Between Two Waters

Pam Brunton

Book of the Month: September 2024

Reviewed by Candice Chung

In The Beaches of Agnès, the late filmmaker Agnès Varda said, ‘If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.’ But what happens when you unpick all the stitching that holds together the story of a restaurant? What then are we left with – at its pulsing heart?

This seems to be the central question that animates the book Between Two Waters – a formally experimental debut by author and beloved Scottish chef Pam Brunton. In the food world, Brunton is best known for being the co-owner and chef of Inver, Scotland’s first Green Michelin Star restaurant – an accolade that not only recognises culinary excellence but a restaurant’s innovative approach to sustainability. 

Together with her partner Rob Latimer, Brunton opened Inver on the quiet shores of Loch Fyne in 2015. It is a project that, like her book, defies genres. Something closer to art than commerce – something which, in her own words, mimics ‘a multi-sensory installation’ that contains ‘a world within the world’. If this is a premise that feels terrifyingly ambitious – it is. And Brunton is the first to admit it: draining one’s life savings, the vulnerability of exposing ‘your most intimate creative thoughts’ by way of what and how you serve your diners. All that, on top of sharing a 100-hour, 6-day work week with one’s partner on very little sleep.

It makes sense that it’s only now, almost a decade on, that a phone conversation from the early days of Inver emerges like driftwood to interrupt her daily life. In those first weeks of an empty dining room, a man who lives on the far side of the loch rings to ask what kind of food the restaurant serves. ‘“I often see your lights on at night . . . and we’ve been thinking of visiting, my wife and I,”’ he says.

To the caller, Brunton describes with warmth a menu of ‘modern Scottish food’ that the restaurant is now renown for. At the time, however, she was met by a question. Might they have just “‘normal Scottish food”’? ‘“Fish and chips? Steak pie? Lasagne?”’

It’s a minor grievance. The kind that a lesser chef would think nothing of after a pint and a rant. But this ordinary complaint turns out to be crucial – for it becomes the very seed of the absorbing, intellectual and fiercely personal inquiry that unfolds in Brunton’s book.

‘To name our food “modern Scottish” I must have known that there was this “normal Scottish” food I was distinguishing us from,’ she writes. What follows is an interrogation of what and who shaped our idea of what we have passed off as ‘normal’ for decades. Is it normal to consider Mother Nature as an ‘insensate machine’? And just how normal is it for us, as modern Scots, to enjoy ‘a black bun, Dundee cake, shortbread…and the cup of tea that goes with it all’ without paying mind to the ‘stolen land and labour for ingredients that have defined what Scotland tastes like’?

Along the way you will meet the philosophers (Descartes, Locke) economists (Smith, Amartya Sen) and contemporary food writers (Jonathan Nunn, Alicia Kennedy) that Brunton discourses with. You will be taken on a road trip with Brunton’s father to his hometown Fintry, north of Dundee, where you’ll see how certain working-class food habits took roots in her family as it did across the country.

You will see a reverence (and recipes) for clean broths, berries, mince and dairy and be surprised by storied dishes like hattit kit (a milk curds dessert) and skirlie (oats cooked with chicken fat). Perhaps most importantly, Brunton will skilfully –  sometimes devastatingly – reveal how our eating lives are bound to our relationship with land. To truly decolonise our food culture, she argues, we have to ‘[acknowledge and care for] all the landscapes – personal, environmental, cultural.’ In other words, we have to forge a ‘landscape cuisine’.

The best writing defamiliarises the quotidian, and Between Two Waters does just that. This is not a feel-good book. But it is an invitation to feel deeply. If you open Brunton’s book, you will find her ardour for truth, and a homeland. You will find a landscape to love.

Between Two Waters is published by Canongate.

Candice Chung is a Glasgow-based freelance writer and editor. Her first book Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You will be published by Allen & Unwin in 2025.