The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood

by Diana Gabaldon

  Cooking equipment and utensils were very basic, and cooking was a necessary chore that held none of the creative appeal seen in today’s ergonomic and sanitary kitchens. The woman of the house prepared and cooked her family’s meals from her perch on the edge of her stool, with only the dim fire to light her efforts, unless the family could afford an oil-burning rush lamp for additional lighting.

  The cast-iron girdle (griddle) was nestled into the ashes of the fire and used to bake bannocks and oatcakes. The kettle for cooking the family’s porridge and pottage was either balanced on top of the fire or hung just above it, from a chain attached to the ceiling. The pot was perpetually filled morning to night with the family’s next meal, bubbling away unobserved while the woman of the house completed the rest of her exhaustive list of chores, including the backbreaking work of fetching water for cooking and cleaning, as well as hauling back and stacking the peat cut by the men in the fields to ensure a constant supply of fuel for the fire.

  In stark contrast to the dim picture painted of the crofter’s living space and cooking area were the large—sometimes vast—kitchens in clan castles and large homes, which were generally housed on the building’s lowest level and equipped with at least one major hearth and chimney. The inventory of large equipment would have included a brick oven beside the hearth for baking, as well as a stew hole in the wealthiest and most up-to-date of kitchens.

  The stew hole was a raised freestanding structure that allowed the cook to stand instead of sitting or crouching at the hearth and was a precursor to the cast-iron stove. A fire was built in the base, and pots were set on grates over the fire to cook or warm, depending on their distance from the heat.

  In addition to iron kettles and girdles, the list of small equipment would likely have included spits to turn the meat and fowl, copper and clay pots, a variety of knives, tongs, ladles, mallets, sifters, and molds, all designed to make the preparation of modern, more refined foods faster and easier.

  Meal times were also dependent on class and status. While breakfast in a croft was an almost nonexistent pre-dawn sup of milk and a bowl of hastily consumed porridge or brose, praise was sung from as far as London regarding the wide variety of fish and meat available at the laird or clan chief’s morning feast, taken later in the morning. Supper was a light evening meal for all classes, with the exception of celebratory feasts, and was usually leftovers from that day’s most substantial meal, dinner, which was eaten at or around midday.

  Defeat at Culloden saw the systematic destruction of the clan system and a need for cash to satisfy the demands of the court in London. These changes were at least partially responsible for the switch in the Highlands from a barter economy to a cash-based one. Tenant farmers who had paid their rent with labor and goods in kind for generations now found themselves unable to come up with the coin their landlords demanded.

  Over subsequent decades, the majority of the land was enclosed for grazing and, often, entire townships evicted to make room for more-profitable sheep. The more fortunate evictees were relocated to the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, while the less fortunate were transported to faraway colonies such as Australia and North America, most never to see their homeland again. Many of the poor that arrived on America’s Atlantic shores moved into the backcountry, including wilderness areas of North Carolina like the fictional Fraser’s Ridge.

  To begin, their diet remained based primarily on boiled grains and vegetable stews, although they quickly adapted to incorporate a number of locally grown ingredients such as corn (maize), beans, squash, and collards, a close cousin to kale. Potatoes, which were still new to the first emigrants forced from the Highlands, became an important staple. The lush natural larder of their new home also regularly provided animal protein, in the form of small game and birds, resulting in a much more varied and nutritionally complete diet for all.

  Because they were released into the woods as young shoats to run wild until they matured, hogs were relatively simple and low cost to raise. Eventually, much of the North Carolina and surrounding colonies’ diets were based on pork and corn, with the average person consuming five pounds of pork for every pound of beef.2 This “hog and hominy” diet, as it came to be called, stretched across all levels of society, with the wealthiest consuming the choicest cuts of the animal and leaving their workers and slaves with what remained. All parts of the animal were consumed or repurposed, and the diet was supplemented with a bevy of collard greens or cabbage.

  As they had been at home in the Highlands, smoking and salting were the primary means used to preserve meats and fish. Potted meat, the process of sealing cooked meat in fat, was another common technique. Salted meat was perpetually on the menu in most homes and taverns. Hogs were never slaughtered in summer, and their meat was seldom eaten fresh, except after a large slaughter, when giant smoking pits would be dug and people were invited for miles around to join the feast. The great tradition of Southern barbecue originates from these early gatherings.

  In their new home, fruits and vegetables were dried and pickled, then packed in fresh straw to sit alongside cheese and barrels of salted meat, as well as cider and beer, in the cool air of small underground house cellars. In cold seasons, fresh meat was also stored for short periods of time. Those without such spaces stored food for a short time in springs or wells, in containers set into the cold water. Only the very wealthy, as well as large dairies, possessed separate icehouses.

  In the homes of plantation owners, large farmers, and wealthy merchants, traditional foods were being transformed at the hands of their African cooks. Spices were used heavily to enhance flavors as well as to disguise spoiled meat in the warm climate. Vitamin-rich “pot likker,” the previously discarded cooking water in which vegetables had been slow-cooked, was now kept and savored. Slave cooks produced fried chicken and fritters, adding the African method of deep-fat frying to the growing list of new cooking techniques.

