Abroath Smokies

My Lonely Planet guide to Scotland elects Abroath Smokies as Scotland's fourth most important Scottish attraction. That means that before you visit Edinburgh’s old town, before you tour Stirling Castle, before you sip whiskey in a Hebridean distillery or play a round of golf at St Andrews, you should consume an Abroath Smokie.

An Abroath Smokie is a haddock, traditionally smoked over a hard-wood fire. Gutted at sea, the fish are transported to the smoke-house where the first stage of the process is to head and clean the fish. The fish are then salted and packed into barrels (and left overnight). After salting, the fish are washed and their tails are tied together in pairs. The pairs of fish are slung over wooden sticks and suspended over a whiskey barrel, lined with slate to protect from the slow fire of oak and beech. Hessian sacking is placed over the fish, allowing sufficient oxygen to sustain the fire whilst retaining heat and smoke around the fish. Smoking time is usually 30 to 40 minutes.

Last Saturday, Iain R. Spink's Original Smokies from Abroath had a stall at the Edinburgh Farmers market. I usually wander over to Queens Street on a Saturday morning to check out the stalls and breath in the smell of the Roast Crackling from the Reiver Country Farm Foods Stand (although that’s another entry). Other than the Pork smell, the market is often slightly disappointing; the range of produce is sometimes quite limited, excepting an eternal plethora of sausages. This week, the market was wonderfully busy. It was obviously the on-week for most traders, including the elusive Abroath Smokies company. As soon as I turned onto Bread Street, the air had a wood-fire flavour and any thoughts of crackling and apple sauce were forgotten.

Abroath Smokies had set up a row of smoking fires along the verge of Castle Terrace. Freshly smoked fish were cooling on a park bench. The fish had been filleted once they were out of the smoke and all the bones were tossed in a large bin. On other benches and garden edging around the stand, were dozens of people picking the very last flakes from the skin of their smokies. I bought two smokies. I pulled a flake of white flesh from the tail of one (just to have tried it when hot!) then wrapped them up again to have for dinner. The fish was so delicious and so delicate that I was quite tempted to sit down in the middle of Johnston Terrace and eat them both, despite having had a huge breakfast an hour before.

I did reach into my bag for a second flake about half way up to the Old Town, where I was going to meet Hattie. My hand came out of my bag covered in clear, warm juice. The fish were leaking all over the place. I pulled out my wallet, my diary, my camera and my phone, all of which were covered in a sweet sticky liquid. (I know it was sweet because I had a good lick of my fingers!) I then retrieved the fish bag, which continued to drip all over my boots. I really needed something to sop everything up and I badly needed to wash my hands and my phone! I thought of going into the Ness shop to ask for a bag, but I figured that they wouldn’t be very obliging after I’d dribbled smokey fish juice all over their floor. I called Hattie (getting a sticky ear in the process) and asked her pick up a plastic bag and a newspaper for me to wrap the fish in. Thanks to Hattie, the Saturday Scotsman, a granite bench in Tron Square and the teeny tiny bathroom of the Southern Cross Cafe, I was soon cleaned up. (My keys and phone still smell a bit smokey though.)

P and I ate the fish cold for dinner with rocket and shaved parmesan on the side. They were just as good as they had been in the morning – sweet, smokey and salty like the sea. Delish!
I agree with the Rough Guide about the number four attraction in Scotland and would recommend that all visitors to the country try an Abroath Smokie.

Whirlwind visitors might have a hard time getting one though. Unless your Highland's tour stops in Abroath, the only other option is to visit Iain R. Spink at one of Scotland's farmers markets. It is particularly difficult to catch them at the Edinburgh Farmers market as they only come to Edinburgh on the fourth Sunday of the month, if, and only if, there are five Sundays in the month. By my calculations that is about two times in the year.

Other market locations for Original Smokies from Abroath can be found on their website.

Wordsworth Biscuits

Morning tea hasn’t happened in my house for a while. We’ve had plenty of afternoon teas. We’ve had cakes and scones and sandwiches. We’ve had cookies, but they’ve been big fat cookies, the kind of cookies that are good to munch during a long night in, at the end of an otherwise too small lunch, or in response to the hunger pangs that arise on the walk home from school. So today I made hazelnut biscuits, perfect for placing on the saucer next to a cup of tea or good coffee.

The recipe I adapted from Stephanie Alexander The Cook's Companion. She calls for thinly sliced candied peel to be added but I switched for dried cranberries (as below) and increased the quantity of ground hazelnut and decreased the almond meal of the original recipe.

2 eggs
200 grams castor sugar
a few drops of vanilla essence
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
60 grams chopped dried cranberries (although perhaps not chopped next time)
180 grams ground hazelnuts
120 grams ground almonds
½ teaspoon baking powder

Beat eggs, castor sugar and vanilla until the batter is paler than when your started and it is coat-the-back-of-a-spoon thick. Fold in remaining ingredients. Using a piping bag with no nozzle, pipe the mixture in fingers onto baking trays line with paper. Bake for 30 minutes in a 140º C oven. Once out of the oven dibble a thin icing made from:

1 cup pure icing sugar
juice of one lemon

The original recipe did call for the egg and sugar batter to be beaten until ‘pale and thick’. This instruction lead me to a quarter hour of frenzied beating but the batter never would get as thick as I thought it should – nowhere near as thick as egg yolks will go if they are beaten alone. Hopefully my instruction, while less elegant, may help avoid any extraneous beating. Candied peel might give a more exciting tang to the biscuit but I never really like peel. Cranberries certainly add a similar sour flavour, and a somewhat Christmassy look, but perhaps fresh peel might be a nice change next time.

The amoretti biscuit that one occasionally receives with coffee at an Italian cafe always fill me with happiness. When I see them. When I eat them, I often find that they are dry, over-crumbly and contain too much almond extract or they are just too small. Wordsworth biscuits are much more satisfying but still light enough for a morning tea. Also, compared to some of those other almond biscuits, these are really, really easy to make.