Tag: bere

Bere scones

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
  1. Pre-heat the oven to 200/220 C or gas mark 8
  2. Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl
  3. Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs then add the fruit
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. Brush a little milk onto the top of each scone
  8. 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
  1. Pre-heat the oven to 180/200 C or gas mark 7
  2. Mix the flours, mustard powder and salt in a large bowl but just one pinch of cayenne pepper
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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.
  6. 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
  7. Brush a little milk onto the top of each scone, then add a little remaining grated cheese and the last pinch of cayenne pepper
  8. Bake for 12 – 15 minutes until golden with the cheese on the top melting down the sides.
Links on the Living Field web site

More on the bere plant, its history and its products at The bere line -rhymes with hairline and Landrace 1- bere.

More recipes using bere at Bere bannocks, Bere shortbread and Seeded oatcakes with bere meal.

Many thanks to Grannie Kate for her recipes using flour (meal) from bere barley.

 

Bere battered fish

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!

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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

  1. 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.
  2. Grind sea salt and black pepper into the flour to season it.
  3. Crack a fresh free range egg into a small jug and whisk it until the yolk is well mixed with the white.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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!

Delicious………!
Links

The bere meal was sourced from Barony Mills in Orkney. For more on Orkney bere, see: Bere line rhymes with hairline and Landrace 1 Bere.

And for other bere recipes on this site – Bere bannocks and Bere shortbread and Seeded oatcakes with bere meal …..

 

Great quantities of aquavitae II

The store-house of Foulis; more from the Andrew Wight on his journey north of the Cromarty Firth in 1781; improvement and innovation in 1700s farming; feeding oxen and horse; ‘a man of enterprising and comprehensive genius’; bere and barley.

In ‘Great quantities of aquavitae‘, the farmer-traveller Andrew Wight commented in 1781 on the denizens of Ferintosh, on the Black Isle,  who “utterly neglecting their land, which is in a worse state than for many miles around” preferred to spend their time distilling bere (barley) malt than tending soil and growing crops.

Among places supplying grain to the Ferintosh whisky trade in the 1780s was (he reported) the farmland of Foulis (also spelled Fowlis), on the opposite, northern, side of the Cromarty Firth. Mr Wight rode his horse the long way round, but now Foulis is only a few minutes drive from Ferintosh over the bridge.

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The Store-House of Foulis

Andrew Wight did not write about the girnal or store-house at Foulis Ferry Point. It was built 1740, that is 40 years before he passed by on his journey north from Inverness  (and that’s about 275 years before now). It was built to store grain before it was shipped off to market or paid to people in kind for work or favours.

The grain was grown by the estate or paid as rent by the tenants of the estate. They would grow grain on a farm or allotment and pay some to the landowner. Beaton (1986) reports accounts that the total barley received at the Store-House of Foulis in 1784 came to to 169 bolls two firlots. Example of payments ranged from 98 bolls one firlot from the tenant of Mains of Foulis to two bolls from a slater.

The Store-House of Foulis (map reference NH 599636) today has been well restored, with its fine slate roof and well harled walls (images above). Though sometimes called Foulis Ferry Point, the ferry ceased to operate in the 1930s. New buildings have grown around the site housing a visitor centre, restaurant and shops.

There area is rich in these store-houses or girnals as they were called, along the Cromarty Firth and up to Portmahomak. Beaton (1986) gives a map of locations.

Andrew Wight’s comments on the area

Mr Wight (IV.I p 241 onwards) writes about the crops, the farm animals, the owners, the improvers, the tenants and the peasants. Here are some excerpts from his journey along the north side of the Cromarty Firth from Fowlis eastward.

Of Fowlis (Page 233), he regales against the old practices – “having a baulk between every ridge, upon which were heaped the stones removed from the ridges; the soil was taken off every third ridge, in order to ameliorate the two adjacent ridges; and the crops alternately oats and bere; and to this bad practice was added the worst ploughing that can be conceived.” But after the land was improved by the then owner, he reports (page 235) a wheat yield of ten bolls per acre.

And on the same estate, Robert Hall, the farm manager of Fowlis  ‘introduced a crop, rare in Scotland and an absolute novelty in the north, which is carrot. (…..) The farm-horses are fed on carrots instead of corn; and they are always in good condition.”

I rejoice to see six yoke of oxen

At Novar he remarks on the poor inherent quality of the soil, which is more than compensated by the desire of the estate to effect improvement to a degree that today would be thought of as ecological engineering.

