Taste of Place

Episode 7

An Imagined Past

[00:00:00] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: A taste of place, of time, of space, of memory. How do we find a way to belong, a way to look to the past and to build a future. My name is Dr. Anna Sulan Masing, and I hope to answer those questions as we explore taste and memory throughout this series. Welcome to Taste of Place, a Whetstone Radio Collective podcast.

[00:00:33] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: In this episode, An Imagined Past, we delve into how food, nostalgia and nationalism all interplay with each other. We also have the pleasure of cooking a few dishes with Pam Brunton, who is chef and owner of Inver restaurant in Scotland on Loch Fyne. As Pam guides us through recipes, she also teaches us about an idea she coined: "landscape cuisines."[00:01:00] 

[00:01:06] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Scotland has always had a special meaning to me, but one that feels distant and almost exotic. My mother was born and bred in New Zealand, but her grandparents came from Scotland as small children in the 1880s as part of a migration flux that lasted between 1840s through to the 1970s. These migrants consisted mostly of those from working class backgrounds, farmers and tradespeople.

[00:01:33] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I know that these ancestors of mine were very religious and came to New Zealand to work hard and build new livelihoods. My great-grandfather worked, saved and bought a farm, then died in the influenza epidemic. His wife and son, my grandfather, moved to the city and sold the farm. My grandfather eventually bought land in Wellington and built a shop called Family Clothing.

[00:01:55] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: It was almost like a mini neighborhood department store with a [00:02:00] haberdashery and sold items from underwear to school uniforms. It had a safe built into the floor, and my mother loved that shop. From my mother's side, I come from the Henderson and McClennan clans from Scotland. Crossing bodies of water, traveling and building home in new places is an act that goes back far in my heritage.

[00:02:21] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Nostalgia, by definition is a yearning for the return of a past of a time in history. It is also a longing for home, such as homesickness. It was coined in the 1600s to describe anxiety expressed by Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home. It is often triggered by a smell, a taste, a conversation, and is remembering happy times, But there is sadness.

[00:02:49] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: It can be bittersweet. It can affect feelings of belonging-ness. The word is a combination of the Greek word "nostos", meaning homecoming, a Homeric word, "algos," meaning sorrow [00:03:00] or despair. Nostalgia is a longingness. This longing for home is one that those in diaspora feel as well as those in places of home and origin.

[00:03:11] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: To understand nostalgia is to understand the places you are in and the histories your story is involved in. So this Scottish side of my history is one that I don't know much about, but it sits in my mind as our landscape, a place of hills, mist, water, and mystical creatures. It feels like a place of magic, one of warriors.

[00:03:32] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: It is hard not to have an idea of Braveheart, in my understanding of Scotland. It also feels far away, even though it is on the same landmass that I live on now. Scottish missionaries are also large figures in my family story, although they occupy a hazy form as they are the reason my father was who he was. As many in Sarawak were, he was educated by Scottish missionaries in the interior.

[00:03:59] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: A school with a roof [00:04:00] and no walls, where he spent six months at a time away from home. He fished, gardened, and grew his own vegetables from the age of six, dropped off by his mother with a big bag of rice, only a pair of shorts held up by a belt of looped together rubber bands. None of this was unusual for the indigenous community in the 1950s in Sarawak.

[00:04:22] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: The missionaries schooled my dad, they were responsible for conversion to Christianity, and they gave him the name James making his Iban name Jemut a secondary one. I'm on my way to Scotland to meet Pam Brunton, chef owner of Inver, a restaurant known for its superb food and sustainable practices. To get to Inver to this corner of Loch Fyne was a four hour train from London to Glasgow and an hour and a half drive in a car.

[00:04:49] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: It was cross hills and valleys an abundance of green at this time of the year. Lusciousness. Field flush of purple, perhaps Heather. A plant I [00:05:00] associate in my imagination with Scottish wilds, but Google tells me it's bell heather or blue bells. It reminds me of New Zealand, of course, but the shape and the rhythm of the landscape is also reminiscent of Sarawak. Bodies of water weave throughout the terrain.

