Produkt

KlappentextScotland has some of the best seafood in the world, so we why don't we eat more of it? Why don't we highlight the bounty of our seas and the people who fish, produce, sell, preserve and cook it? Acclaimed cooker writer Ghillie Basan embarks on a journey around Scotland's coastline and over to the islands to capture the essence of our nation's seafood through the stories of fisherman, farmers, artisan smokers and curers, boat builders and net makers, creels and shacks, skin tanners and age-old traditions. In addition, she offers 90 original recipes showcasing the wonderful produce she encounters on her journeys to all parts of the country. Features a foreword by Gary Maclean, winner of MasterChef: The Professionals

Ghillie Basan has written over 40 books on different culinary cultures and has been nominated for the Glenfiddich Award, the Guild of Food Writers Award and the Cordon Bleu World Food Media Award. Her food and travel articles have appeared in a huge variety of newspapers and magazines, including The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, BBC Good Food magazine and Eating magazine. As a broadcaster she has presented and contributed to many BBC radio programmes. As well as running cookery workshops she also works as a flavour and food pairing consultant for bar tenders and chefs.

Details

Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781788856454

ProduktartE-Book

EinbandartE-Book

FormatEPUB

Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen

FormatE101

Verlag

Birlinn

Erscheinungsjahr2023

Erscheinungsdatum02.11.2023

Seiten256 Seiten

SpracheEnglisch

Dateigrösse48078 Kbytes

Artikel-Nr.12647017

Rubriken

Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

INTRODUCTION

The last holiday my children and I had with my parents was on Tanera Mor, the largest of the Summer Isles off the north-west coast of Scotland. My father, who was in his late eighties at the time, had seen an article in the newspaper about the new island owner who had renovated some of the cottages to rent.

My father had fond memories of his honeymoon there; my mother didn´t. In fact, I´m surprised they remained married. The boat had dropped them off at the old, disused herring station with a Border terrier pup that had been given to them as a wedding present and the skipper said he would pick them up the next day. My father had brought my mother to the island to camp and pitched the tent on the only bit of flat grassy ground near the harbour. He was in his element. He had always camped as a boy and, ever since travelling the world as the doctor on a Blue Funnel Line merchant ship, he had developed a love for the sea, boats and fishing. A wild storm began to brew, but he was in the water looking for crabs to cook for his new wife. My mother had never camped and the heavens opened with such torrential rain that their tent was flooded and hundreds of earwigs took refuge on the inside which kept Tinker, the pup, busy as she tried to eat them. Adding to my mother´s misery, the boat couldn´t return to pick them up for four days.

My children and I helped my elderly father walk along the path from the cottage to the old herring station so he could show us where they had camped. They laughed at my mother´s dramatic account of her miserable honeymoon - one could laugh because my father did redeem himself the following year by taking her to Venice and they remained happily married for 56 years - and were keen to see where he had pitched the tent and to look for crabs. Arriving at the roofless herring station which dates back to 1784 and the little harbour created for the boats to land the fish, my father told my children about the glorious days of the herring boom that began in the late 1800s and lasted until the early nineteenth century.

It was an extraordinary moment in Scotland´s fishing history, heralding the construction of harbours, herring stations and saltpans. Salt was needed in vast quantities to preserve the herring in barrels that were transported to places like Germany, Eastern Europe and Russia. The fishermen would follow the shoals through summer months when they were at their fattest, around the Hebrides and the west coast, around Orkney and Shetland, and the whole length of the east coast. Young girls from the fishing villages, the herring lassies´, would follow the boats to gut and pack the silver darlings´ in the salt. It was hard, physical work and the girls had to make cloth bandages to try to prevent the salt from getting into the cuts and scratches on their hands. They were earning a wage, which was unusual at that time, and there was fun to be had with dancing and music and, in some cases, the meeting of future husbands. According to SCOSHH (scottishherring.org), by the 1900s, the Scottish herring industry had become the largest in Europe, producing over 2 million barrels and employing over 35,000 people.

Ten years after that holiday in the Summer Isles, I was hosting a group from Sweden on a Whisky Food Safari, a whisky and food pairing experience that I host at my home in the Cairngorms, and one of the tasters was a big, juicy, fresh scallop from the west coast. The leader of the group was delighted. He and several of his friends travel the world as shellfish enthusiasts and will go as far as Spain, California and Indonesia to get the best´. But the best is here, I enthused, and pointed out that the shellfish he had in Spain probably came from Scotland anyway. Regrettably, the Swede´s past experience of Scotland´s shellfish had been disappointing. He had visited the Isle of Skye and couldn´t find any fresh shellfish, herring or cod. Admittedly it was a time when Scottish pubs and restaurants were all too comfortable with the deep-fat fryer and lumps of frozen prawn in breadcrumbs - scampi and chips, scampi and peas, and a sachet of ketchup or tartare sauce on the side. I don´t know how we managed to sink from the glory of the herring days to deep-fried prawns but, I assured my Swedish guest, he would be blown away by the quality and freshness of our seafood now and we have some of the best chefs to prepare it.