  Access to cheap sugar, for centuries so costly as to be out of the reach of all but the very rich, meant that everyone could now afford to make puddings, custards, and other sweet treats regularly. The imposition of heavy taxes on staple foodstuffs also resulted in dietary changes. Examples include the replacement of the popular molasses-based rum with liquor made from locally grown corn and the rise in popularity of coffee as the supply of tea dried up leading up to the American Revolution.

  The settlers’ wooden backcountry cabins were small; however, they included a fireplace with hearth and chimney, an important improvement over a croft’s centrally located fire on the floor. As it had been back home, cooking of any meal was a major undertaking and equipment was basic. Activity was centered on the fireplace, with the cast-iron pot hanging from a chain or rod over the wood fire and the baking kettle and/or girdle nestled into the ashes of the fire.

  In larger households, the kitchen was often separated from the house to keep the heat, smells, and staff far from living quarters and guests. These kitchens contained the same basic equipment and tools as found in backcountry cabins but better made and from higher-quality materials. In addition, more-expensive inventory, such as mechanized spit jacks and stew holes, made the cook’s job faster and easier, while allowing more control over the final taste and appearance of the dish.

  The other large feature of wealthier kitchens—including those of the burgeoning middle class, such as merchants and tradesmen—was the presence of a bread oven, either beside the hearth or outside the house. Baking was an all-day affair undertaken once per week and involved the baker rising early to prepare her dough and light the fire within the oven. Once the fire had reduced to ashes, the oven floor was swept clean and the loaves and pies placed inside, with the help of a long wooden or cast-iron peel. The oven door was then closed and the contents left to bake. It was often well after dark when a day’s baking was finally done, and meals on these days were generally leftovers or simple stews that could be left to cook unattended.

  Much like it had been in the Highl
ands, breakfast was taken early if you were poor and later for those of greater means. For most, it began with home-brewed cider or beer and a bowl of porridge cooked overnight in the embers of the fire. It was among the Southern planters that breakfast became a leisurely and delightful meal, more like our modern brunch, featuring large spreads of breads, cold meats, and cheese.

  Dinner was the main meal of the day, served in early afternoon. A typical wealthier family in the late 1700s served two courses for dinner. The first included soups, meats, savory pies, pancakes and fritters, and a variety of sauces, pickles, and catsups. Desserts appeared with the second course, which included an assortment of fresh, cooked, or dried fruits, custards, tarts, and sweetmeats. “Sallats,” or salads, were more popular for supper, a light meal served just before bed, but were sometimes served at dinner to provide decoration for the center of the table.

  The life of an eighteenth-century Highland crofter was one of constant toil and strife. The workday was long, food scarce. And while their relocation to the Americas resulted in death for some and a cruel loss of country and family for thousands more, eventually those who survived in the New World adopted a life of continuing hard work but greater food and nutritional reward. The increase in protein and variety of diet undoubtedly fueled many Highlanders’ rise from crushing poverty and their contribution to the fight for their new nation’s independence.

  * * *

  1 Jamieson, John. Scottish Dictionary and Supplement: In Four Volumes. Supplemental Kab-Zic, Volume 4, 1841, http://bit.ly/1aPCLCc.

  2 Taylor, Joe Gray. Eating, Drinking and Visiting in the Old South: An Informal History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

  PART NINE

  MAPS AND FLOOR PLANS

  LALLYBROCH—FIRST FLOOR

  What you’re looking at here is the original house, as built by Brian Fraser for his bride, Ellen MacKenzie. The house would have been added to over the years, as was common, and so the house that Roger and Brianna acquire in the 1980s would have a couple of additional wings and, of course, would have had interior renovations, particularly in the kitchen.

  I have, however, indicated the location of the priest’s hole (and the mudroom that disguises it), which was installed by Jenny at Claire’s behest, prior to the ’45 Rising.

  I’ve never bothered thinking out a floor plan for the house before, so when sitting down to do it this time, I made some effort to reconcile what I know of the house with what viewers have seen of the televised version. So the floor plan you see here matches the rooms you’ve seen in the show—with one minor exception: given where the reception room is, in the center of the house…there’s no conceivable way (given the normal construction methods of the eighteenth-century Scottish Highlands) that there would be an open hearth in that room.

  Chimneys were always at the ends of the house; I’ve never seen a building of that vintage with a central chimney stack (and, in fact, you don’t normally see a chimney in the middle of any house; they’re always located on an outer wall, for both structural and operational reasons).

  Naturally, the very excellent set designers for the show wanted the hearth there for visual reasons, and, television being what it is, they can have anything they want.

  LALLYBROCH—SECOND FLOOR

  Again, I made an attempt to reconcile a reasonably traditional floor plan with the purely visual version produced by the TV show. It’s reasonable for there to be a gallery running outside the Laird’s Room (from which Claire can observe MacQuarrie holding a gun to Jamie’s head), but as the Laird’s Room also has a hearth (and is therefore at one end of the house, that being where the chimneys are), and we saw a staircase with a noticeable turn, I was obliged to do some fancy internal engineering of the stairs when we reached the second and third floors.

