Kith is a new, no-fuss cookbook whose mission is to re-establish our faith in tasty, traditional Scottish cuisine
Talking to Sarah Rankin you can tell dinner at her house is a lot of fun. “I just want to feed people and for people to leave full in every sense,” she says. “Food is there to be enjoyed and shared with love.”
Rankin’s supper clubs and events in her hometown of Kinross and around Scotland are legendary, and now the private chef and BBC Masterchef contestant has published her first cookery book Kith: Scottish Seasonal Food for Family and Friends. Kith is a paean to Scottish producers, ingredients, and one of the most generous and useful books to have been published on Scottish food in decades.
Inspiration for Kith came from Rankin’s time on Masterchef: “Sometimes we didn’t know what we’d be asked to make so you’d spend hours trying to memorise recipes for shortcrust or sweet pastry. I just thought, this is really useful knowledge, it would be good to have it all written down in one place.”
In a chapter called Firm Foundations, Rankin talks the home cook through classic sauces like bechamel and hollandaise, and how to make stocks, different types of pastry, bread, and even your own butter.
The recipes are then divided into seasons, with great tips on sourcing the best produce, and building relationships with local suppliers, something she is passionate about.
“A cookbook in seasonal order just makes sense to me,” she says. “It’s how I cook. It drove me bananas on Masterchef when people were cooking asparagus in winter and nobody said anything. That’s enormous food miles when there’s incredible seasonal produce you could be using from Britain.”
Rankin’s recipes are a mixture of family hand-me-downs and her own creations, all the food she cooks for herself and her family and friends. “When I went on Masterchef, I just thought, I’ll cook what I cook at home,” she says. “We try to eat seasonally and we eat a lot of game because of where we live and we like it.” Rankin also hoped to challenge a few misconceptions about Scottish food.
“I think Scottish food a lot of the time is quite misrepresented, and people still think Irn Bru, deep fried Mars bars, and the sick man of Europe, when the food scene in Scotland is amazing. There’s a lot of culinary expertise and people go crazy for our produce. The recipes in the book all have some sort of emotional connection,” Rankin adds. “There are recipes I just had to include because they’re a huge part of my life. Like my mum’s Scotch broth, which is legendary; it’s on our Christmas dinner menu, but we’ll have it once a week in winter as well.”
Like the broth, some recipes are straight-up Scottish classics: oatmeal-crusted herring, skirlie, clootie dumpling, left unfussed with for a reason. “The recipes at the root of Scottish cooking are not to be sniffed at because they’re old-fashioned. They do still stand up on their own. These recipes are cultural and should be important to us.”
It’s in the kitchen where Rankin would love to see Kith too, earning its place: “I’d love it to be well used,” she says. “I want to see it dog-eared and covered in butter.”
Kith: Scottish Seasonal Food for Family and Friends by Sarah Rankin is published by Birlinn as is out now.
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