During the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, I was struck by a recurring conversation I had in several coastal communities. I was travelling up and down the west coast between the lockdowns, writing my book, A Taste of the Highlands, and kept meeting locals who were enjoying shellfish for the first time. Some felt they were living like kings with lobster on the table several times a week; others were unsure what to do with it. All of them had been used to the landed catch from the waters around Mull, Skye and Ullapool being loaded straight onto lorries heading to London, France and Spain while they bought haddock, prawns and dressed crab from the fish vans that came all the way from the east coast. It is a dynamic that is difficult to comprehend, with laws and quotas regarding what a boat can and cannot land.

At the end of filming Appetite for Adventure (p.96), we enjoyed Cape Wrath Oysters (p.117) on the beach in Durness.

So, when I started writing this book, I had these locals in mind. In Scotland, we have more coastline than any other part of the UK. Seafood is one of our biggest exports, and while it is important to showcase Scotland as a global seafood destination it is also important for those of us who live in Scotland to enjoy eating more fish and shellfish and to be inventive with it. Since the pandemic and Brexit, there have been positive changes for the home market as some fishermen and fish farmers have switched to selling solely to the local communities and restaurants whilst others are holding back enough for locals before the rest goes to export. The raft of guidelines and quotas often don´t make sense to the fishermen, especially when they see premium fish ending up as bait. The recurring conversation I was having while writing this book, two years later, switched to boats going out of business and the industry dying due to unrealistic regulations. Most fishermen go to sea because they love it and see it as a way of life, they said, but the fun was being sucked out of it.

Bally Philp on his boat, Nemesis BRD 115, Skye.

On my journey around the coast I gained such respect for our fishermen and cemented my appreciation of the quality of our seafood. In my imagination, I followed in the wake of the herring boats and herring lassies, starting in Ayr in the south where the wind is being harnessed to produce salt from the seawater, to the Western Isles, up the coast to Orkney and Shetland, and down the east coast to Fife and East Lothian to meet people whose lives are associated with the sea. I met not just fishermen, but salt producers, shellfish farmers, seaweed harvesters and foragers, creel makers, boat makers, fish merchants and several seafood chefs. The resulting stories provide a potted picture of our coastal communities today, the challenges they face and the lives they lead in order to provide us with the wonderful products of the sea.

There are some traditional recipes amongst the modern and multicultural ones. They reflect the society we live in and the way we often draw inspiration from different culinary cultures and our own travels. All the recipes in the book are easy to prepare and have been written with the intention of inspiring you to have a bit of fun with our glorious fish and shellfish. Whether seared in a little butter with salt and pepper and a squeeze of lemon, or cooked in a spicy broth or a soulful curry, you simply can´t go wrong when the quality of the seafood is so fresh and so good!
Ancestral Coastal Survival

Before heading off on our seafood journey, I thought it would be interesting to hear how our ancestors would have survived by the sea. They would have been skilled foragers and fishermen; they would have understood the seasons and the tides; they would have produced salt and preserved fish in it; and they would have cooked fish over fires and tanned the skins to make leather for shoes and pouches. Many of these ancient skills are being practised again today, so I have asked Patrick McGlinchey, the founder and director of Backwoods Survival School, and the ancestral skills consultant and practitioner for a number of BBC programmes to paint a picture of our ancestors´ lives for us.

The remains of shell middens scattered throughout Scotland give us an insight into some of what they consumed in ancient times, by hugging the shoreline and utilising the resources of the woodland environment in which they thrived. It was a smart strategy, the best of both environments. A day actively hunting in the forest could yield nothing and use up valuable calories whereas a walk on the shoreline would offer them abundant protein without much effort. They were literally standing on their next meal. Working with the ebb and flow of the tide they would gather their daily needs from this living larder and also forage for the seasonal edible and medicinal plants that grow on the shoreline above the high-tide mark.

You´ll find many different habitats on the coastline but it´s the estuaries and rocky shore that yield the rich pickings as far as foraging is concerned. Looking out onto an empty beach at low tide would give you the impression that there was...
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Autor

Basan, Ghillie

Ghillie Basan has written over 40 books on different culinary cultures and has been nominated for the Glenfiddich Award, the Guild of Food Writers Award and the Cordon Bleu World Food Media Award. Her food and travel articles have appeared in a huge variety of newspapers and magazines, including The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, BBC Good Food magazine and Eating magazine. As a broadcaster she has presented and contributed to many BBC radio programmes. As well as running cookery workshops she also works as a flavour and food pairing consultant for bar tenders and chefs.

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