  LALLYBROCH—THIRD FLOOR

  As those of you who have been watching Downton Abbey (or Upstairs, Downstairs, in an earlier age) know, the servants’ quarters of a big house tended to be small, spartan, and on the top floor. Lallybroch is no exception in this regard. In later years of the house’s existence, some of these small rooms may have been knocked into larger ones or serve as attics rather than living space.

  LALLYBROCH ESTATE

  You can see from this map some of the complex operations that having an estate entailed and why people who had estates had a lot of servants and employees. Somebody had to be tending the dovecote, the kailyard, the goats, and the horses. Somebody had to be excavating a new pit for the necessary house every year or so. Somebody had to be harvesting grain, malting it, then fermenting and distilling. All of this outside the normal household operations of food preparation, clothing manufacture and mending, and just keeping the general chaos of life under control.

  One thing I like about the television staging of Lallybroch is that they show things breaking down (the mill) and people constantly repairing things in the background. Lallybroch is a working farm, and the word “working” is apt.

  ERASER’S RIDGE—BIG HOUSE (ORIGINAL)

  As Jamie hasn’t yet finished building the New Big House, we don’t know quite what it will look like. But this is the general layout of the original house that he built for Claire. (Obviously the Fraser men are given to ambitious constructions….)

  The usual construction of this period and place would likely have been slightly more simplified, with a four-up, four-down sort of layout. However, Scottish manor houses have much more complex layouts (owing in part to their evolution over many generations), and Jamie grew up in several of these. He also needed to provide Claire with a decently large, well-lighted space in which to conduct her surgery—which means that the Big House sported more and bigger windows than were usual, as well as having a more complex downstairs floor plan.

  I don’t think we have ever seen any business of living being conducted in the front parlor. This is probably a reflection of the fact that people wealthy enough to have a front parlor didn’t use it, save for ceremonial occasions like a wedding or funeral. And if you contemplate the realities of housekeeping (with children) in a time when a twig broom, a rag mop, and a bucket of water were your only tools, you can see why not.

  PART TEN

  THE METHADONE LIST

  o…you’ve re-watched the first season of Outlander, the TV series, twenty or thirty times and your family is becoming restive about not being able to watch football or play video games, and you’ve gone through all the Big Books (again) and all of the Lord John novels and all the novellas…

  And thus find yourself facing the Universal Question:

  WHAT THE HECK AM I GOING TO READ NOW?!?

  Oddly enough, people ask me that pretty often. So, some years ago, I started “the Methadone List.” This is a brief descriptive list of books that I personally can recommend for quality. I’m a very eclectic reader, and thus the Methadone List has a wide variety of titles, everything from the easily recognizable genres to the frankly odd and indescribable.

  Now, everyone’s tastes are different, and I don’t expect y’all to like all the same things I do—but you may find something here that appeals. I can guarantee that everything on the list is well written, has Deeply Interesting Characters, Excellent Plots, and good grammar.

  The first installment of the Methadone List was published in the revised and updated Outlandish Companion, Volume One, but I’ve updated it at intervals on my website (www.DianaGabaldon.com)—and will continue to add to it whenever I encounter (or remember) another excellent book or series.

  * The City Stained Red, by Sam Sykes.

  * God-Thing: And Other Weird & Worrisome Tales, by Amy Dupire.

  * The Long Way Home, by Louise Penny, the latest and tenth book in her Armand Gamache series.

  * Good crime fiction by a couple of Roberts that I know: Rob Byrnes and Robert Dugoni.

  * The Secrets of Pain, by Phil Rickman (Merrily Watkins Mysteries).

  * Thumbnail reviews of three of my favorite books: The Knife M
an, by Wendy Moore; Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez; and Haunting Bombay, by Shilpa Agarwal.

  * The Children’s Book, by A. S. Byatt.

  * The Kate Shugak series, by Dana Stabenow.

  * Pandaemonium, and other books by Christopher Brookmyre.

  I thought that when recommending books, when possible, I might include a small bit of text so as to give a taste of an author’s style. (N.B.: An author’s works are naturally copyrighted, but quoting a short passage for review purposes is considered “fair use.”)

  The City Stained Red, by Sam Sykes

  Sykes’s books are described most often as “epic fantasy”—which apparently means that they’re composed of serpentine plots executed by entertaining characters, and the humor is as high as the body count. While the setting is definitely of Another Place and Time, the people—and other things—you’ll meet there are so real that you’d like to hang out with them, if it wasn’t so dangerous to be in their vicinity.

  (In the Interests of Full Disclosure, Sam Sykes is my son, and while he’s never read any of my books—none of my children has; as my Eldest Daughter says, “I don’t want to read sex scenes written by my mother!”—he rather eerily seems to have inherited my pacing, my sense of dialogue, and my penchant for Extreme Vocabulary. I had no idea that sort of thing was coded for in DNA.)