Scottish Food: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

This is a guest post from Jemma Porter of Jemma Eat World. Jemma is one of Edinburgh’s most popular food bloggers, although given the name of her blog she clearly has food blogging world domination plans. Based in Scotland at the moment I asked Jemma, as an expert on both food and being Scottish, to put together a post on Scottish ‘cuisine’. I’m sure you all have your stereotypes about Scottish food, so we’ll see whether this post serves to enforce them or to tempt you to try some of its finer culinary delights.

We Scots have a reputation for eating unhealthily. To paraphrase Dylan Moran, we deep fry our food three times to make sure it’s dead. Some Scots do make a concerted effort to stay fit and healthy. Take my friend, for example. He decided that he wanted to shed some pounds before his wedding, so embarked upon the ‘soup’ diet. Which to him meant eating two sandwiches with each bowl of soup and a bag of crisps afterwards.

I’m not sure he got the point.

We do have some great food up here. We have some truly awful eating habits, too, so before you arrive in Scotland prepare yourself for the good, the bad and the ugly side of Scottish cuisine.

The Good

Scotland is renowned for seafood. Our langoustines are exported to the finest restaurants in France. Our smoked salmon, scallops and mussels have a reputation that preceeds them. But for a true taste of Scotland, look out for fish chowder cullen skink. Cullen skink is made with finnan haddie (smoked haddock to non Scots), potatoes, onions, and milk.

I was tempted to put haggis under ‘bad’ or ‘ugly’ based on the worldwide perception of our national dish. Although it may sound gruesome, haggis is delicious. If you’re squeamish about offal stuffed into a stomach, ask yourself: when was the last time you ate a sausage? Because it’s the same thing. Haggis goes well with everything: and Scotland’s international foodie community has embraced it too. On the streets of Edinburgh you can find haggis pizza, haggis quesadilla, haggis pakora, and haggis burgers. One shop even sells haggis flavoured chocolate.

For a cheap and easy Scottish side dish, you can’t go wrong with a bit of skirlie. Simply chop up an onion, fry it for five minutes until it’s soft, and then throw in a couple of handfuls of porridge oats. It’s rare to find skirlie in restaurants, but if you’re at a traditional Scottish meal it will probably make an appearance. It’s quite dry, similar to cous cous, and harks back to a time when Scots survived mainly on oats.

Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tessawatson

The Bad

When you’re offered a full Scottish breakfast you’ll find the usual suspects on your plate. Eggs, bacon, black pudding, beans… and if you’re lucky, a slice of fuit pudding. Fruit pudding is sliced fruit cake with cinnamon and raisin, fried of course, and added to the breakfast. It doesn’t exactly taste bad, it’s quite tasty actually, but I’ve been assured by James that frying cake is not normal anywhere but Scotland.

On the topic of unholy fried foods, most people return to the same old chestnut: the deep fried Mars Bar. But unless you’re born and bred in Scotland, you might not know that it gets worse. Introducing ‘pizza crunch’. For the uninitiated, pizza crunch is deep fried pizza served on a bed of chips. The majority of Scottish chip shops were founded by Italian immigrants, and to ingratiate themselves with the locals they deep fried everything.

Crunchy!

The Ugly

The munchy box was introduced to me by a friend from Falkirk as a box of tasty delights from the chip shop. Chicken pakora, onion rings, chips, donner meat, even a small pizza, sometimes. But the truth is far from delightful. As far as I’m concerned a munchy box is what is left over at the end of the night, scraped up and served in a pizza box. It’s one of those ideas that seems amazing until you do it, and then you slowly turn green and wish you had listened to that common sense voice in your head. This is something that you are unlikely to find east of the M9, although there are rumours that a few isolated kebab shops in Edinburgh deal in these foul boxes of doom.

Scottish goodness?

Jemma is the owner of Jemma Eat World, a food and travel blog following her travels as she eats her way around the world. Keep up with her progress by following her on Twitter or Facebook.