He notes “Oxen only are employed both in cart and plough. I rejoiced to see six yoke of oxen in six carts, pulling along great loads of stones, perfectly tractable and obedient to the driver. They are all in fine order, and full of spirit. They begin labour at five in the morning, and continue till nine. They are then put upon good pasture, or fed with cut clover, till two; when a bell is wrung, and all are ready in an instant for labouring till six in the afternoon.’

At Invergordon, he comments on seven crops: “wheat on this strong land was very good; barley after turnip excellent; beans and peas are never neglected in the rotation; oats in their turn make a fine crop; the old pasture grass excels.”

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Agriculture, manufactures and commerce, the pillars that support the nation

Several pages are devoted to the contribution of George Ross of Cromarty, MP a man of “enterprising and comprehensive genius”.  He started a hemp manufacturing company employing many people and exporting coarse cloth to London and then a brewery for  strong ale and porter, much of it “exported to Inverness and other places by sea-carriage”.

On Ross’s  agriculture: “it is wonderful to see barren heath converted into fertile cornfields; clover and other grasses rising luxuriantly, where formerly not a blade of grass was to be seen; horse-hoed turnip, and potatoes, growing on land lately a bog; ….. hay, not known here formerly, is now the ordinary food of horses and cows”. He also cures and exports pork:  “… he carried me to a very large inclosure of red clover, where there were 200 hogs of the great Hampshire kind feeding luxuriously.”

Ross works on a plan for improving the harbour and entertains “sanguine hopes that government will one day establish a dry dock near the harbour for repairing ships of war in their northern expeditions.”

Ed: Writing in 1810 after Ross’s death, Mackenzie (1810) states that the hemp trade was “now in a flourishing state. From (the year beginning) 5 January 1807, there were imported 185 tons of hemp; and about 10,000 piece of bagging were sent to London”.  Ross was not so far off in his hopes for ship repair – Mackenzie refers to a ship being built there in 1810, and today there are deep anchorage and rig maintenance.

Eight fields, eight crops in sequence

Later on page 257, Wight comments on Mr Forsyth of Cromarty who manages a small farm divided into eight fields, and cropped as follows: “First potatoes, horse and hand hoed, with dung; second, barley; third, clover; fourth, wheat; fifth, peas; sixth, oats or barley, with grass seeds; seventh, hay; eighth pasture. … in this way ‘kept in excellent order, with the advantage of dung from the village”.

Throughout his journeys,  Andrew Wight speaks his mind, always ready to praise good farming and condemn poor practice. (You can sense these journeys are more than a job.) And while he accepts the social divides of the time – he was commissioned by the wealthy – notably between the landed gentry and their peasants,  he condemns those of the former who ignore, ill treat or exploit and praises those who support and encourage the people to improve their lot by agriculture, manufactures and commerce.

Other points to note are that legume crops (fixing nitrogen from the air) were common in crop rotations  and that bere and barley are both mentioned but no clear distinction is made between them (see link to the Bere line below).

Sources

Beaton, E. (1986) Late seventeenth and eighteenth century estate girnals in Easter-Ross and South-east Sutherland’, In: Baldwin, J R, Firthlands of Ross and Sutherland. Edinburgh, pages 133-152. Available online: http://ssns.org.uk/resources/Documents/Books/Ross_1986/09_Beaton_Ross_1986_pp_133-152.pdf

Mackenzie, G S. 1810. General view of agriculture of the counties of Ross and Cromarty. London: Phillips.

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 IV part I. (See Great Quantities of aquavitae for further reference and web links).

More on the Foulis girnal

Canmore web site. Foulis Ferry, Granary.  https://canmore.org.uk/site/12905/foulis-ferry-granary Notes on history with references.

Am Baile web site: Foulis Ferry http://www.ambaile.org.uk/detail/en/20423/1/EN20423-foulis-ferry-near-evanton.htm

Images

Those in the upper set were taken of the Foulis Store-house and its surrounds on a visit in August 2016.

There were no ‘yoke of oxen’ around Foulis and Novar in 2016,  so the Living Field acknowledges with thanks use of photographs from Burma (Myanmar) by gk-images, taken February 2014 (permission granted by the handler to take the photographs). The quotes below the images come from Wight’s text of 1784, and apply well to this magnificent animal).

