'Consuming Food and Obeying a Code of Manners'

“We breakfasted at Cullen. They set down dried haddocks broiled, along with our tea. I ate one; but Dr Johnson was disgusted by the sight of them, so they were removed.”

We were married in Nova Scotia in July 1998, at a place memorably called Murder Point, and honeymooned in Halifax, where I ate seafood at every meal, including breakfast, for the remainder of our stay. Such a cuisine is alien to most American palates but suited mine perfectly. I don’t eat cereal, pancakes or eggs. My first meal of the day is usually a banana. “Dried haddocks broiled,” as described by Boswell on this date, Aug. 26, in 1773, in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), sounds intriguing. How much Johnson’s disgust is related to his general contempt for anything Scottish is not known. In Croker’s 1831 edition of Boswell’s Life, Sir Walter Scott defended Scottish cuisine in a footnote to the passage quoted above:

“A protest may be entered on the part of most Scotsmen against the Doctor’s taste in this particular. A Finnon haddock dried over the smoke of the seaweed, and sprinkled with salt water during the process, acquires a relish of a very peculiar and delicate flavour, inimitable on any other coast than that of Aberdeenshire. Some of our Edinburgh philosophers tried to produce their equal in vain. I was one of a party at dinner where the philosophical haddocks were placed in competition with the genuine Finnon-fish. These were served round without distinguishing whence they came; but only one gentleman out of twelve present espoused the cause of philosophy.”

Some years ago I was in conversation with an anthropologist who noted that humans have more deeply rooted, even fanatical convictions about food than about any other subject, including sex. Such convictions are both cultural and personal in origin. Subsequent observation confirms this. In his essay “The Anthropology of Table Manners from Geophagy Onward” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), Guy Davenport writes:

“Eating is always at least two activities: consuming food and obeying a code of manners. And in the manners is concealed a program of taboos as rigid as Deuteronomy.”