"Cookie Cutter" Pipe Band Dress

[MacLowlife]

Jock, this may be like the old chips -crisps-fries problem, but Americans have a pastry cutter, too. In the US, a Pastry cutter is a tool used for blending pastry- if you need one and don't have it, you use a fork. Where Fluter and I come from, one punches cookies ( UK: Biscuits ) and biscuits (UK: scones? not really, rolls? Not that, either) out of dough using a circular cutter and then bakes them in the oven. If you need one and don't have it, almost anything will do- a glass, a soup can ( UK:tin ) any ring that can be pressed onto the surface of the rolled dough. And then, at Christmas or other times, you can use a more elaborately shaped device to cut out dozens of identical bears or stars or gingerbread men, or what have you- highland pipers, I suppose...

And now we need to know, if you made a dough from flour and baking soda and milk, rolled it out and cut discs from it, what would you call the baked discs in the UK? Hereabouts , we call them biscuits and eat them with jelly, or butter, or a slice of meat in them. How soft they are depends on how good a biscuit maker you are. I have seen them range from melt-in-your- mouth to hockey pucks.

[Paul Henry]

And now we need to know, if you made a dough from flour and baking soda and milk, rolled it out and cut discs from it, what would you call the baked discs in the UK? Hereabouts , we call them biscuits and eat them with jelly, or butter, or a slice of meat in them. How soft they are depends on how good a biscuit maker you are. I have seen them range from melt-in-your- mouth to hockey pucks.

Those would generally be called scones, but here we have them with Jam ( US Jelly)butter and sometimes even clotted cream.
They are usually sweet , but cheese scones( a small amount of grated cheese added to the mixture before baking) are popular as well.

I grew up in Northern Ireland and what we called "soda" bread is essentially the same thing,but baked on a griddle- on top of the cooker, but of course there are lots of variations.
One of my favourite variation is Wheaten bread, much the same but made with wheatmeal flour and buttermilk and baked in the oven, with butter- and of course served with smoked salmon and black pepper is wonderful

[Jock Scot]

MacLowlife.


You are asking me questions that are well beyond my ken!

[Bugbear]

We even have "Cookie Shooters" over here.

[MacLowlife]

Cookie Shooter sounds like a bar shot, like a lemon drop or a Nasty Girl Scout. Or maybe it could be a variant of the marshmallow gun. Isn't it really a mechanized version of ye olde cookie press, sort of a caulking gun or extruder for dough?

Drop the shooter, Cookie. Give up the dough...

[Bugbear]

Cookie Shooter sounds like a bar shot, like a lemon drop or a Nasty Girl Scout. Or maybe it could be a variant of the marshmallow gun. Isn't it really a mechanized version of ye olde cookie press, sort of a caulking gun or extruder for dough?

Drop the shooter, Cookie. Give up the dough...

Ya, but I think their electric now.

[OC Richard]

As a sort of update, I just spent last weekend at our largest local Games, at Costa Mesa.

A number of bands came down from Canada.

As you can see, the White Hose Era is dead, as far as pipe bands go at least.

But bands still are tending to dress alike. They've abandoned white hose and white shirts en masse as you can see, but so many wear blue shirts that there's hardly more variety than before.

Grade One was won on Saturday by our local Los Angeles Scottish (muted Drummond of Perth kilts)



down from Canada in Grade One were Alberta Caledonia and Triumph Street, seen here:



If you don't get your kilt pleated like the other guys, you don't get to play!



(just kidding... the guy in the foreground is with Edmonton & District, which wears the same uniform.)

Here's Edmonton, then James Coyne Memorial (in an Irish county tartan), then Kevin Blandford Memorial, then Robert Malcolm Memorial (from British Columbia). Those shirts the Blandfords wear are quite intense.









Judges' dress is interesting. It's not pipe band dress per se, because judges usually avoid wearing the uniform of the band they play in, if they indeed still play in one. Here's Canadian judge Jamie Troy. Interesting sporran, the cantle of a Gordon Highlanders sporran stuck on a leather Day sporran:

[Andrew M. Stewart]

Richard, it would be interesting to see the trend over the last twenty years or so (not that I'm suggesting you do the same analysis for twenty years!).
Our band is never going to the Worlds. We have our own tartan designed for the band, but the rest of our kit is pretty much standard.

What band are you in Macman??

[Andrew M. Stewart]

Judges' dress is interesting. It's not pipe band dress per se, because judges usually avoid wearing the uniform of the band they play in, if they indeed still play in one. Here's Canadian judge Jamie Troy. Interesting sporran, the cantle of a Gordon Highlanders sporran stuck on a leather Day sporran:

Nice!

He's my teacher!

[sirdaniel1975]

Nice thread.. and I like the term "Cookie Cutter", mostly because I use that to describe many things myself. I will say this, applying it to Kilt outfits makes loads of sense to me. It does get tiring seeing 5 bands go by in the same or similar tartan.

Fortunately, here in the Bay and Central FL area.. we do see some different tartans. Dunedin has their own, one group wears Isle of Skye, one of the Police pipe bands around here wears the Gordon tartan, Sarasota Riverview HS wears the Dress MacDonald (going on memory), Lake Wales HS wears MacLeod of Lewis tartan. Now there are still those that wear Royal Stewart or Stewart dress, but that is not the norm here... so I guess my eyes are lucky.

I personally have not thought about applying the term "Cookie Cutter" to pipe bands, but I definitely would apply it to 1st time kilt wearers sometimes. You know what I mean; same shirt, hose, kilt belt, etc... Most of us have been guilty of that at some point.