Before I wrote about food, I taught cooking. Not terribly well, but just a bit better than the people who came to learn. The first thing I insisted on was that nobody ever wrote anything down or looked at a book. You cook ingredients, not recipes. For thousands of years, people have learnt to cook by example, memory and taste. Most food was invented, perfected and passed on by illiterate women with one pot over a flame. I was particularly interested in Scottish food, because it’s the earliest mouthful I remember.
My first kitchen instruction was how to stir with a spurtle porridge made with water, eaten with salt and butter. So, for a couple of summers I taught up a glen in Ross-shire, beside the River Conon. We cooked ingredients only to be found locally — tatties and soft fruit, deer and grouse from the hills, salmon and trout from the river, crab and mackerel from the coast.
To stay ahead of the students, I’d trudge up the hill in the afternoons and sit in the kitchen of Peggy McKenzie, a retired gamekeeper’s wife who was one of the most naturally in-tune, modestly perfect cooks. I’d watch her make food and listen to her talk about the family and the seasons and the events and the hardships and the triumphs that were marked by her labours. She did everything with an ethereal lightness and the elegant dexterity of ancient practice.
She knew all her frugal kitchen equipment by touch and made miraculously simple yet soundly surprising food, from slow-baked jams as clear as precious stones to boiled cakes and slow soups. She taught me how to stuff a sheep’s stomach to make mutton black pudding; and black bun and clootie dumpling, braw bree, skirlie, crowdie and oat farls. She wrote nothing and I wrote nothing. All the food was sourced, invented, aged, matured, smoothed and perfected over years and years by hundreds and hundreds of hard, gentle hands and hungry mouths within a day’s walk of her bungalow.
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None of it is surprising, but it was all exceedingly well made; there’s good bread, the kebabs are properly unctuous. All the flavours are shouty
I learnt more about cooking and the value and meaning of food and hospitality, sitting at her tin-topped table, than in all of the next 30 years of menus, reading, writing and eating. The great dichotomy of Peggy’s kitchen was that what it produced was entirely private, almost secret. There was nothing comparable in public cafes, bars or restaurants. And there still isn’t. Scotland remains the worst country in Europe to eat in if you’re paying — and one of the finest if you’re a guest.
People who have only been tourists here laugh when I mention the heritage of Scots’ hospitality. They know only the hot-box pies and late-night souse of vinegared fish suppers, the grim tourist interpretations of guidebook food, the dumb blanding of the Scottish board into the polite ethnic experience of haggis-stuffed tomatoes.
I was up in the Highlands a couple of weeks back, banging about in the heather. At the end of a day, I stepped into the kitchen to a smell that reminded me of Peggy — mutton being braised by Fiona, another miraculous Scottish cook. I, like you, had forgotten mutton. With a great marketing and agri con, it was replaced by lamb. If you look at 19th-century cookbooks, you’ll see very few recipes for lamb and hundreds for mutton.
Wool was what made England its first fortune. Fluffy gold, sold to the weavers of Ghent. Sheep weren’t slaughtered till they were four or five years old. The most valued were gelded rams. But today, wool has no value, and farmers want an immediate return on their animals, so the sooner they can slit their throats, the better. And the more they add value to young, tender meat, the better. Except it isn’t better. Lamb is a bland, short, monoglot mouthful compared with mutton’s eloquent, rich, euphemistic flavour. We’ve been cheated by agri-expediency to eat an inferior, flannelly, infantilised alternative. In fact, we’re led to believe that younger is better for all meat, when the opposite is the truth. Flavour, richness, interest and complexity come with age. Mutton is the true base taste of our national cuisine, and it’s gone. But you can still find it — go and order some, cook it slowly, be amazed.
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I spent a day in my home city of Edinburgh and had one dinner. I always search for somewhere to review. Hanam’s was recommended — a Kurdish restaurant in the Old Town. I took Emma Hawkins, purveyor of taxidermy and memento mori to the jaded, and Stella Tennant, so I was mutton between two lambs. Hanam’s is very red inside, medically, furiously ruddy. It’s like eating inside an inflamed pancreas — not a bad look.
Kurds are clutching the edge of history, but it looks like they may now be dealt a nation out of the chronic nihilism of the Middle East. They were short-changed and lied to after the Great War, and have blown on the embers of their resentment ever since. They have the best name for armed freedom fighters: peshmerga, meaning “to stand in front of death”.
This bit of the city is lively, full of students, tourists and locals, so it’s brave to keep the restaurant austerely teetotal. But for me, it’s perfect. They offer a very good version of the salted Iranian yoghurt drink doogh and an excellent take on chai. The gamut of Kurdish food isn’t markedly different from the Lebanese-Iranian stuff you’re used to: flatbread, grilled lamb and chicken, minced kebabs, stuffed vine leaves, fresh pungent salads, purées and pulses, baklava, thick coffee and hubble-bubble.
None of it is surprising, but it was all exceedingly well made, particularly the marvellous rice with pomegranate seeds; there’s good bread, the kebabs are properly unctuous. All the flavours, as you’d hope for in Middle Eastern cuisine, are shouty, strident and hot under the collar. Nothing is judicious or equivocal or polite. Emma and Stella, both living up here, were happy just to eat and get out without having to spit into a napkin. This generic style of food is too often dimmed, damned and defined by low expectations and low prices. But when it’s made this well, it sings and shines as a good, handmade, reasonably affordable and engaging dinner.
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Afterwards, the lambs needed a drink, so we went to the Ensign Ewart, a tiny, low, ancient pub under the castle, named after a soldier of the Royal North British Dragoons who captured a French eagle at Waterloo. There, I sank a happy can of Irn-Bru, which is everything I love and loathe about a Scottish mouthful, and went with dinner like a Scientologist in a mosque.
There was local music being played conversationally around a table, by, I think, Sandy Brechin, a magical accordion player. And it struck me as strange that the accordion can be a brilliant purveyor of emotion and pleasure in the hands of a Scotsman, but an instrument of aural torture when given to a Frenchman — and that exactly the opposite is true with frying pans. Phew.
Hanam’s, 3 Johnston Terrace, Edinburgh EH1 2PW; 0131 225 1329, hanams.com; Mon-Sun: noon-midnight
Second helpings: three of the best Middle Eastern restaurants
Shaam Nights, Cardiff
An alcohol-free grillhouse specialising in Syrian dishes in a colourful, tiled setting.
116-118 City Road, Cardiff CF24 3DQ; 02920 482824, shaamnights.com
Mezze Palace, Bristol
A cosy cavern in central Bristol, serving Lebanese food with a focus on mezze.
13a Small Street, Bristol BS1 1DE; 0117 927 7937, mezzepalace.com
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Pomegranate, Brighton
A contemporary restaurant offering Middle Eastern specialities made with organic ingredients.
10 Manchester Street, Kemptown, Brighton BN2 1TF; 01273 628386, pomegranatebrighton.co.uk