‘Hunger Added the Best of Sauce’: The Foodways of Women Innkeepers in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, <i>c</i>. 1770–1840
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, English and Scottish gentry-class travellers took journeys into the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and wrote about their experiences. They made observations about foods, especially meals cooked and served by women innkeepers, at accommodations along the way. By analyzing written travellers’ accounts, this study uncovers foodways and the daily lives of women who were working—and cooking—as innkeepers in the Highlands and Islands, circa 1770 to 1840. It establishes that, with some noted exceptions, foods that women innkeepers offered at inns were repetitive for reasons of choice, economy, familiarity with practices, and labour efficiencies. Habitus, including preferences for certain foods and forms of service, greatly influenced guests’ reviews, reinforcing class and cultural differences between travellers and innkeepers. This article argues, however, that despite these differences, guests acknowledged and appreciated how innkeepers made concerted efforts to appease their tastes and abate hunger, reinforcing the idea that women innkeepers had power and agency as they leveraged their kitchen meshwork. Finally, despite a common narrative of the ‘bad Highland inn,’ the evidence discussed suggests that guests felt women innkeepers excelled at some meals, saying the food was at times unexpectedly plentiful and delicious.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".