is harvested and saved for next year’s crop.
Bere grows easily to form an attractive stand shown in the lower of the images above. As the heads or ‘ears’ fill with grain, they bend on their stems and hang down (upper left). Each grain has a long thin awn sticking out from near its top. The grains are typically 7-10 mm long but the awns are 15-20 cm long. (A long-awn corn!)
The image top right shows mature grain (light brown) harvested in a previous year, the awns removed; and for comparison, some green, unripe grain from this year’s crop, the awns still attached. The thin panel centre right is a closer view of the grain.
To make meal or flour, the awns and outer protective coating of the grain have to be removed and then the grain is ground between stones. The Living Field can grind bere and other grains in its heavy rotary quern, but the meal Gill uses to make bread is bought from Barony Mills in Orkney.
[Gill’s recipes for making bread with bere will be published in separate post.]
Cricket bread
Following the first event in The Crunch, at the Maxwell Centre Dundee, Aisha Schofield from Dundee Science Centre suggested adding cricket flour to one of the bread recipes. Cricket flour is made from insects.
An experimental insect loaf was duly produced from Gill’s kitchen, using a meal mix that included ‘cricket flour’ from Cornish Edible Insects (images of their insect produce below).
A tasting panel was quickly assembled. All agreed that the bread had the taste and texture of a wholemeal or ‘ancient grain’ loaf. Nice and fulsome with butter. There was no evidence (by sight, feel or taste) of insects in the bread – there were no wings sticking out of the slice and no unusual pincers or other crunchy bits. It was just tasty wholesome bread.
By coincidence
A student from AgroParistech France, Benjamin Lepers, visited the Institute in 2015 as part of his project year. He studied diversity of wild plants in farmland and also the invertebrates (insects and spiders) living on different types of vegetation, such as the barley crop, grass patches and mixed dicot weed patches.
He then went on to work for a few months at a new enterprise called Entomo Farm – Farming Insects for Animal Feed, which started in 2014, based in Bordeaux France. Their web page states that Entomo Farm has developed a self contained and transportable system for insect farming called the Entomo Box, which enables mass production of insect meal and insect oil anywhere with very few resources.
Benjamin was intending to move on to Laos. He’ll find plenty of insects and exotic foods there. The Living Field would love to hear from him about his exploits.
…. and more on Gill Banks’ experiments with bread to follow ….
Cornish Edible Insectshttp://cornishedibleinsects.co.uk. A business started 2015 aiming to produce ‘high quality foods and cooking ingredients using some of the finest insects the world has to offer.’
Entomo Farm Read more about the Entomo people and their aims and methods at: (link disabled, Jan 2017).
I make shortbread biscuits regularly with my 3 year old granddaughter Ellie, who loves making a mess and ‘helps’ me.
Shortbread biscuits can be a bit dense so I always use self-raising flour (or a mixture of SR and plain flour). I usually add semolina to give a slight crunchiness to the biscuit. However, I had only a small amount in the bottom of the packet. So, I substituted bere barley for the semolina.
The resulting dough was too dry and so extra milk (or buttermilk to be more traditional) was added – about 2 tablespoons – so the dough could be rolled easily without it breaking up.
What to do
Preheat oven to 150 C or gas mark 2. Melt the butter or soften in the oven for a few minutes then cream the butter and sugar together ( use a hand held electric whisk) until the mixture is light and fluffy. Add all the dry ingredients, then mix again. Add milk to make the dough stick together.
Roll out the dough on a floured surface and then use cutters to make the biscuits into rounds or other shapes. Transfer to a greased baking tray or use baking paper and make small pricks in the biscuits using a fork.
Bake for 20 min then turn the trays around and bake for a further 20 minutes. Remove the biscuits when they are a light golden brown. This makes a good 40 biscuits or so, depending on the size of the cutter. Cool them (if you can) before eating!
Variations
Add a handful of dried cranberries or sultanas to the mixture before you roll it out. Little helpers love doing this, but often eat the fruit before it gets into the biscuit mixture!
Comments from the tasting panel
“Shortbread can lack body. The beremeal gives it serious character.”
“Good cohesive strength when wet – doesn’t disintegrate between tea-mug and mouth.”
Bere and barley both named in Andrew Wight’s journeys of 1778-1784. Bere as the substrate for aquavitae. Bere as a nurse for grass. Bere seed maintaining its mass to volume ratio. Bere fertilised with seaweed.
Andrew Wight, a farmer from East Lothian was commissioned to undertake a series of tours in the late 1700s to examine and report on the state of agriculture in Scotland. His work was published anonymously between 1778 and 1784, but is invariably referred to by his name, and quite rightly, since it was a major undertaking and the best single guide to the state of agriculture during the long ages of improvement (reference below).
He travelled by horse to mainland areas, meeting farmers, tenants and landowners and noting the improvements, or lack of them, to husbandry .
Throughout he refers to both barley and bere, sometimes in the same place, which suggests he considered them different things, presumably bere being the 6-(or 4) row types and barley the 2-row.
He related many anecdotes about bere. Here are a few of them on the journey north from Inverness to Sutherland.