[00:05:15] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: At the restaurant, Pam cooks for me two dishes that use pepper. A classic Scottish combination of turnip and black pepper in a classic dish, a broth, followed by wild pepper, a close cousin of the pepper we are speaking about in this series, piper nigrum, in a dessert. Although the restaurant wasn't open for lunch, the staff were busy all around us in the kitchen and the foyer of the restaurant. 

[00:05:43] Pamela Brunton: My name's pam Brunton and we are at Inver Restaurant sitting in the foyer, which overlooks the shores of Loch Fyne. Lachlan be, and directly across from me there's the Old Castle Lachlan. 

[00:05:54] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: What are you cooking? 

[00:05:56] Pamela Brunton: Turnip broth, which is, I mean, the turnips done, we're talking about them earlier for, [00:06:00] uh, very iconic Scottish vegetable originally introduced into the country as animal feed, but the wealthier landowners reserve them for their sheep up north in Scotland where the land was much poorer and the people were much poorer. We ate them as a vegetable, so I'm very fond of using them. One, they're very tasty, but I also kinda like that kind of a history as well, and I like to glorify things that have had maybe not such an honorable past.

[00:06:26] Pamela Brunton: I'm very interested in making humble ingredients delicious, rather than just relying on the luxury ones. So this is turnip broth, which we make by juicing a whole bunch of turnips. Basically, we blend them with some water and then squeeze all that liquid out and then cook that with chicken stock. You know, if you wanna talk about Scottish nostalgia foods, I think a mash, turnips, neeps. That's what I associate with haggis, neeps, and tatties.

[00:06:50] Pamela Brunton: You know, that's pretty classic. We do serve it in the restaurant. We make it and serve it occasionally in the restaurant as well. Just a very contemporary presentation. It's not the kind of school dinners [00:07:00] type blobs. 

[00:07:01] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Just to confirm, you heated the soup, then the pork fat with the infused pepper goes in., 

[00:07:07] Pamela Brunton: It's just melted and then dribbled on top of it.

[00:07:09] Pamela Brunton: Important principle in my cooking is that kind of separation of flavors you get, so rather infusing the pepper into the turnip broth, if you float it on top in the vehicle of a fat or an oil, you will get the hit of the pepper and you will also taste the turnip itself as well, so you get a more vivid impression of both. I guess a bit of like the black and the white next to each other, that kind of contrast. 

[00:07:28] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: So the wild pepper. Why did you decide to use that? 

[00:07:32] Pamela Brunton: Because it's delicious. I mean mostly 

[00:07:34] Pamela Brunton: because a colleague used to like using it a lot. He used to put it on his eggs a lot. I'm always curious about new ingredients.

[00:07:42] Pamela Brunton: I started using myself and I really enjoy that it's a pepper and people don't expect to find pepper in their puddings as well as the kind of peppery elements to it. It's got a lot of clove and cinnamon and all spice kind of notes to it as well. So is perfectly at home being served in a salt and pepper apple [00:08:00] pie as it's other application that we did last year and I'm, I'm fond of using it as a venue or donut spice as.

[00:08:07] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: What do you think it brings to a sweet dish? Like you were talking before about contrast. Is it similar? 

[00:08:12] Pamela Brunton: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:08:13] Pamela Brunton: It's that kind of pepperiness does, it takes people's minds to slightly more savory space maybe, although it really is as relevant in sweet as any of the other kind of sweet spices. I think it's just one of these things that helps people engage with the food.

[00:08:26] Pamela Brunton: It's a bit more interesting, it makes people think. 

[00:08:30] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I sat down with Pam in the foyer of the restaurant away from the kitchen to talk a little bit more in depth about her philosophy and approach to cooking. I met Pam for the first time in Norway in 2021 when she gave a keynote talk at a symposium called Arctic Mass.

[00:08:46] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I had known of Pam's food for a few years, and I remember reading a piece that she wrote at the beginning of the pandemic in the Vittles newsletter about capitalism and restaurants. At the symposium, Pam spoke about an [00:09:00] imagined past and how the stories we know of ourselves are created for various reasons and which means we have the power to tell new stories.

