What Is “Normal” Food?
The Desk Book Club: ‘Between Two Waters’ by Pam Brunton (Part I)
Between Two Waters: Heritage, Landscape, and the Modern Cook by chef Pam Brunton asks us what “normal” means in the context of Scottish food within the first few pages. Is “normal” the food traditional to the landscape, or the food that has come to be ubiquitous through global trade and migration?
“I know that when we opened Inver, we set out to cook and serve something we called ‘modern Scottish’ food – in part as a reference to the current ‘modern British’ trend we’d left behind in London, and in part because we didn’t know what else to call it. We were in the midst of this most iconic of Scottish scenery, using produce from local farms, gardens, hills and waters, and taking inspiration from traditional food culture and historic recipes (including a century-long handwritten cookbook collection inherited from my great-aunt, Ann Simpson). It seemed like a fair claim.
We have spent the last decade explaining ourselves to each other, to the press and to our guests. But something hasn’t quite settled in my mind. Like jolting a bucket of new vinegar as you rack off the clear liquid from the murky sediment at the bottom, fragmentary thoughts are stirred up every time the phrase comes up. Modern Scottish food. Normal Scottish food. The two are not the same. But why?” (page 4)
I was sent Between Two Waters before its release to consider for a blurb, and I immediately said yes. Brunton’s work at her restaurant Inver gives shape to my hopes and visions for more regional food systems: It’s not about shutting out “new” flavors, but rooting the cuisine in what is nearby. “Local” now has conservative connotations—perhaps it always did—but because my food system brain was forged through reporting on and then living in Puerto Rico, I have always believed that using the local as the foundation can be a way toward self-sufficiency, otherwise known as food sovereignty. We can all eat everything from everywhere, but can we ground it in where we are to support the infrastructure that will feed us when shit hits the fan? Here, she’s presenting possibilities in the deeply specific that remind me a lot of the ideas about biodiversity presented in Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction, which we read to end 2024.
