Ginger Tablet

Potato Scones, Baking with Whisky

         

(ugh. horrible picture. horrible dark winter and lack of natural light. very, very pretty pan)

I love potato scones. You can make an excellent breakfast by frying up a couple of them and topping them with some fried tomato and slices of smoked salmon. They are the perfect textural addition to a bacon roll. They make for a very indulgent grilled cheese sandwich. 

I'm going to go back to buying them at the store.

To make potato scones you simply mix some flour into some mashed potatoes and cook them on a buttered griddle. The advertised ratio of flour to potato is about 1:5. I tried this easy recipe the other day and it was a disaster. My dough was really, really wet so I had to add quite a bit more flour than suggested just to get it in any kind of shape. The recipes said to roll it out and cut circles of dough to fry up. I was sort of squishing disks directly onto my skillet. They stuck and would absolutely not be turned. I then remembered that I now own a very beautiful copper-bottomed non-stick frying pan so I tried them in there. This was better. I still had to drop rounds of dough onto the pan and flatten them out with my spatula, but at least they were browning nicely and somewhat willing to turn. I expected to make a huge pile. I ended up with three. All the rest of the dough ended up in a half-charred lump. And they were only ok.

I guess I'll try again in the future. There was one that was almost tasty and the promise of that could be enough to battle again. The texture/taste was softer and fresher than the ones from the store. But a whole package of those ones only costs about 49p. That's not a lot of money to spend to save a pretty big pain in the ass.

Moving on.

Let's say you want to do some baking and you want to use whisky. Personally, I like baking with Jack Daniels, but if I felt the need to keep it Scottish, I would use Bell's. Bell's is a blended whisky which means that it's a mutt. Unlike a single malt which only comes from a single distillery, a blended whisky is from many sources and this makes its character less defined. In the case of Bell's you get something quite sweet and smooth, i.e. something that's not going to make your cake taste like peat. Plus the blends are way, way cheaper and if you're going to be masking the subtleties with chocolate, fruit and mounds of sugar, you don't need the expensive stuff. You should add a tiny bit of water to a nice single malt, you should never add cake batter.

Cullen Skink, Old Pulteney

 

Cullen Skink. Quite possibly the most intriguingly named soup on our fair planet.

This smoked haddock chowder is also fantastically delicious, creamy and indulgent despite it's lack of cream and is a breeze to make.

I made a batch on Sunday while simultaneously baking J a birthday cake, cleaning the kitchen, making potato scones, hearing J's recent tales of London and looking at the accompanying pictures. I was also listening to the radio and worrying about our broken boiler and performing some light scheming and negotiating quite a hangover from a girls' night that involved martinis so dirty they were actually obscene. Basically this recipe is difficult to screw up and tastes far more involved than you ever have to be in putting it together. Serve it at the start of your Burns Supper.

The best bowls of cullen skink I've had have come from Cafe Gandolfi's and it's their version I aspire to. Unlike a lot of recipes, they add a tiny bit of tomato to their soup. I think this is essential. You want a bit of acidity in there to cut the creamy, smoke flavours. It makes you love the creamy, smoky flavours even more. Likewise, lemon is mandatory. As is the bright parsley. There aren't a lot of ingredients to this soup, but if one were removed its character would suffer.

You'll also find some recipes that call for cream and diced potatoes instead of milk and mashed potato. I would stick to this version. The texture is far more interesting and the milk allows the smoked haddock to come through without being choked by dense cream.

I've adapted my recipe from this source since I think it's the simplest way to get the best result and it's not a bad approximation of Gandolfi's.

Ingredients

• A little less than one liter of whole milk

• 400g/1 lb of smoked haddock (not the dyed kind)

• 1-2 bay leaves

• one diced onion

• 1-1 1/2 cups of mashed potato (made according to taste)

• parsley (save the stems)

• 1/2 a seeded tomato, cut into small and delicate chunks

 

Method

1. Gently bring your milk to a simmer, add the bay leaves, the parsley stems and the fish. Poach the fish for approximately 5-10 minutes. Remove from the heat and let the fish further infuse the milk for about 5 or 10 more minutes.

2. Fry up your onions until they are just soft while all of this fish action is happening.

3. Fish out the fish from your milk. You can strain the fish/leaves/stems if that's easier, but I keep the milk in the pot and just use a slotted spoon to remove the chunks. Throw away the stems/leaves and then break the fish into small chunks discarding any unappetizing skin and bones. If you took the  milk out of the pot, put it back in now.

