The glories of Scottish cookery have had many advocates, but few as quietly eloquent as the food writer Catherine Brown, who has died aged 83. Her dozen books exploring every quarter of her northern realm, as well as years of journalism with the Glasgow Herald and the Scottish Field magazine, both provoked and recorded an explosion of interest in what her nation had to offer our stoves, palates and tables.
This turn to her home territory came after realisation that the cookery she was teaching her catering college students was entirely based on a debased lingua franca out of French haute cuisine and that they, and she, would do far better to contemplate the wealth of materials available on their own doorstep. The anecdotal high point of this conversion was her persuading luxury hoteliers to offer a dish of venison tripe (disguised under a Gaelic name) to unsuspecting tourists who, of course, found it excellent.