Links to posts on this site

More from Andrew Wight on his travels in this region: Great quantities of Aquavitae and Great quantities of Aquavitae II.

The distinction between barley and bere: The bere line – rhymes with hairline and Landrace 1 – bere.

Maps of potato. legumes and vegetables in the region in the twenty-tens (and the relevance of this land over the last 2000 years?): Can we grow more vegetables?

Contact: geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk

Bere and cricket

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 something more exotic.

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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.

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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 ….

Sources, references

Barony Mills bere meal http://www.birsay.org.uk/baronymill.htm and see the following on the Living Field site Landrace 1 – bere and The bere line – rhymes with hairline. And for other bere recipes – Bere shortbread, Bere bannocks and Seeded oatcakes with bere meal.

The Crunch – The Wellcome Trust https://thecrunch.wellcome.ac.uk/

Dundee Science Centre The Crunch

Other Hutton Crunch events: Feel the Pulse

Cornish Edible Insects http://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).

 

 

 

Bere shortbread

Ingredients

10 oz self-raising lf_brbsc_750_gsflour ( not plain)

1.5 oz dried semolina

3.5 oz bere barley flour

8 oz butter

5 oz castor sugar

and a pinch of salt.

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.”

“A real biscuit – you can taste the bere.”

“Can’t stop eating them…”

Sources, links

Recipe by Grannie Kate

Beremeal from Barony Mills Orkney

Links to pages on this web site:

More baking with bere barley: Bere bannocks, Seeded oatcakes with bere meal

The bere line – further links and pages on the history and uses of bere barley

Landrace 1 – bere – for information on the Orkney bere landrace

Bere, bear, bair, beir, bygg – variation on the name in Old Scots

Great quantities of aquavitae

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.

A note in the Living Field’s Bere line …..

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.

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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.

See also on the Ferintosh Distillery (closed 1785): lost distillery.com/06ferintosh/ryefield.html

For a growing list of bere notes, articles and recipes on this site: Bere line …

Bere bannocks

This recipe is an adaptation from the booklet ‘Barony Mills – Bere Meal Recipes’ from Birsay, Orkney.

Ingredients

lf_brbncks_gk1_550a100 g beremeal

60 g self-raising flour

40 g rolled oats

2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

250 ml milk

What to do

Mix all the dry ingredients together then add enough milk to make a soft dough. Turn out onto a board coated with beremeal/oat. Flatten by hand until about 1 cm thick, then make rounds using a pastry cutter (7 cm). Bake in the centre of the oven at 170/180 degrees  C for about 10 minutes, then turn the bannocks and bake for 5 minutes. Alternatively, bake on a dry griddle or pan on the top of the cooker for about 5 minutes each side. This makes a batch of about 8 bannocks. Alternatively, shape into a large round, mark out 8 segments and bake for about the same time.

Notes

The original recipe was used by the Creel Restaurant, St Margaret’s Hope. In addition to the beremeal,  it  used 100 g plain flour and no rolled oats. I have substituted this with 60 g self raising flour which gives a bit more ‘lift’ to the product. The rolled oats also seems to make the bannocks lighter, almost a cross between bread and a scone!

The crucial thing in baking bannocks is to get the proportions right – proportions of the dry constituents with the right amount of raising agent, in this case baking powder.

Barony Mills is Orkney’s only remaining working mill – and a water-powered one at that. It produces traditional Orcadian beremeal, a speciality flour with a nutty brown colour and a distinctive flavour, which has been used in this recipe.

Recipe by Granny Kate

Links on this site

Seeded oatcakes with bere meal

The bere line – further links and pages on the history and uses of bere barley

Landrace 1 – bere – for information on the Orkney bere landrace

Seeded oatcakes with bere meal

A recipe by for oatcakes made with wholemeal flour, rolled oats and bere meal, with a few extras.

Ingredients

90 g bere meal
50 g wholemeal flour
140 g porridge oats
1 teaspoon sugar, 8 twists of black pepper
1 large teaspoon salt
10 g butter or margarine (optional)
75 ml good oil like olive oil or Scottish rapeseed oil
Experiment with seeds like black onion seeds, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, golden linseed – just a handful.
Boiling water (variable)

What to do

Heat the oven to 160-170 degrees C and grease a large baking tray.

Add the dry ingredients to a bowl and mix well. Add the chopped butter and mix in by hand, as if you were making pastry. Add the oil and then mix together using a spoon or by hand.