[00:09:09] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Her perspective is focused on Scotland, but the questions she asks and interrogates can be universally applied. Pam is currently writing a book exploring these ideas through a philosophy that she has coined landscape cuisine, which is about investigating our personal landscape, which encompasses the literal landscape around you, as well as your historical and personal histories.

[00:09:34] Pamela Brunton: The notion of personal landscape came about through exploring what a landscape cuisine might be. That idea those two words put together a landscape cuisine came about through a conversation with a photographer called Susan Bale. We were discussing how she would like to take some photographs, and perhaps I would do some words to go along with it.

[00:09:51] Pamela Brunton: That book never happened, but it was, um, through an interesting conversation that we started talking about landscape cuisines and an idea of localism, [00:10:00] not just as an environmental response to food miles, but as an idea of connecting people to where they're from, to their own stories, to the landscape around them and the kind of health and social and environmental benefits that might come out of all of that.

[00:10:15] Pamela Brunton: And when I started thinking about what that actually meant, the most obvious starting point is, is natural landscapes. If you look out the window here, you can see we are surrounded by some pretty stunning scenery. The kind that has sold Scotland on chocolate boxes and calendars all over the world. The whiskey marketing drive relies heavily on the hills and the mountains and the locks and the old castles and all the rest to, to paint this picture of Scotland that resonates with Scottish diaspora and whiskey lovers and farm salmon lovers, the the world over.

[00:10:45] Pamela Brunton: But then I started thinking, well, how much of this is actually real. And how much of this is a made up story because what, what you actually look at when you look out that window is spruce forests that were planted for money due to government incentives in the 1960s and seventies. These [00:11:00] are monocultures.

[00:11:01] Pamela Brunton: They have all the inherent problems that monocultures do. They have suppressed the growth of certain species. They have suppressed biodiversity and they have turned deer who, or a a certain kind of deer in the red deer into basically a plague across Scotland. You know, people have romantic notions about stag's heads and shooting and game estates and all the rest, but actually these are mismanaged, natural landscapes that have had a lot of detrimental effects on biodiversity, on communities, on natural landscape all over the country.

[00:11:31] Pamela Brunton: The iconic Scottish grouse, for instance, which is romanticized every 12th of August. Fancy restaurants in London have it all over their menus. Grouse mirrors are terribly badly managed. The grouse eat the shoots of young Heathers, so to promote the growth of these little shits. Uh, grouse mo managers will burn the entire mirror.

[00:11:50] Pamela Brunton: If we go back a couple of centuries to when the Victorians first cottoned onto Scotland as a playground for wealthy royals and their associates from down south, and to be [00:12:00] honest, we don't need to pitch it as an England versus Scotland thing. It's very much a rich versus poor thing. Aristocracy, the remainders of the kinda clan heads that were still in ensconced here as much a part of it as Londoners and Royals.

[00:12:12] Pamela Brunton: But you know, Queen Victoria and Albert bought Balmoral estate and from there, with the coming of the railways, suddenly the, the Highland Scotlands became a romantic destination for holidays and shooting became a big part of, of what they did, the recreation. But in setting up shooting estates so that there was plenty deer and grouse and all the rest of the game birds, for people to shoot, they had to suppress the predators of the game birds, meaning that foxes, stolts, Martins eagles, golden eagles, white tilled eagles, sea eagles off spray were all decimated.

[00:12:44] Pamela Brunton: So the romantic idea of Scottish landscapes and the noble stag and shooting and stalking and being close to nature is already a manipulated image. That got me thinking too well if all of these stories are just kind of made up [00:13:00] essentially for whatever purpose, whether we're trying to promote grouse or whiskey or uh, tourism in Scotland or whatever it is, what other stories could we be telling and, you know, how far reaching actually is this, is this all of history?

