Her traditional recipes - complete with bacon and egg pie; tablet, a sweet made from sugar and condensed milk; and Forfar bridies heavy in suet - have been published for the first time, hitting the top three in Scotland's bestseller lists.
It is an imagined version of Maw Broon's famous recipe book, complete with food stains, annotations, newer recipes clipped from make-believe newspapers and cheeky cartoons scribbled in by the young Broons - the Twins and the Bairn. But her meals - once staple dishes for generations of older Scots - are potentially lethal, said Mike Lean, head of human nutrition at Glasgow University. Her high fat, high cholesterol meals were a "caricature of absolutely the worst things you could possibly put in your mouth", Prof Lean said.
"It's a scary thing because the foods in this book are exactly the things which have led Scotland to have some of the highest heart attack rates in the world. If you want to have a heart attack, stroke, diabetes, this is exactly how to do it."
The matronly housewife, with ever-present white apron and tightly-wound bun of hair, has been the head of Scotland's "first family", The Broons, since they first appeared in the Sunday Post newspaper in 1936. The cartoon strip and its equally famous sister strip, Oor Wullie, about the tousle-haired anti-hero with his tin bucket for a seat, have been a national institution for decades.
David Donaldson, one of The Broons' main scriptwriters since 1962 and head of children's publications at DC Thomson, Dundee-based publishers of the Sunday Post, said publication of the Broon recipes was a deliberately nostalgic exercise. But he insists the meals are worth enjoying, in sensible moderation. "If you made a full clootie dumpling every day, and ate one every day, you would get fat and die. I'm in my 60s now and I have always been eating stuff like this because my family background is very much Broons. My own mother was one of 19 children but none of the people in my family died of obesity."
No comments:
Post a Comment