Recipes from Scotland

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Here are some recipes from Scotland. They are very much traditional recipes and these days much modified - for example, not everyone today makes the famous Cullen Skink with a real fish stock, or just add chunks of potato, rather than the suggested mashed potato as a thickener. Recipes evolve. These recipes from Scotland link back into domestic culinary traditions, long before fan-assisted ovens and microwaves.

These days, Cullen Skink (traditional recipe below) features in plenty of collections of recipes from Scotland. What is less often explained - and what especially appeals to me with so many fisher-folk in my own ancestry - is that the name is probably ironic, or a kind of a joke.

'Skink' usually meant a meat-based soup in Scots, or even a cut of meat. (For interest, see the skink as meat recipe below.) Skink is possibly cognate with shin (of beef) or even shank, and seems linked to Middle Dutch schenke, meaning shin. (You'll be a hit at your next dinner party if you murmur that at an appropriate moment.) The implication is that the fishers from Cullen on the Moray Firth coast - like so many others at the time in this perilous trade - were so poor they couldn't afford meat, so made their soup with fish. An analogy is the ironic description of herring as 'two-eyed steak'.

Buy the smoked haddock at a top quality fishmonger's shop.This happens to be Jolly's in Kirkwall, Orkney - but that might be a bit far for some of you.

Skin a smoked haddock (original recipe suggests a 'Finnan haddie') and cook with just enough water to cover, along with a chopped onion. Remove and flake the fish, adding bones to a fish stock that you are meanwhile boiling up separately. Strain this stock, adding to it a pint / 568ml of already hot milk and the flaked fish. Salt to taste (though, these days, smoked fish tends to be salty enough). Boil a little longer, adding mashed potato to thicken, then some butter and pepper. Serve immediately.

Skink: an old Scots Stew Soup

Make beef stock from a leg of beef. (No stock cubes in those days!!!!) Reserve the choicest parts of (what my granny would have called) the 'boiling beef'. Cut up whatever vegetables you can find in your kailyard - for example carrots, neeps, leeks, onions, cabbage etc, blanch for ten minutes. Add to the stock base and boil till tender. Add the chopped bits of boiling beef to the tureen and serve the soup seasoned.

Nettle soup or broth

The story goes that Highland folk preferred nettles to kale (kail) in the spring. They considered the kale of the Lowland Scots to be positively effete! In the traditional recipes from Scotland, you must gather young nettles from a clean source then chop very finely. As usual, the recipe assumes you have at hand some good stock - chicken this time - in which you have cooked a quantity of barley. Simply add the nettles, simmer till tender, then season. Variations include adding milk, butter and mashed potato as thickener.

Tatties and Herrin (Potatoes and Herring)

Not so much a recipe from Scotland, more a staple in season for the fishing communities of both Lowland and Highland Scotland. In its original form this traditional Scottish recipe suggests a three-legged pot is almost filled with potatoes (peeled or otherwise) and half-filled with water. Salt herring, washed, are laid on top of the tatties. Cook for an hour or so over a peat fire. Not to be confused with……

Though I can't say I ever cooked herring in a pot over a peat fire, I do remember hairy tatties. Why were the potatoes hairy, you ask? Well, that's back to my granny again - the one who used to dry fish outside on the clothes-line. Simply boil up the dried fish and mash into the cooked tatties (around equal quantities, I think). It's the simplest of traditional recipes from Scotland. In the resultant dish, the tatties take on a fibrous look when the fish has been pounded through them. Eat with some kind of mustard sauce or just mustard.

Mussel Stew

For about 30 mussels, use 1 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp flour, 1 onion, 1cup milk, good splash of white wine, salt/pepper/parsley. After scrubbing the mussels, discarding any open ones, place in pan with white wine, cover and bring to boil. Simmer gently c. 10mins until all the mussels are open. Strain liquid and keep aside. Remove mussels from shell, discarding beards. Melt butter, stir in flour, add mussel liquid, continuing to stir, then add (warmed) milk. Add finely chopped onion, simmering till cooked. Add seasoning, parsley etc, then mussels and cream. Do not allow to boil, or mussels may go rubbery. Serve in soup plates.

Skirlie

Ah, the Scottish preoccupation with oats and oatmeal! Skirlie, mentioned by Sir Walter Scott in 'Old Mortality' is said to be short for 'skirl in the pan' where skirl is a Scots word meaning shrieking (as in the skirl of bagpipes). It refers to the noise made by the frying pan when butter is melted. To be honest, I can't say I've ever heard butter shriek, but you get the general idea.

Anyway, chop two ounces of suet, melt in a hot pan. Add chopped onions and brown well. Add enough oatmeal and stir to absorb the fat. Cook for a few minutes. Good as a stuffing-type accompaniment to roast chicken, or with mince.

Not all shortbread is made at home. But Scotland's shortbread makers on a large scale are pretty good! This is the Shortbread House of Edinburgh

Shortbread

The carb-fest continues with this sweet biscuit that is both still baked at home and also made and exported on an industrial scale. Notable from recipes from Scotland, here is an old traditional one for a round of shortbread, baked as festive cake at Hogmanay (Scotland's New Year Festival, formerly more important than Xmas). Use 8 oz / 27g flour, 4 oz / 113g rice flour, 8 oz / 227g butter, 4oz / 113g castor sugar.

Carefully blend the butter and sugar by hand on a board. Mix the flour and rice flour together, then work this gradually into the butter and sugar, until the dough is of the consistency of short-crust. Make sure it does not become oily (possibly in hot weather therefore unlikely in Scotland) or rubbery with over-mixing. The less it is kneaded the shorter and crisper the shortbread.

Do not roll out - as this can toughen the dough - but press by hand into two round cakes either in shortbread moulds or on baking-paper. The proportions should be in the ratio of three-quarters of an inch thick for an 8 inch diameter cake. (That's 1.9 x 20.3 cm.) Pinch the edges all round by way of decoration and prick with a fork all over. Oven cook for around 30 mins at 150 C. (gas mark 2) to get it crisp and very light golden brown.

Mrs MacNab's Scones

Lightness, coolness and quickness in the dough-making seems to be key in all of the many scone recipes (such as Johanna's granny's, on that link). Mrs MacNab was a farmer's wife near Ballater. That town, of course, is near Balmoral Castle, the royal family's holiday hideaway ever since Queen Victoria had it built. So great was the reputation of Mrs MacNab's scones that distinguished guests at Balmoral, including King Frederick of Prussia, used to pop in for tea regularly (or so the story goes.) This Frederick was really Kaiser Frederick III - the one who married Queen Vikki's eldest daughter, called after her mother.

I imagine Mrs MacNab, passing the scones, desperate for a conversational gambit, saying in her fine Aberdeenshire accent 'An foo's yer mither-in-law?' (How is your mother-in-law.) To which Kaiser Fred would reply. 'Ach, still ze queen…!'

Anyway, to attract German nobility with one of the famous recipes from Scotland, mix 16 oz / 454 g flour with a teaspoon of salt, a small tsp of bicarbonate of soda and 2 small tsp of cream of tartar.Rub in 2 oz / 55g butter. Stir in a beaten egg and a half-pint / 284ml buttermilk. On a floured board, knead by hand as lightly as possible. Tear into big enough pieces of dough to enable you to cut them into 'scone-size' quarters, having pricked them with a fork. (This is our interpretation of the original instructions.) But, basically, handle the mixture as little as possible. It seems that both Mrs MacNab and Johanna's granny had really cold hands. (So that's where Johanna got her own cold hands from……trust me.)