[00:13:13] Pamela Brunton: Is this all of human endeavor? The history is written by the winners, it is true in microcosm as well as the big events. Whether it's a feud in your family, whoever's come out on top in that is the one that gets to carry on telling the story of the right and the wrong that happened. And so from that, we started thinking about natural landscapes and then also got into, well, what, What does that actually mean for your own personal, your personal landscape, your own imaginative history, your family history, where they've come from, the stories that you hear growing up during childhood that feed into your own identity.

[00:13:45] Pamela Brunton: And of course, because we are actually talking about food, the food stuffs that carry those stories as. 

[00:13:50] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: It is fascinating to think about the beautiful landscapes of Scotland as being manipulated to be a commodity in itself. We can understand Scotland [00:14:00] as a producer of venison or whiskey, all of which are sold to us in part because of a sense of wilderness, but to realize that the actual landscape with its woods and locks and wildlife is a commercial endeavor for the wealthy and the elite is jarring.

[00:14:15] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: In fact, Pam told me that very little of Scotland is actually owned by Scottish people. It frames this paradise as a tourist destination devoid of people and labor. It's a familiar feeling that reminds me of Sarawak and its pepper. With the romance that Sarawak pepper gets sold as has the same effect of creating the space of Borneo is an exotic destination to visit, a place to get a taste of

[00:14:39] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: without engagement. The global south as a space becomes a commodity for the consumers in the global north. I asked Pam how she connects with bigger historical themes, with personal histories and how she incorporates all of that into her cooking. 

[00:14:55] Pamela Brunton: What we say we do at Invers is modern Scottish cooking, which is [00:15:00] kind of a huge statement. When I started writing the book

[00:15:02] Pamela Brunton: that's about a landscape cuisine between two waters, it was all about exploring what I meant by that because you know, I am Scottish and I am cooking in Scotland and I do draw on traditional Scottish recipes, uh, some of which were cooked by my grandmother when I was a child in that classic cooks tale. But also I am aware that Scotland itself is not a theme country.

[00:15:24] Pamela Brunton: We have things that are not told as the part of the story abroad with the hills and the mountains and the stag's heads and the leaping salmon. There is more to us than just that, especially these days. For the last two or three centuries, we have had populations in Scotland, from India, from Bangladesh, from Pakistan, from China.

[00:15:45] Pamela Brunton: There's a big, well established Chinese population in Glasgow, as well as from Iran, Poland. In the cities, it's easy these days to find food from all of those countries and to find it in supermarkets. And I, myself am fairly well traveled. I've lived [00:16:00] abroad. I have a curiosity about the world and to present something I was gonna call modern Scottish food, but exclude all those influences,

[00:16:08] Pamela Brunton: seemed erroneous at best, deceitful at worst and dishonest. Um, and certainly not a representation of me. If I were to cook food that was all about turnips, barley, lamb, whiskey, I would actually be cooking some something that excluded a big part of me and my own experience and my own interest in flavor combinations and learning techniques and ingredients abroad and bringing them back.

[00:16:32] Pamela Brunton: And then you extrapolate that to the kind of country as a whole and you start thinking, Well, is that how I want Scotland to present itself to the world? Insular, backward looking tradition only? No way of integrating the rest of the world into what we do and moving forward with it. That wouldn't be a fair representation of what Scotland is because we're actually quite a progressive creative country with trade and social links across the globe.

[00:16:56] Pamela Brunton: We are our hospitable people who like new influences. [00:17:00] Fantastic example in 2020 when the home office descended on an immigrant couple in a street in Glasgow where my friends actually happened to live and everyone in the street turned out to like barring them from entering the house because these people were welcome.

[00:17:12] Pamela Brunton: They were their neighbors and the home office had no right to go in and remove them. 

[00:17:17] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: In 2021, 2 men were apprehended in a dawn raid by the UK immigration enforcement. They were Muslim men and this incident happened during Eid al-Fitr, the marking of the end of Ramadan. But the van holding the men were not able to leave the street

[00:17:31] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: as local residents surrounded the vehicles in protest. At the end of the day, they were released to cries of you messed with the wrong city. Scotland has a reputation of resistance and although they didn't win independency during the referendum in 2014, it has a real sense of difference from England and the rest of UK.