4. Put the deliciously fishy milk back on the heat and add your mashed potatoes. Also those onions. At this point I would cook it for a few minutes, maybe 15, to further thicken and reduce the liquid.

5. Reinsert your fish and the chopped tomato. Let them get nice and hot. Add some chopped parsley.

6. Serve it up with loads of pepper and some lemon wedges.

Do you know what whisky might be nice with this soup? Old Pulteney, a new favourite of mine that comes from Wick in the far north of Scotland. In the olden days you could sometimes only get there by boat! Even though it's on the mainland! Remote! While this whisky does not have the same smoky, peaty character as the Islay whiskies I love, it is quite mellow and smooth, being matured in old bourbon casks. Sometimes you need mellow and smooth. But because it's also matured right by the blustery shore, it has a this salty kick right at the end.  That makes it a really fantastic mouthful. A hot flask of soup and a cool wee flask of this whisky on some bracing sea shore. That would be perfect. That could possibly be my weekend.

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.

Whisky Tasting Notes: Dalmore 12 Year

I remember the night clearly when after taking a swig from a large, warm can of Tennent's I thought: "You know what would go well with this alcohol? More alcohol!" Specifically whisky. And since you are never more than six feet away from a bottle of cheap blended whisky when studying art in Scotland, my desire was quickly fulfilled. It's not that I had never wanted to drink different kinds of alcohol together in one evening before, but it was the first time I really wanted two different alcoholic drinks on the go at once. From that point forward, I became a devotee of whisky and a half pint.

In my previous life I drank cocktails like vodka and soda with a splash of cranberry, or dirty martinis, or kir, but none of these work in Scotland. They might pop up at the occasional party or a late afternoon picnic, but if you want them to be your staple, you'll be weeping in your oatmeal. On the whole, Scotland doesn't do cocktails, and on the whole it's because the climate is not condusive to them. The Scottish aren't stupid. They have developed a few food products that make the weather not bearable, but somehow just manageable enough allow everyone to keep going. Whisky & beer, oatmeal (in cake or porridge form) and delicious pig products create a holy trinity of food stuffs that enable us to make it through the dark and wet winters.

While single malt whiskies are the reserve of middle-aged business men outside of Scotland, within this fair country the pubs do something to make it accessible to even the poorest art student (the poorest one who prioritizes alcohol, anyway): they have a malt of the month. Every month a different (and usually single malt) whisky is selected and then offered at a very reasonable price (between $1.40 and £2). This means that with a little bit of dedication, even novices can quickly get an idea of the kinds of whiskies they like and the kinds that just leave a burning feeling in their mouth. And you can order the whisky with a nice Scottish beer and together they will make you forget about the rain and the wind that almost knocks you down and that comment that that person made during your group crit and you wanted to punch them.

On Saturday we arrived at the pub almost three hours before the Scotland match and were facing spending the next five hours shifting about uncomfortably on one chair between the two of us, trying to watch the screen and avoid having too much beer spilled down the backs of our shirts. Apart from our friends also huddled around the only tiny available table (nicely saved, B&A), drinking was to be our only solace. After an initial pint, J asked if I wanted a whisky to accompany my next beer.

Clearly.

He brought back two messy pints and two demure glasses of amber-coloured Dalmore and we sipped them carefully.

"It tastes like caramel!" I exclaimed. One of the first things you learn about whisky is that it tastes different based on the region where it comes from. Dalmore is a Highland whisky and those are characterized by being "smooth". Normally I like smooth whisky about as much as I like smooth men. I prefer some dirt and smoke in there somewhere and that's why I tend to pick Island malts. But this sweet malt was quite pleasant. J thought brandy, and we decided it had probably spent some time in sherry casks. Later internet research told us we were right. So clever.

Dalmore seemed to have two distinct phases; the first sweet and fruity one (they say chocolate, but I wouldn't agree) and a second wave that tasted, well, like whisky. Warming and strong and alcoholic. It's not one I would want to have in summer, but seems like a perfect drink for the Christmas season. And not a good mate for the IPA we were drinking, it could use a darker ale. It would go well with dessert, though, and I think if one were prone to decadence, could be a lovely single malt to bake with.

I can't tell you what it looked like because I forget and the pub was dark. You'll have to imagine the smell, too, because I was mostly smelling spilled beer and the already-drunk Scotland supporters. It was a pungent micro-climate. Therefore these notes won't be that extensive. But in short, I liked it. If you were ever trying to get your mom to cozy up to a whisky, this would be where I would start.