For many years, Thanksgiving was a tradition with roots. We gathered at the same house, saw many of the same people year after year. It was one of few opportunities to spend time with our beloved grandparents. The menu was always comfortably predictable and included the cheesiest, creamiest casseroles and green jello salad. Canned cranberry sauce had a prominent place on our table, lodged between the margarine dishes and the pilgrim salt and pepper shakers. It shined in the flickering candlelight, quivered with every table bump and passing plate.
But the most important dish was not the turkey or the white bread stuffing, but the potatoes. Mounds and mounds and mounds of lightly buttered mashed potatoes, made with real Idaho spuds (no boxed mashed potatoes for our family). Because leftover mashed potatoes meant we could make tattie scones, and tattie scones were an essential part of a Thanksgiving weekend. A Scottish tradition brought over from the old country, tattie scones are a mix of day-old mashed potatoes and flour, rolled out thin, cut into triangles, and pan-fried (at least the way we made it anyways, which I cannot guarantee is authentic to Scotland but it was absolutely authentic to us).
We’d slather the tattie scones with very American margarine, roll them up, and eat them piping hot. I imagine my great grandmother, an Irish immigrant married to a Scottish immigrant, must have made them for her three children. And Granny made them for her children. And she and my mom and aunts made them for us anytime there were leftover mashed potatoes. Especially on Thanksgiving.
In his book Buttermilk Graffiti, chef Edward Lee writes about the idea of authentic cuisine. He travels all over the U.S. and interacts with pockets of immigrants, second and third generations, making dishes brought over from their grandparents, great grandparents. Along the way, they’ve adapted to the ingredients available in their new locations, sometimes creating new traditions based on what’s available to them.
Food is memory and ritual. And authenticity lies within the hands of the maker, hands containing the DNA of ancestors, shaping, forming, making based upon the memory of mamas and grannys and great grandparents.
I’m not an overly sentimental person. I don’t think much about tradition-building or old memories. But I can’t separate tattie scones from Thanksgiving celebrations, even now, even with my own traditions and Thanksgiving menu.
When Granny passed last year, we were unable to gather and memorialize her life. Our family was scattered from coast to coast. I didn’t miss the canned cranberry sauces or long for casseroles drowning in cream of mushroom soup. But I did miss tattie scones. I missed the rhythm of the day after Thanksgiving, bloated, tired from eating, tired from laughing. I missed congregating in the kitchen and pulling ziplock bags of congealed mashed potatoes from the fridge, mixing in the flour, frying the pale triangles. I even missed the unsalted margarine.
Because food is memory. And tatties scones are our memory.
Our generation, four generations removed from our immigrant great-grandparents, have few traditions that have trickled down. I don’t make mashed potatoes often, which means I don’t make tattie scones often. And I sometimes wonder how much longer this tradition will endure. I wonder how much the recipe changed and adapted after crossing the Atlantic and settling in a coal-mining Pennsylvania town. How much of the authentic recipe changed and morphed over time?
Lee writes about the relevance of story in food. Critics easily critique flavor profiles and methods, but the story explains the reason for the food in the first place. “The plate of food has never been the be-all and end-all for me,” he says. “Quite the opposite for me, good food is just the beginning of a trail that leads back to a person whose story is usually worth telling.”
There’s too many questions I didn’t ask when Granny was still alive, when we stood in the kitchen as margarine dripped from greasy fingertips. I don’t know the history of the tattie scone, why we continued making them through generations well past the great potato famine. But even if Granny didn’t know the whys, she knew the recipe. She knew the best thing to do with a pound of day-old mashed potatoes lay within her muscle memory, in her mother’s traditions, her grandmother’s stories.
Tattie scones and Robert Burns were two traditions that survived. We ate potato pancakes and quoted Robert Burns before every meal. And so, friends, I’ll leave these verses with you. May next week’s table be full, may the memories of your ancestors and those who have gone before linger, may their stories flow through your finger tips in every dish, in every pie crust, and congealed log of canned cranberry sauce:
“Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.”