[00:17:50] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: This idea is most famously told through the stories of William Wallace, but can be seen today with its separate governing decisions and systems, such as the fact that undergraduate education is [00:18:00] still free for Scottish people. 

[00:18:02] Pamela Brunton: So that's the kind of Scotland I want to present; inclusive. But if you look back historically as well, there are trends in Scottish food and cooking

[00:18:10] Pamela Brunton: there have always been like that. They have always accepted influence from abroad. Of course colonialism is the elephant in the room when you start talking about produces from abroad. And of course there's the whole dark history of the rise of capitalism and with it colonialism and the British East India company and all the dubious histories they're in.

[00:18:28] Pamela Brunton: And I wanted to be able to talk about all that, you know, use ingredients and acknowledge what had brought them here, the other families, the other histories that have brought them to us. 

[00:18:37] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Part of talking honestly about colonialism is having these rich conversations, as Pam mentions on how the exchange of goods and cultures shaped places, spaces, and people. As people produce and plants moved across the world, landscapes were changed forever.

[00:18:55] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: We get to enjoy the deliciousness of those exchanges, but we can do that [00:19:00] whilst acknowledging the past. These paths of movement, especially relevant to Pam and shaped her as a person and a cook. 

[00:19:09] Pamela Brunton: My mother was born in Zimbabwe. Her parents very tragically died in a plane crash when my mom was 11 and her elder brother was 13.

[00:19:18] Pamela Brunton: They were actually on their way, they were emigrating back to Scotland. The kids had been sent on ahead, uh, with their grandmother. My mom and her brother, Uncle Gordon were brought up by their grandmother. So there was a kind of skipped generation in, in the sort of progression that you get through families.

[00:19:34] Pamela Brunton: And when I was growing up, their grandmother, my great-grandmother, lived with us for a number of years. She was in her nineties, so I remember being part of, you know, as well as the kind of Findus crispy pancakes and Linda McCartney lasangas and potted hawk, fresh crowdy cheese and lemon curds the, the things that gran used to make,

[00:19:52] Pamela Brunton: traditional Scottish things that were always around. There's a lot of family stories, um, to tell that have been handed down to [00:20:00] me through the food that we eat, as well as the photographs. So that is my kind of personal landscape and it's, it's all relevant. Good cooking is all about connection, storytelling

[00:20:09] Pamela Brunton: seeking acceptance and communication with other people, be it the family and friends you're cooking for, or the guests in the restaurant. These were my stories and I wanted to find ways of 

[00:20:19] Pamela Brunton: telling them. 

[00:20:20] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: For Pam, food becomes a tangible way to discuss the past in our relationship with nostalgia. I grew up in New Zealand, very much aware and treated as being Asian, but of course there was only part of who I was.

[00:20:34] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: It was often a surprise when people met my white mother, the very picture of the Scottish ideal pale skin, light eyes, and dark hair. So although the world treated me as other, I also knew I was white, and the identity of being Scottish in particular was something that was very much a part of that whiteness.

[00:20:52] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: This is because New Zealand is a relatively young country and most people can trace their heritage back to "the old country" and still have [00:21:00] family roots within the United Kingdom, and therefore, it is a topic spoken about a lot, which is of course a nostalgia and a romanticism too. My mother's parents died before I was born, so this Scottish identity is present, but in a somewhat dream or imagine state for me.

[00:21:17] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I felt a real kinship with Pam's Scottish diaspora identity. Hearing Pam talk about her family's stories gave me a yearning for what I knew existed, but I was not a part of. This trip to Scotland very much felt like a search of my Scottish side. I asked Pam about her own relationship with nostalgia.

[00:21:38] Pamela Brunton: Yeah, it's interesting. I guess I'm a nostalgia skeptic just because of that idea of what is it you're nostalgic for exactly? To me, like particularly in being Scottish, and nostalgia and nationalism are a very closely entwined thing in my experience of nostalgia is being abroad and thinking of home.

