Landscape with kitchen: Women and foodways of the Gàidhealtachd in the Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland, 1770–1840
Date
2025
Authors
Mackay, Theresa
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Abstract
This project brings to light a new way of understanding “the kitchen.” Examining the complex foodways of Gaelic-speaking non-gentry women of Scotland’s western Highlands and Islands in the period 1770 to 1840, the analysis presented here takes us far beyond the walls of the Gàidhealtachd family home. It positions the interior kitchen as but one component in an environment of spaces and activities that spanned the landscape from home to sea in an interconnected kitchen meshwork linking house-based kitchen spaces to diverse exterior “kitchen” environments. Through a meticulous analysis of foodways within this spatially expansive kitchen of the Gàidhealtachd, this project explores in detail how the kitchen meshwork that women developed demanded responsiveness and flexibility in the ways they gathered, produced, and prepared foods. Women laboured in the meshwork to create recipes and meals that both sustained families and in the process, expressed and propagated culture. The meshwork provided a dynamic ecology from which women could innovate and seek to mitigate food security risks when circumstances changed, such as during the major historical shifts of the long nineteenth century. Faced with sociopolitical and socioeconomic pressures resulting in land loss and loss of “kitchen,” and historical fractures including famines and evictions, diets changed dramatically and the capacity of the kitchen meshwork to provide food for people could no longer be fully realized. Women navigated these waves of change as their foodways taskscapes and seasonal rhythms were destabilized and they had to uncover new kitchen meshworks in their land “without kitchen.” This project demonstrates that historical events of the long nineteenth-century Gàidhealtachd were, in profound ways, centred on the kitchen meshwork and foodways, positioning women as prominent players in some of the most significant historical transformations in the history of the western Highlands and Islands.
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Keywords
Scotland, Highlands and Islands, Foodways, Women, Gender, Inns, Innkeeping, Kitchen, Gàidhealtachd