Add boiling water, a small amount at a time until the mix comes together as a round ball. Flour the surface and roll out the dough to about 1 or 2 mm. Using a plastic or metal cutter, cut rounds and place them on a baking tray.

Bake for 20 minutes then turn over and bake for a further 10 minutes.

Cool the oatcakes and then eat with cheese or humous! Delicious! The above recipe makes about 30 oat cakes.

Comment

Beremeal has a distinctive flavour – along with haggis and whiskey, one of the distinctive tastes of northern cornland. You can replace some of the bere meal if you wish with medium pinhead oatmeal and follow the same instructions.

Alternatives
Try adding a handful of chopped fresh herbs like parsley or thyme instead of seeds.

Beremeal sourced from Barony Mills, Orkney.

Recipe by Grannie Kate

For more on bere barley and crop landraces Bere line – rhymes with hairline

The bere line – rhymes with hairline

Rhymes with hair line …..

In Landrace 1 – bere the query arose as to whether there was a bere line from the neolithic (late stone age), a line of transmission of bere (barley) seed from the first settlers in these regions to the present day. Another question was when bere and barley became  distinct – they are the same plant species, but just look a bit different, close up.

So since bere is our most famous and still-grown-in the-wild-but-only-just cereal landrace, the Living Field will explore the bere line as a fairly random walk through time, backwards and forwards that is,   putting facts and photos on this web site as we find them.

At some point in the future, we might order them into a chronological list, starting with the earliest and ending with the most recent, but ‘random’ suits us for now.

As an introduction, here are some photographs of bere barley on the left compared with a 2-row barley on the right.

Links to articles

Introduction to the Living Field’s work on bere and other ancient grains
Description of landraces
Bere and old barley in historical accounts

Landrace food

Related

 Living Field garden

Bere heads in 2016, the lower mature, the upper still green, and from the latter, a few green grains with awns attached, contrasted with clean, dry grain from a previous year

Contact: geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk

{Last update: 18 October 2021 with new images and links]

Bere in Lawsons’ Synopsis 1852

Lawson and Son’s bere and barley varieties, 1836 and 1852. Bere and two-row barley clearly distinguished. Several extant bere landraces, attempts at improvement. Types like bere grown across northern Europe.

In their Synopsis of the Vegetable Products of Scotland (1852), Lawson and Son list the names and characteristics of all varieties of crops and other useful plants known to have been grown or tried by them or their correspondents in Scotland. The 1852 Synopsis built on their earlier Agriculturist’s Manual (1836). They must have been growing all these different types of plant in their experimental gardens and plots near Edinburgh throughout the 1830s and 1840s if not earlier. Their Synopsis was a major achievement. It has not been surpassed.

Was bere listed?

Under barley, ‘Common Bere’ is listed among the four-rowed barleys (see note below on four- and six-rowed barley), but of particular interest are several other types that appeared very close to bere. Since most of these types were kept and grown from saved seed, they made a set of landraces, certainly not pure and probably overlapping in many characteristics.

Title page of the Synopsis of 1852, scanned image set on a field of bere in greyscale (Living Field collection)
Title page of the Synopsis of 1852, scanned image set on a field of bere in greyscale (Living Field collection)

So was common bere a distinct type? Lawson and Son frequently used it as a standard, comparing others to it in terms of structure and timing. For example, there were types that looked the same as bere growing on mainland Europe, one of which was ‘probably the same variety’. Then there was the higher yielding ‘Victoria bere’, and several naked forms (the ‘husk separating from the grain in thrashing, as in common wheats’), including ones said to be superior to the ‘Old Scottish four-rowed naked’. There were also several four-rowed types originating from other parts of the world, outside Europe.

Was there more than one bere landrace?

Their account, while not mentioning separate landraces within the bere grown in Scotland, suggests a situation more complicated than a single class of northern barley landrace that was generally called bere.  The name ‘Victoria bere’ suggests bere could be of different forms. The Living Field has not yet found evidence from subsequent records of what happened to the various bere-like barleys. Did any become more widely grown? Were they all classed as bere in some future time?

In the Lawson’s time, and for another century, oat was the main cereal here, but as barley increased in area and overtook oat to become the most widely grown crop today, it was mainly the two-rowed barley that came through. Certainly, most of the four-rowed recorded by Lawson and Son seem to have disappeared.