[00:21:56] Pamela Brunton: It's that kind of thing. Some of it's just the intimate, personal, you know, I wanna [00:22:00] be at home. I want mom to make this thing for me, and that kind of thing. But there's also, I remember watching when I was, I spent the last year of high school in, um, the United States, uh, a high school in Utah as an exchange student.

[00:22:11] Pamela Brunton: It was the year that the film Braveheart came out. I watched it in the cinema in America, and it did make me feel nostalgic for and homesick and, and all the rest, even though it's that complete fabrication. Although I missed my friends and family, I don't remember a feeling of like, you know, missing being part of an identity that, that, that film kind of provoked.

[00:22:30] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: So much of our conversation was looking at this idea of what traditional Scottish cooking is, and so many of the dishes linked to a national Scottish identity uses spices that are from and grown outside of Scotland. This paradox demonstrates the inextricable links, British cuisine has to its imperial roots and complicates the message of eating local that many restaurants in the global north

[00:22:54] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: like to tout. I ask Pam how she reconciles these ideas in her cooking. [00:23:00] 

[00:23:00] Pamela Brunton: So I guess the way I see it is just as, as Scotland is, uh, if you're gonna be, um, honestly reflective or accurately reflective of, of Scotland's role in the world, both historically and currently, we trade with people. And we play host to people from all, all of the globe.

[00:23:18] Pamela Brunton: We've had colonial relationships with them where people from the former colonies now are established in Britain and have been for a couple hundred years, as well as just, um, people from Europe and and America as. Um, who've either gone and come back or with, with new influences. And then of course there's the ease of holiday travel these days where people are, are traveling abroad and coming back and bringing all the influences.

[00:23:40] Pamela Brunton: And now we have the expectations that you walk around a high street supermarket and you find things from anywhere you like. And I feel that if we're gonna be honest about what Scotland's food culture is, you can't just edit it to do the chocolate box salmon packaging version of Scotland. Yeah. You have to be open and [00:24:00] honest about your influences from everywhere, and it's also just a very enjoyable way to cook.

[00:24:04] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I mean, there is a lot of joy, I think, in your cooking. It's fun, it's beautiful, It's textured. Every course was something fun. 

[00:24:13] Pamela Brunton: And that's the thing about haggis, neeps, and tatties that I call it Scottish dish. The Neeps, which are what we call Swedes, the the big orange turnips originally from Sweden, Potatoes originally from Peru, Haggis full of um, black pepper and all spice, which are from anywhere but here.

[00:24:29] Pamela Brunton: And even the idea of making a pudding with your scraps of meat and stuffing it and awful and stuffing it inside an animal's stomach is not unique to Scotland. That appears all over the globe from, you know, Asia to North America, there are versions of, of something like this. So, you know, this is, this is what we hold up for as a sort of nostalgic Scottish food, but actually

[00:24:51] Pamela Brunton: It is representative of a Scotland that has always been very well connected to the rest of the world and remains that way. 

[00:24:59] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: [00:25:00] And of course I had to ask Pam one of my favorite questions. When did you first realize that pepper was from somewhere else and not grown here. 

[00:25:11] Pamela Brunton: That's a really interesting question. Don't even know if I can answer it accurately.

[00:25:15] Pamela Brunton: As we were talking about earlier, like imagined histories and how your own imagination and where you're at right now in your life influences your memories. I mean, I know that when I was a child, I didn't know where anything came from, so obviously there was a point where I learned it, but I'd suspect it was probably part of just growing as a cook.

[00:25:30] Pamela Brunton: And I've cooked since I was quite young, became a vegetarian as a teenager, and my mom said, Well, that's fine, but you're gonna have to cook for yourself. I'm not doing two meals a day, so, and your dad won't eat vegetables. So , very Scottish. That was all part of the process of just learning where anything came from.

[00:25:48] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: To end our conversation, I wanted to know how Pam was envisaging the future, what new stories she would like to see us create. 

