Pam Brunton’s book is an exploration of what she terms, ‘landscape cuisine’ in which the experience of eating any one dish or a whole meal, is the sum of the history and ‘today’ of the land, sea and peoples who produced it. For her this is about being a caring perpetual student willing to learn how to work with the land, not against it, recognising that there are ecological limits, a requirement for interdependence and an acknowledgement of ‘enough’ rather than purely economic gain.
As she sits writing at Inver, her multi award winning restaurant, on the edge of Loch Fyne, Pam roots herself in time and place, then zooming out and out or right in, follows threads that spin out from every ingredient as they combine into dishes which in turn are described within the wider themes she explores of modern, Scottish, ‘fine dining’ cooked by a woman.
Pam, uses stories of ingredients, which since people settled in Scotland, have always been a mix of the hyper local and the distantly sourced exotic, to illustrate the problematic histories of many of them such as nutmeg and potatoes and the more modern day challenges of salmon and grouse. There are also stories at landscape level of how land moved from being, to support the local population, to being a source of profit for a few and the devastating effects that these changes had on communities and what they had available to eat.
Deeply reflecting on these stories has shaped what she chooses to serve at Inver and illustrates the complexity and tensions of these choices and how hard she and her team work to find ingredients which are produced in ways that share their values.
This is, though, at its heart, a hopeful and joyful book, that illustrates how ‘food culture is culture’ which is never static continually trying, incorporating, dropping or rediscovering ingredients and how they can be combined. The delight of eclectic combinations inspired by diasporan Scots, alongside a celebration of the Scottish love of dairy, cheese and black pepper are mouth-wateringly described. She is passionate that the physical food skills involved in non-industrial food production such as growing, butchering, baking, fermenting and brewing are what teach us to ‘know nature’ in very intimate ways.
There are a smattering of intriguing recipes such as corn custard, which completes a reflective historic journey about one of the world’s most prolifically grown crops from her mother’s childhood in Zimbabwe playing between the sweetcorn rows, via growing corn in her North Sea battered childhood garden, to serving it at Inver.
Pam leave us in no doubt that the way she cooks requires detailed attention from all her senses to transform the thoughtfully chosen ingredients with all their history, quality and terroir into food that could only be produced by her and her team to be eaten on that edge of Loch Fyne, in the Inver buildings as shaped by her and her partner Rob.
Between Two Waters: Heritage, landscape and the modern cook, by Pam Brunton. Review by Alice Lewthwaite.