Great quantities of Aquavitae, Ferintosh distillery, Black Isle
He visited the area around Ferintosh, on the Black Isle, owned by Forbes of Culloden. Ferintosh was …. “famous for the great quantities of aquavitae made there under exemption from duty. I am told that there are no fewer than 1000 distillers in that place, wholly occupied in making spirits, utterly neglecting their land, which is in a worse state than for many miles around”. He goes on to write “great quantities of bear are imported from the neighbourhood, and malted there as Ferintosh bear: Not only so, but quantities of aquavitae made elsewhere are carried to market as Ferintosh”. [Ninth Survey Vol IV.I, p. 238].
Of those areas supplying the distilleries was Fowlis, which ‘ .. near the Cromarty Firth has access to seaweed and lime is imported from Portfoy … and bear finds a ready market at Ferintosh.” [p 239]
So you can imagine all these bear harvests from all around, going, not into mouths of people and animals as meal, but to distilleries at Ferintosh, and whisky coming out for export; and everyone so involved in making the stuff that the land went to waste.
But these days bear grain contributes to only a few specialist malts. Most are made from two-row barley.
Wight implied that exemption from duty was granted as a monopoly to that particular estate before the Union, and became ‘destructive to fair trade’ and ‘the occasion of manifold frauds’. Back-handers and dodgy labelling – what’s changed? But the distillery went out of business in around 1785, presumably because other distillers complained abut the unfair exemption.
Bear as a nurse crop for grass
At Invergordon, he writes …. ‘Wheat on this strong land was very good; barley after turnip excellent; beans and pease are never neglected in the rotation; oats in their turn make a fine crop; but above all, the old pasture excels. Later, at the same place, he tells of a method used to protect new-sown grass pasture.
The farmers anticipated a demand for hay or grazing the next year that current grass fields could not supply. So what could they do? They could sow more grass late the present year (September), but what could be done to avoid the seedling grass being damaged over the winter. The solution was to sow grass (which then included various legumes and ribwort plantain with rye-grass) and then … he related….
‘Three firlots of bear were sowed at the same time upon the acre, intended as a cover for grass during the winter …… The bear grew vigorously, and covered the surface during the severe months, but died away on the approach of warm weather.’ The bear seed was sacrificed, it seems, to solve the problem ‘when grass-feeds must be sown in the wrong season’. [Ninth Survey, Vol IV.I, p. 248-250]
Bere fertilised with seaweed
Repeatedly, the writer points to farmers who use lime or marl to reduce acidity, and dung to replenish nutrients taken from the soil by previous crops. Soil fertility was probably the major limitation to maintaining yield.
At Lochbeg, Sutherland, about Mr Gilchrist, the proprietor, he writes “His mode of cropping is one half (the land?) under bear, manured with sea-weed, which is spread on the ground directly, and mixed with soil in spring in two ploughings. Three firlots sowed yield seven bolls per acre.” [Ninth Survey, Vol IV.I, p 307].
Bere seed maintaining its mass to volume ratio
On the Route Homeward, he calls in at Castle Grant. “One thing is extremely remarkable with respect to bear on this farm. Though, time out of mind, no feed has been used but what is produced in the farm itself, yet it never degenerates. To this day a boll of bear, measured by a firlot of 32 pints weighs 20 stone Amsterdam’. And he goes on to write that it degenerates every where else after three or four years sowing, ‘Yet this country lies high, and the climate is cold and stormy.’
An uncertainty in interpretation here seems to be what is meant by the word ‘degenerates’. All cereal harvests consist of grain (seed) that is used for food or sale and the supporting and protective ‘stuff’ around the grain – the stem, the spiky awns, the coverings. A good harvest has a high proportion of grain to all the rest. But grains will only grow to their full extent if they have enough nutrients from the soil.
We have noticed in the Living Field Garden, where bere and other cereals are maintained by saved seed, that the plants might put out all the supporting and protective materials, but if nutrients are short, then the grains do not fully fill. The resulting harvest is not heavy per unit volume of material.
A crucial feature of the bere on the estate that Mr Wight refers to seems to be that the ratio of volume to mass of grain (firlots to Amsterdam stones) is maintained over time. The heaviness does not decline presumably because soil nutrients removed by the crops are replaced by nutrients from elsewhere on the farm and this happens ‘time out of mind’.
This may be a case of highly effective, scientific, nutrient management centuries ago – before labs, remote sensing and intelligent machines.
Farewell Mr Wight
And he writes a farewell to Volume IV.I: “Having now no ground to survey, and having been long out, I proceeded with the utmost expedition homeward, to make up the loss that my absence occasioned in my private affairs.”
Many thanks Mr Wight!
[There will be more from Andrew Wight in future notes on the Bear line – rhymes with hairline].
Sources, references, contacts
Wight, A. 1778-1784. Present State of Husbandry in Scotland. Exracted from Reports made to the Commissioners of the Annexed Estates, and published by their authority. Edinburgh: William Creesh. Vol I, Vol II, Vol III Part I, Vol III Part II, Vol IV part II, Volume IV Part II. All available online via Google Books. With thanks.
Ayrshire in the age of improvement. Contemporary accounts of agrarian and social improvement in late eighteenth century Ayrshire. 2002. Edited by David McClure. Published by Ayrshire Archaeological and Natural History Society. [The introduction gives background to Andrew Wight’s mission and journeys.] Available online.