[00:25:56] Pamela Brunton: I'd like people to take environmental benevolence, [00:26:00] like social equity, things like that into consideration when we value the things that we buy and cook and eat, and perhaps just connect a little bit more to the things that are actually happening around you.

[00:26:13] Pamela Brunton: It means things like buying local food from local farms and all the benefits they're in. You know, a bit more than just food miles. It's also about, you know, supporting local economies and making your own locality richer by keeping the money circulating in it, and all these things that we know. And if we can learn to value things, like just be more conscious of where things are coming from and how they got there in the first place, and valuing the things that can what?

[00:26:36] Pamela Brunton: Providing benefits to communities rather than rinsing them for all they were worth. Be that communities abroad or communities here. Perhaps whether it's a concerted effort by governments and marketing boards, or whether it's actually just something that's led by people learning to tell stories that will benefit the people in the future, as well as bringing joy to the people who are cooking and eating now.[00:27:00] 

[00:27:01] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: After leaving the restaurant, I walked across the bay to the Old Castle Lachlan, and stood in the open courtyard. Castles are fascinating spaces. They were centers of futile power and built to display that power to all who gazed upon it. Even as they stood in its ruins, the thick stone walls that were left felt like they would last forever.

[00:27:26] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: This castle was built in the 1400s when at the other end of the island in London, The Fraternity of Peppers had already become the Company of Grocers, and the British Isles were thriving in their global trade. This castle, a plaque on the remains of the castle wall, tells me, belongs to the McLaughlin clan, a family that immigrated from Ireland to Scotland in the 11th century.

[00:27:50] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: It was built to protect the bay and control travel through and on Loch Fyne. There is a sense of movement in this place, and I can easily imagine that this [00:28:00] castle operates as a fort. What travel were they controlling? Was it goods going to and from the rest of the Isle? Was the Port of Glasgow bringing in produce from the rest of Europe that the clan wanted to move through their part of the country?

[00:28:14] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Pam's restaurant was called Inver, which means between two waters, a place where one body of water meets another. This is referring to the fact this bay is the meeting point of the Lachlan River and Loch Fyne. This Castle and Pam's restaurant sit on either side of this meeting point, both are or were home and anchor, as well as places where people come to and move through.

[00:28:40] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: It feels like the past talking to the present. Water, travel and movement are all reminiscent of Sarawak to me. As I mentioned at the start of the journey to Scotland in the landscape, I felt echoes of Borneo. And now here at this castle where these waters meet, I am [00:29:00] again reminded of Sarawak and specifically my family farm where I first encountered pepper.

[00:29:07] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: My family farm is called Nagna Majau – which means mouth of the Majau river. It too is a meeting place of two flowing bodies of water – Majau and Belah rivers. It is very quiet in the courtyard. I look out as winds skim across the bay and ripple the water, but I feel protected in this medieval structure. It feels remote and calm and as akin to when I was a child and looked out the farm window across the pepper trees and onto the river below.

[00:29:41] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Thank you for listening to episode seven of Taste of Place. Special thanks to Pam Brunton for speaking to me about her concept, landscape cuisine, and her cooking and sharing a delicious meal. I'd like to thank my producer, Catherine Yang, audio [00:30:00] editor, Dayana Capulong, researcher Caroline Merrifield and intern Ashley Choi.

[00:30:07] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder, Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone Radio Collective, executive producer Celine Glasier, sound engineer Max Kotelchuck, music director Catherine Yang, managing producer Marvin Yueh, associate Producer Quentin Lebeau, production coordinator, Shabnam Ferdowsi, production assistant Maha Sanad and publicist, Melissa Haughton.

[00:30:34] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Theme music created by Catherine Yang and cover art created by Whetstone Art Director Alex Bowman. You can learn more about this podcast on WhetstoneRadio.com, on Instagram and Twitter @WhetstoneRadio on TikTok @WhetstoneMedia, and subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube channel, Whetstone Media for more podcast content.

[00:30:57] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: You can learn more about all things happening at [00:31:00] Whetstone at WhetstoneMedia.com.