Meet the Scottish producers changing the culinary landscape

Monday 17 May 2021
A few years ago, as I sat overlooking the harbour in Sydney – I was living there and working at Time Out – an Italian chef, upon clocking my Glaswegian accent, looked at me and said, ‘Scotland? Great produce! But you don’t know what to do with it.’ This, I realised, feeling suddenly pale in the Australian sun, is the global reputation of Scottish cooking. Sure, our produce is world-renowned – salmon, shellfish, whisky – but there is little faith that we, as Scots, know what to do with our own bounty.
Ethical Shellfish Company boat
It is, of course, nonsense. The people have known how to cook with their country’s wares for millennia – culinary craft has been honed throughout historic invasions, waves of immigration and the spice laden kists of imperialism – but somehow so-called Scottish cuisine has left us with haggis and tatties, deep-fried fish (we don’t talk about the other deep-fried thing) and chicken Balmoral. Glasgow chef Grant Reekie, who runs pop-up restaurant That’s Yer Dinner together with his brother Gordon, believes the reason for this might be that traditional recipes stopped evolving around the early 19th century, when the Highland Clearances drove thousands to smog-dense cities, the centres of the Industrial Revolution. ‘Oats and beremeal barley had been the staple grains,’ he explains. ‘But when people moved into tenements – essentially overcrowded slums – white bread with jam and sugary tea became staples. This is when the Scots stopped being healthy – when they stopped being so connected to their roots.’ And with the Clearances came not only the temporary ban of speaking Gaelic and wearing tartan, but the degradation of Scotland’s food culture. But recent years – shaped by pivotal referendums and a focus on locavorism – have shaken this culture, to both reflect on its traditions and strive to create new ones. In the gnarled, windswept Outer Hebrides, two-year-old North Uist Distillery is developing the world’s first headline whisky made with native beremeal barley, which will also be the first (legal) whisky produced on the island. Locals help to harvest the acid-pink heather and inky-black brambles that are key to the distillery’s gins. ‘When we were wee, we went cockling, musselling, brambling; we’d plant potatoes in the machair,’ says Kate MacDonald, who co-founded North Uist with partner Jonny Ingledew. ‘It is about more than just drink – it’s about a deep connection to the land.’ The couple were inspired by the work of Mark Williams of Galloway Wild Foods. Hosting foraging walks across the country, Williams says he’s seen a huge surge of interest in the past five years. ‘There is not a single spice or exotic flavour that we don’t have already in Scotland,’ he says. ‘You’ve got magnolia petals, with their gingery profile – really warming and slightly peppery. Sweet cicely has a lovely aniseed flavour. Sea arrowgrass tastes of coriander. Gorse flowers have a coconut flavour, sloe blossoms taste like almond, and you can get vanilla notes from meadowsweet flowers.’ He points out that the Right to Roam policy means you can ‘take wild things for your own consumption, which is massively empowering’. Such ingredients are now finding their place on Scotland’s menus in all manner of guises. Under the surface, quiet as a timorous beastie, a new movement seeks to establish a sustainable, contemporary cuisine, echoing what René Redzepi did for Scandinavia when he opened Noma.

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