Of all the themed events taking place to mark Scotland’s Year of Food and Drink, one is particularly fascinating to me as a lover of food history and the politics of food. It reveals a lot about how we ate 100 years ago and even, as I serendipitously discovered, as far back as 300 years ago.

This month highlights the Scottish game season. It also marks the 300th anniversary of the Jacobite uprising of 1715, in which William Murray, earl of Tullibardine, was heavily involved.

William was the eldest surviving son of John, the 1st Duke of Atholl, the massively powerful landowner, staunch Unionist government supporter and high commissioner to the General Assembly of the Kirk. For his support of the Old Pretender James VIII, William was punished with the removal of succession to his father’s titles. (Later, during the ’45, William stayed overnight with his army at his ancestral home of Blair Castle.)

This year also marks the 100th anniversary of the Dardanelles Campaign at Gallipoli during the First World War, when British troops were sent to fight Germany’s ally, Turkey. The Scottish Horse Regiment was raised by the 7th Duke of Atholl and commanded by his son, the future 8th Duke of Atholl.

You may wonder what place this has in a food column. Bear with me. In the archives of Blair Castle there is a selection of recipes collated by John Stewart-Murray, 8th Duke of Atholl around 100 years ago that have been on exhibition over the summer.

It contains some fascinating and unusual recipes for dishes made in the castle kitchens that we don’t see so much today – rum omelette, nettles on toast, game pie and Atholl brose.

The game pie contained slow-cooked locally sourced pigeon, mallard, rabbit and venison with redcurrant jelly, and the Atholl Brose was made with local honey as it would have been then; over a century ago oatmeal was also grown locally.

What is immediately striking is how central to daily life locally sourced food was back then – for both the gentry eating it and the women (and men) preparing it.

There’s a heavy emphasis on venison, game and poultry from the large Atholl estate, and the recipes go into great detail on how to get the best flavour from them. Red deer venison, for example, should be hung before using for between 14 and 21 days. It should be wiped before hanging with ground ginger or pepper on a damp cloth. It should be examined often with a skewer or knife run right into the bone and if it is either sticky or smells unpleasant, the tainted part should be cut off and the joint washed with warm milk and cooked immediately.

Deer’s Head Broth was prepared in the same way as sheep’s head broth: half a hind’s head should be skinned before cooking, and all hair removed. The brains and tongue were also to be removed to make separate items such as deer’s head brawn, brains and tongue. Deer’s liver was also a prized dish. There’s a fascinating note to this recipe: an old stag’s liver is apt to taste rank after the middle of September, while male calf’s liver is prone to have flukes, so is best avoided. A hind’s liver is preferable, after mid-September.

We go further back into time. Jane Anderson, Blair Castle’s archivist, shows me the Atholl House Daily Journal of October 1800 in which every single item purchased is logged, by hand in ink (two harts at a combined 13 stones, one hind at 5 stone, a wether at 3st 4lb, a bullock at 30stone, a calf at 9 stone). Alongside is a column describing how they were discharged as meals. The menus contain an amazing range of dishes, which must have taken huge amounts of time and effort to produce.

Dinner for the Duke and guests consisted of boiled beef or tongue, mutton hauch; muirfowl custard pudding, turkey omelette and French bean and pea tartlettes; venison soup, loin of mutton, haunch venison, vegetables, and so on. There was turtle soup, mutton and currie (curry) of rabbit, emince of venison, partridge Espagnolia, saddle of lamb, grouse cutlets. To see these written in copperplate, some of it smudged, and in old-fashioned spelling really brings the cook and her kitchen to life.

What was most moving for me was the discovery of menus and table plans from the years leading up to the 1707 Union of Crowns and the 1715 rising.

A tiny scrap of paper bears a dinner menu for June 19, 1712, handwritten in painstaking detail: “barly broth, minced hen, pattie of chickens, pyke boyled, mutton roasted, plover tongues” and “hodge podge”, and then, delightfully, “venison to servants”.

Supper on the same day was “boyld chickens, buttered eggs, spinage, collops, milk, mutton roasted, 1 leg, and capons, cold”.

Then the piece de resistance: an infinitely fragile page of folded paper bearing a table plan from September 2, 1703. Here, perfect circles are drawn in ink (perhaps using an egg cup or wine glass for guidance) to illustrate dishes as they would be laid on the grand dining table. Again they contain venison collops, roast beef, “boyld venison + colyflowr”, coley head and “selery soup”, half a leg of roast veal, green soup.

Those long-gone cooks must have been as exhausted as the politicians and campaigners fighting their own causes. Bet they didn’t get as much attention.