So – from the Lawsons’ books and records – bere in Scotland in the 1800s was structurally distinct from two-rowed barleys, but was not   that distinct from a range of bere-like forms grown on mainland Europe and beyond.

The Lawsons’ books also give evidence of the wealth of international connexions in the seed trade and in the desire of farming to seek improved crop varieties wherever they could be found, whether from a few unusual ears in a field in Scotland or from occasional samples from Nepal, Morocco or … the list is endless.

Further details of bere and other four-rowed barleys

Lawson and Son distinguished four-rowed, six-rowed, two-rowed and an usual type named ‘fan’ or ‘sprat’ barley.

Presumably reflecting the usage at that time, they classed bere and several other barley types as four-rowed. In their earlier Agriculturist’s Manual (1836) they write of Common Bere and types similar to it – ‘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.”

Common bere is described as ‘ear about two and a half inches long, containing about 60 grains … and ‘awns or beard about three and a half inches long, adhering to the grain’. In their Agriculturist’s Manual, they state the bere grown in 1835 in trial plots in Edinburgh was sown 7 April, in ear 27 June (81 days) and ripe 12 August (127 days).

The description of the type referred to as Victoria bere suggest attempts to improve the existing landrace. This type ‘produces longer straw, is longer eared, often containing 70 to 100 grains”. Where did it come from? A Mr Fulton, in Ayrshire, is credited with ‘bringing the Victoria bere under the notice of cultivators in this country’. He obtained a few ears of it from the Belfast Botanic Gardens in 1836 and he must have bulked seed for extensive trialling from those ears.

Several others are compared with common bere. Winter white has ears thicker and longer than bere, and its grain sample is coarser. Sown in the autumn it acts like a modern winter variety, ripening earlier than the spring types, but it can also be sown in spring, ripening later. Winter black also had ears larger than bere, but of a ‘black or dark bluish colour’ best sown autumn because if sown late in spring it will not mature the same year.

The variety Square is evidence of similar varieties to bere grown on mainland Europe, being cultivated in France and Germany. It differed from the common bere by being ‘three or four days sooner ripe, and having a thinner skin’. There authors suggest it is probably the same variety (as common bere).

Also, the variety Naked (also known as Siberian barley), which superseded the ‘Old Scottish Four-Rowed Naked‘, which is ‘still a favourite in many districts of Scotland’. Naked’s ears are similar in shape to the common bere but rather more distinctly six-rowed, containing a much greater number of grains. It was grown extensively in the north of Europe, and even in parts of France, and despite ‘its cultivation now almost abandoned … it certainly deserves a fair trial in this country, particularly in the north of Scotland, where it might form a valuable acquisition on account of its earliness, being ripe about a week before the Common Bere’.

Of the 11 other four-rowed barleys listed, some are from overseas, for example African also known as Tangier or Morocco barley (stated as no longer cultivated), Bengal, Nepaul or Himalayan introduced 1817 and Peruvian (described as a superior six-rowed).

Note on Six rowed barley

Entries on six-rowed barley include only two types, one of which is imported from China, but appears the same as the other listed, True Six-Rowed Barley. They describe the awns of this adhering to the grains ‘with great tenacity’ and ‘the coarsest in sample of any of the barleys, but hardy and prolific’, sown as a winter or a spring type, and nearly a fortnight longer to maturity than bere.

Sources

Peter Lawson and Son. 1852. Synopsis of the vegetable products of Scotland. Edinburgh: Private Press of Peter Lawson and Son

Title page: Prepared for the Great Exhibition and dedicated to William Jackson Hooker, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew. Peter Lawson and Son describe themselves as ‘Seedsmen and Nurserymen to the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland’. [The notes above are from a copy of the original book. The text is also available as a scanned version – search for its title at Google Books].

Peter Lawson and Son 1836. The Agriculturist’s Manual. Edinburgh, London and Dublin.

Full title: The Agriculturists’s Manual ; being a familiar description of the Agricultural Plants Cultivated in Europe including practical observations respecting those suited to the Climate of Great Britain ; and forming A Report of Lawson’s Agricultural Museum in Edinburgh by Peter Lawson and Son, Seedsmen and Nurserymen to the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland. Available online at biodiversitylibrary and at books.google.co.uk

Links

Further sources on Bere and barley  at the Living Field can be found at the following page: The bear line – rhymes with hairline

Author/contact for this page: geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk