Semmit is Scots for vest or undershirt as some people say. In one of these the Clootie Dumpling was traditionally cooked.
When I was a boy, my Auntie Janet would cook dumpling and we all loved it. It was not a dessert but a main meal.When unwrapped from the semmit, it would steam gloriously. A good dumpling was always coated with a thin skin of pure white fat.
What joy to get a wonderful Xmas present from my sister Rosy. It is a recipe for dumpling written by my Mother, which somehow Rosy had printed onto a tea towel. It is now on my bedroom wall.
My Mother’s handwriting is beautiful and for me instantly recognizable. How many letters when I was at boarding school.
The recipe is not traditional. Microwaves were unimaginable in 1960’s Scotland. A dumpling was steamed for 4 hours in a semmit.
Anyway this is an introduction to the fact that I finally made it back to Okinawa. My God, what a trip.
A new state of emergency was announced the day after I got here, basically stay at home.
The Quiet Ripple Defines The Pond 
Do you want Auntie Janet’s recipe that she always made on the kitchen table at Rosehill?
She used no scales so would handful the flour etc until it looked the right amount, I then scraped it off to weigh it and she had to make it “look right” again on the table before adding the next ingredient.
Wonderful days.
By the way the skin was not a layer of fat but a flour skin on the summit to seal it in the water as it boiled.
I still make one as a birthday cake sometimes for auld lang syne!
Grand to see Mother’s clootie recipe in Okinawa. Can we see a picture of the results at your next feast?
I’ve got the Maw Broon’s Cookbook and it’s got a grand recipe in it for clootie dumpling – perhaps we should have a three way cook-off one day between Mother’s, Rosie/Janet’s and Maw Broon’s versions?
Have you got the rest of that Broon cartoon page – there’s more than a semmit involved in that episode!
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