How many Scots have tasted clootie dumpling? What are the key ingredients? It’s easy to imagine such a question making an appearance in a future Scottish citizenship test should we ever end up in an independent Scotland.
A cultural totem that harks back to our grandmothers’ kitchens, the clootie dumpling is a cartoonish favourite, a cipher for a nostalgic, rose-tinted Scotland where porridge and babies were kept in drawers, and women counted blessings instead of calories.
When DC Thomson brought out Maw Broon’s Cookbook in 2007, the clootie dumpling was a star recipe, a favourite of the denizens of No 10 Glebe Street. Professor Mike Lean, then head of human nutrition at Glasgow University, described the recipes as a “caricature of absolutely the worst things you could possibly put in your mouth” and suggested the book be sold with a discount off a headstone.
But for sheer enterprise, bunnets should be doffed to Michelle Maddox, the 46-year-old founder of Clootie McToot, a company built around the clootie dumpling. Maddox, a former employee of the BBC Food and Drink show, established her company in Abernethy, Perthshire, in 2017 and now employs nine staff in her bakery. Her clootie dumplings come in many guises: gluten-free, wrapped in Harris Tweed, doused in gin, as wedding favours and dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi. In addition to the bakery there are workshops, an artisan food shop and a thriving wholesale business. The icing on the cake — Clootie McToot dumpling kits are stocked by John Lewis.
Whatever Professor Lean makes of the dumplings, there is a couthie wholesomeness to Maddox’s business. It’s exactly the kind of female entrepreneurship that the Scottish government should be encouraging. Seventy per cent of all Scottish businesses employ no staff and are sole proprietor companies such as tradespeople. Getting businesses to scale is an uphill battle. Scotland, with 8.4 per cent of the UK population, represents just 6.2 per cent of the total private sector business base. The one-year business survival rate in Scotland has decreased since 2014. Of the businesses born in 2014, only 42 per cent were still operating five years later. When it comes to fatalities, it’s a business death rate that outstrips Maw Broon’s most calorific confection. So Maddox is to be congratulated for her enterprise. She deserves national recognition, which is what she got when she was invited to a food and drink event in Downing Street last week alongside food producers from England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It was a non-political event and part of the remit of the UK government in promoting British industry. The day ended with the prime minister sampling a Clootie McToot dumpling and telling Maddox it was “fantastic”.
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It ought to have been the least controversial encounter to have emerged from No 10 in weeks. Instead, when Maddox uploaded the clip to her Facebook page, she faced a barrage of abuse by cybernats. Nationalists orchestrated a boycott of the business. A dozen orders were cancelled. She was labelled “a traitor”, threatened with a brick through her window and warned “not to walk down a dark alleyway”. Random Strangers on Twitter told her she should be ashamed of herself. The trolling and abuse left her in tears and in fear of her safety and that of her four children.
On one level this is just the new Scotland. Anyone who does not support the particularly myopic and insular brand of independence that has morphed out of the 2014 referendum campaign to become the dominant and nasty strain, and who puts a head above the parapet, knows to expect this kind of abuse.
But these thuggish followers of the ruling party, who are threatening to throw bricks through windows and who label people “traitors”, are seeking to destroy the livelihoods of Maddox and her workforce. That is both criminal and horrific. The precedents for this sort of thing are dangerous and dark.
Perhaps that is why John Swinney, the education secretary, and Pete Wishart, the SNP’s shadow leader of the House of Commons, have spoken out to condemn their own followers who have attacked Maddox. Wishart described them as on “the fringes” of politics. They are not. They are the mainstream. They are the same people who wore the T-shirts when Nicola Sturgeon did her stadia tour after becoming first minister and congregated in their thousands to cheer her to the rafters. Their chauvinism, anti-English sentiment and determination to appropriate any Scottish icon to their cause has seeped so far into so many aspects of our lives that it is impossible to see it as a fringe activity.
Scotland used to be a nation that prided itself in its pluralism. It was renowned as a place where debate was encouraged and respect for other people’s viewpoints was promoted. We were the nation of reason, progress and empiricism. The nation of the Enlightenment, a legacy we have squandered. This loss will be felt long after the nationalists are out of government.
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It’s not enough for a few SNP politicians to tweet their support for Clootie McToot. We need a coming together of senior figures across the political divide to stamp out this kind of intimidation from whatever political sewer it springs. Those who persist with the abuse should be sidelined and consistently called out by their party’s leadership. The trolling of a clootie dumpling business leaves more than a bad taste in the mouth; it highlights a malignancy in the body politic.
