Coconut Tablet, Bunnahabhain

 

And so I begin a week of Wonderful Scottish Food on the most depressing day of the year. Some would say that was fitting, but those people should be ignored. Instead let's blot out all the pain and negativity with a little bit of sugar, with a tiny piece of Coconut Tablet. Something that, if you were planning a Burns Supper, would be a great way to end the evening accompanied by strong tea or coffee.

Tablet is a pretty easy thing to make in theory. It involves throwing whole packages of things in a pot and turning on the heat. Normally one bag of sugar, one tin of condensed milk and 100g of butter. That's the kind of recipe you can memorize and then magically produce whenever you fancy it. These are the recipes that you can make for the younger generations of your family and when you die, because there's no written record of the culinary trademarks, they all mourn your death terribly, crying to the heavens because they will never again taste whatever it is that you made so well. In this case: tablet. When they themselves try to make it, they will just cry more; as simple as it seems the difficulty lies in knowing the stages of tablet and being able to accurately predict when it will be done. They'll definitely get this wrong for a while. It is this kind of post-mortem adulation that I wish to inspire one day; it's the only kind of legacy I care about leaving. So I'm getting the recipes right, right now.

In thinking about tablet and tablet-making, I often wondered (well, a couple of times) what would happen if you substituted a can of coconut milk for a can of condensed milk. Let me tell you what happens: for a long, long time things appear to be progressing completely normally. Having mixed all of the ingredients together and brought them to a boil, you lower the temperature and mix it now and then letting it simmer for about 20 minutes. In the middle of this you get the most delicious caramel you have ever laid tongue upon. In this case, as it was coconut flavoured caramel, it is excruciatingly delicious. But you don't stop there. You continue to stir until it turns golden and wee sugar crystals start to form and then you take it off the heat, beat the life out of it and quickly pour it into a pan. Except that when you make tablet with coconut milk it doesn't turn golden. And suddenly you're stirring it and there are definitely crystals forming and you are moments away from ruining the batch when you quickly beat the life out of it and pour it into a pan. This perhaps because of a higher water content or a slightly lower sugar content in the recipe. Regardless it is actually quite good; the results are lighter and crumblier than normal and a more delicate hue but the coconut perfume is pervasive and compelling. And think of the other flavours you could add to it - ginger, lime, a drizzle of dark chocolate. Maybe some toasted coconut shavings on top. Rum. Stirred in just after taking the mixture off the heat, any of those would be divine.

If you are making tablet for the first time I sincerely recommend this site. They are more thorough than I would ever care to be.

It's fitting to eat severely sugary food on Burns Night, after all if not for the publication of his poems, Robert Burns was days away from sailing off to Jamaica, to a sugar plantation, to become a slave driver. Technically a "bookkeeper", but as he was going to be in charge of "assets", the job would have involved a great deal of brutality. Instead he managed to avoid the financial and personal situation that was making this appalling choice somehow palatable. Instead he became a national poet and a supporter of abolitionists. So eat a bit of tablet in recognition of our profoundly human ability to be fallible and wrong, of a triumph of art, of the exploitation and atrocities that bankrolled western Scotland and brought in the mounds of sugar. Eat some because it is delicious and because the past is forever complicated.

But back to us, right here, right now. Let's say you are having a bad day, maybe the most depressing of the year. A little bit of whisky could make it a little bit better. If things feel particularly bleak my favourite remedy is a half pint and a shot of Bunnahabhain. Bunnahabhain is an Islay malt and those ones are noted for their peaty and smoky flavour. Being mostly ignorant, I like to think of this malt as being "balanced" because it has smoky, peaty, sweet and smooth aspects. Really this term is reserved for malts that are more cohesive. Rounded and smooth ones from the Highlands. But I feel there is a balance in the way that each taste replaces itself one by one in every sip. I find the slowly changing character of the drink hypnotic, there is a narrative in each swallow. I wouldn't drink more than this to take the sting out of a blue day, this will be enough. And I would drink it at The Pot Still, a small pub near the train stations filled equally with business men and bemapped tourists holding their glasses of whisky with sharp fear. The walls are a dirty warm pink, the ceiling moulds excessive, the wood is dark, the whisky is abundant and miraculously there seems to always be a tiny table in the corner, empty and ready for you.

Comments

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[Basic Bookkeeping]

I think If things feel particularly bleak my favorite remedy is a half pint and a shot of Bunnahabhain. Bunnahabhain is an Inlay malt and those ones are noted for their peaty and smoky flavor.

[Jess]

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I try to honour you, in small ways.