Among the most heartening aspects of editing Treasured Tastes, the upcoming cookbook from VisitScotland, was the potential it offers for a return to regional Scottish cooking, and the proof it presents that Scots cuisine is not all about sweeties and baking.

Wendy Barrie spent “quite an intense” six months collating, editing and testing nearly 50 recipes submitted by ordinary people from all over the 15 tourism regions before photographing the finished dishes.

Perhaps surprisingly, many recipes and memories were submitted by younger people – men and women - in their 20s and 30s who remembered cooking and eating with their grandparents.

One remembers rough camping with his grandparents, and being the one assigned to wash the one pot in which the beef brisket was boiled in the evening, and in which the morning porridge was also cooked. He lost the pan in the burn as it was swept away. When it turned up next day it had a handle missing but they were delighted to find it and went on as usual.

Another recalls “cup time” during haymaking on Arran, and her mother coming across the field with a tray covered with a tea-towel, and the excitement of guessing what would be underneath. There would be nut fingers, something akin to macaroons.

A young man from Islay remembers being taught to forage for crabs, being shown by his grandfather to respect the shellfish – and then being shown how to kill them; he submitted a recipe for potted crab.

There’s no recipe for haggis. Barrie was adamant that people should buy their haggis from their local butcher, using local ingredients like lamb and venison and local grains, as is the tradition. But she celebrates the household habit of having stovies on a Monday, using leftovers from the Sunday roast; and sourcing regional crops for oatmeal and potato scones in the Highlands, and soft bread using wheat from East Lothian.

She insists there were no duff recipes, and dismissed my journalistic cynicism in flagging up the potential accusation that the book might be classed as “kailyard”, parochial and introspective.

Au contraire, says Barrie, boldly citing a Shetlander’s shepherd’s pie as her favourite recipe. This, she says, was not only tasty but it made her feel like she was sitting beside the very fire he describes. She say getting the chance to record that was priceless. A good shepherd’s pie is up there with Coq au Vin and Cacciatore.

We should be proud of our food heritage and all the skills and techniques that go with it. Dismissing it as merely kailyard would be a mistake akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They are in danger of being lost forever.

As Barrie puts it, where we’re going is where we’re from.

It’s all very well talking about becoming a 'good food nation', and it’s a good soundbite, but we have to get inside the psyche and you don’t get that from taking a top-down view.

Thrift and food waste and using leftovers were big issues of the day, as they are again. The stock from boiled brisket, for example, would be kept to be used for soup; a habit we’re being encouraged to get back into by many a celebrity chef.

Thousands of what we now call heritage fruit and vegetables, and pay a small fortune for, once grew freely in Scotland for a reason: they thrived in the climate.

Barrie, who has long been involved in the food scene and describes herself as a “food crusader”, also writes the Scottish Food Guide. She hopes the new book will help us return to thinking in terms of the seasons and using ingredients from the regions; she’s optimistic that the book might encourage a return to smallhold and rare-breed farming.

But what of the “lost” generation of 40 and 50somethings: is it represented? She giggles and cites her own memory of being a student with flatmates who thought Vesta meals were a great and extraordinary new invention, and never learned to brew coffee because instant coffee had become the new big thing. Those novelty products took over our existence, she says. She recalls a friend from her youth whose mother threw very posh dinner parties where she served chicken cassoulet made with a can of Campbell’s condensed mushroom soup, because it was the “cool thing to do”.

As a result, cooking in the 1970s and 1980s was generally a wash-out, and it’s not represented here. But she’s been cheered by the evidence that so many people still have a “feeling” for food, and hopes they will remember a smell, a touch, a smile or a pan along with reading about the food itself. That way we might get over the “vacuum period” and enjoy being in the kitchen together.

Perhaps this time, it’ll the younger generation who bequest new food memories to their own parents.

•You’ll Have Had Yer Tea? Treasured Tastes from Scotland is published by VisitScotland on Tuesday December 8, 2015.