The glories of Scottish cookery have had many advocates, but few as quietly eloquent as the food writer Catherine Brown, who has died aged 83. Her dozen books exploring every quarter of her northern realm, as well as years of journalism with the Glasgow Herald and the Scottish Field magazine, both provoked and recorded an explosion of interest in what her nation had to offer our stoves, palates and tables.
This turn to her home territory came after realisation that the cookery she was teaching her catering college students was entirely based on a debased lingua franca out of French haute cuisine and that they, and she, would do far better to contemplate the wealth of materials available on their own doorstep. The anecdotal high point of this conversion was her persuading luxury hoteliers to offer a dish of venison tripe (disguised under a Gaelic name) to unsuspecting tourists who, of course, found it excellent.
In a succession of books, such as Scottish Regional Recipes (1981), Scottish Cookery (1985), Broths to Bannocks (1990) and A Year in a Scots Kitchen (1996), she teased out the relationship between the kitchen and a country’s population, its landscape and its agriculture.
Pummelled by more than a century’s industrialisation and profound assaults on the traditional way of life in the Highlands and Islands, Scotland’s gastronomic reputation was at a low ebb by the 1970s. This she strove to recover by explaining recipes and methods that were perhaps only to be found in a few crofts and scattered settlements from the Shetlands in the north to Hawick in the south.
Catherine was born in Glasgow, to Barclay Braithwaite, a civil engineer, and his wife Catherine (nee Tonner). Educated at Hutchesons’ grammar school, she went on to study at the Glasgow and West of Scotland College of Domestic Science (now Glasgow Caledonian University), known familiarly to locals as the Dough School. A lifetime of teaching or of professional cookery could have beckoned, but she obtained a post as researcher for a project directed by Professor John Fuller at the fledgling University of Strathclyde’s Scottish Hotel school.
This was to look at British food and collect a repertoire of regional, domestic and folk recipes. The results appeared as British Cookery, edited by Lizzie Boyd, in 1976.
There did then follow some time when Brown was a teacher and a professional chef, most notably at the Loch Torridon hotel, on the mainland opposite Skye, where she achieved her triumph of introducing Scottish dishes to clients more used to international haute cuisine. Her affection for the west coast was there cemented and she was to live in a small village beside Loch Torridon for many years.
She began her writing career in the 1980s at the prompting of a Glasgow publisher who had heard Brown enthusing about Scottish food on the radio and thought she had a book in her. Scottish Regional Recipes was the consequence. At about the same time she began writing for the Glasgow Herald newspaper, ultimately as their food correspondent, writing a weekly column for 20 years.
Her advocacy of local suppliers and enterprising restaurants, enhanced by regular restaurant reviews in the Scottish Field, had a galvanising effect, for the way to improvement had to be educating the consumer as well as bigging up the producer. That education included alerting her readers to the perils of genetic modification of crops, or the decline of their raw materials through over-reliance on supermarkets.
Her re-edition of F Marian McNeill’s essential Scots Cookery, first published in 1929, underscored her membership of a pantheon that dated back to Elizabeth Cleland’s New and Easy Method of Cookery of 1755, “chiefly intended for the benefit of the young ladies who attend her [cookery] school” in Edinburgh and included the incomparable Meg Dods’s Cook and Housewife’s Manual of 1826 and such country-house classics as the Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie (1909).
This desire to place a recipe in its historical context was seen again in her participation in the European Union’s euroterroirs intiative, which aimed to catalogue traditional foodstuffs across the continent. The British component, written together with Laura Mason, appeared as Traditional Foods of Britain in 1999, published by myself, and was then rearranged as Taste of Britain from HarperCollins in 2006.
Brown may be better known to a certain generation as Auntie Catherine, the culinary adviser for the book Maw Broon’s Cooking With Bairns (2010), by which she gained honorary membership of the Broon family, featured in a strip cartoon in the Sunday Post since 1936, while teaching the children of Scotland the basics of cooking.
And if this were not enough, she was a co-presenter with Derek Cooper on the 1998 television series Scotland’s Larder, which travelled the length and breadth of the country interrogating producers, fishermen, distillers, brewers, butchers and every sort of cook.
Her work was so respected by her peers that she received many prizes, including three Glenfiddich food writing awards as well as a Guild of Food Writers’ Food Journalist of the Year.’
She is survived by her daughters, Esther and Ailie, from a marriage that ended in divorce (though she kept the surname Brown), and her grandchildren, Catie and Finn.
• Catherine Grace Brown, food writer, born 20 August 1941; died 28 November 2024
