F Marian McNeill's The Scots Kitchen

Hugh Grant, the actor most renowned for playing the stereotypical Englishman, has an oddly Scottish name. If you have ever pondered this, you might be interested to know that the Grant clan were considered by their fellow Highlanders to be Southern softies. Why? Because they were renowned for preferring the cabbage to the nettle when it came to their main soup ingredient.

I learned this, and many other snippets of culinary information, from one of the classic Scottish books of last century, F Marian McNeill's The Scots Kitchen recently revived by Mercat Press (at £9.99). Written by Miss McNeill in the late 1920s, it has been described by food maven Derek Cooper as 'the best book written about Scottish food'. Although in part a collection of 'old-time recipés', some of them waning in popularity long before the writer's heyday, it also contains a potted, but fascinating history of Scottish food, complete with examples and footnotes from folklore and literature.

As a Scot of French lineage, I was proud to find the Franco-Scottish glossary showing how much of Scots cooking owes itself to the Auld Alliance, including petticoat tails (petits gastels) and haggis (hachis). John Knox was not happy with extravagant feasting, complaining that ministers' stipends were not being paid as a result! After a 1581 ruling, the oat bannock and the kale-sprout were once more the thing.

Part of the book's appeal lies in knowing you need never set about some of the more complex recipés: concocting hare soup (hares have the 'sweetest' blood, apparently) and potting salmon roe with saltpetre ('cover them with a piece of writing-paper upon which lay a coating of hog's lard... tie over all a piece of dressed sheepskin') are clearly from the days when a hired cook had most of the day to prepare the evening's meal. You can also derive pleasure from knowing you never need chomp on powsowdie (sheep's head stew) or, the dish for which I reserved my sourest thoughts, limpet stovies.

Those up on their Scottish food will not need explanations of classic dishes such as rumbledethumps, cullen skink or black bun, but I wonder what modern Scots would make of the following, all of which you can try if you seek out this book: auld man's milk, snoddie, stoorum, neep purry, krampus, noyau, bawbee raw, whim-wham, ustin, soor poos, oon, knotty tam, stoved howtowdie, gundy, hatted kit, fitless cock, inky-pinky and cadger's brose.