Seasons on Harris (16 page)

The guests were assembling in the dining room and Catriona hurried to prepare the little plates of golden oven-baked crostini piled high with homemade game pâté and each topped with a single red currant. I got to test one—actually four—and off they went along with iced water in glass jugs filled with slices of orange, lemon, lime, and strawberry. (A real Martha Stewart touch—why hadn't I ever thought of that?)

Five minutes later the soups went out, garnished with hot toasted almonds and accompanied by baskets of dainty puffballs of kitchen-baked bread scattered with blackened sesame seeds. Then Katie began to
finalize her “dressed salad leaves with scallops, monkfish, and chili jam.” Her dressing couldn't have been simpler—virgin olive oil, fresh-squeezed lemon juice, and pepper, hand tossed with the multicolored leaves.

“I wondered about shaving a few wee slices of cucumber in the salad…,” Katie mused.

“Oh, I wouldn't if I were you,” I said before I knew I'd said anything.

“Oh—and why is that now?”

“Well—you remember what the great Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote about cucumbers…?”

“No, I don't…”

“‘A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar—and then thrown out as good for nothing.'”

“Well, now,” said Katie. “And isn't he the one who also said oatmeal was only fit for pigs and Scottish peasants?”

“I don't think he put it quite so rudely…”

“Well, I'm sure it wasn't far off. He didn't like us at all!”

I couldn't really argue with that except to say, “Well—he was much more complimentary when he traveled here with his Scottish companion, Boswell.”

“Poof!” scoffed Katie.

I wished I'd never brought up the subject of that irascible old tyrant.

Next came the sea scallops and monkfish doused with a little chili jam—seared golden on one side in olive oil and French
Celle sur Belle
butter, then poached more slowly on the other side, the whole task taking less than two minutes. Katie offered me a spare scallop. The combination of golden-crusted topside with the chili jam on the softer side tantalized my palate—until it suddenly dissolved in a gush of gorgeous seafood with a texture almost like that of a cream custard.

Katie smiled at my delight. “All my scallops are hand dived. A guy down in Strond scubas down for them every week—sometimes twice a week in the height of summer. It's a tricky business, though. One diver recently had a bad attack of the bends. Came up too fast or something. They say it almost killed him. Couldn't go down again for weeks.”

I was still absorbing the scallop “custard,” so an empathetic nod was all I could manage.

“Okay—entrée time. Three different choices. We've got about twenty minutes.”

And what a twenty minutes that turned out to be. Katie and Catriona worked together like automatons. I offered to help but was told that my role remained that of tester, which was just fine by me because first came her sauce for the initial entrée—halibut. This was a mix of melted sautéed leek strips flambéed in white vermouth, rapidly reduced, and then melded with fresh lemon juice, double cream, and seasoning and poured around a gently poached fillet of snow-white halibut garnished with spoonfuls of “caviar” made from Scottish herring roe.

Then came a bronze-skinned guinea fowl baked for twenty minutes or so in her huge, blazing-hot oven and served on beds of sliced fennel
and peaches in a rapidly reduced sauce of flamed tawny port, chicken stock, and fresh red currants.

Katie MacAskill at the Stove

Finally there were the filet mignon steaks, two inches thick, flash-sautéed then oven-finished to medium rare and served with one of the most decadent sauces I've ever tasted. Try this sometime—the steak sauté pan is deglazed with chicken stock followed by double cream, a generous chunk of Stilton cheese crumbled into the pan, a handful of chives, parsley, tarragon, and seasoning (including that final magic mix of a little lemon juice and a little sugar)—all reduced over high heat to a golden-hued nectar and poured over the succulent steaks.

All the entrées were accompanied by side platters of vegetables, which included that wild mushroom risotto (pure succulent perfection), baked asparagus spears wrapped in prosciutto, tiny purple Peruvian potatoes, miniature white turnips and carrots, and daintily green baby squash. A dazzling display but hardly a dinner for squeamish dieters, although Katie insisted that she catered for all preferences.

The plates were returned to the kitchen wiped clean. Not a morsel had been left by any of the ten dinner guests.

“Well, I guess if the plates are so clean that means they've still got room for dessert.” Katie grinned, putting the finishing touches on her molds of cold creamed-rice mousse topped with a caramelized crunchy sugar cap, each one carefully browned by Catriona with a tiny kitchen blowtorch and set floating in a rich, dark red lake of poached plums and Madeira sauce.

“And now the petits fours…,” said Katie, dipping tiny wild strawberries into a warm chocolate glaze and presenting them with her just-baked star-shaped shortbread crisps to accompany the coffee.

Half an hour later the diners had left for liqueurs in the lounge and Catriona was completing the washing up. Katie and I sat together on the patio outside the kitchen door, watching the moon creep up from behind Clisham to cast a silver shimmer across the loch and “ghost shadows” among the trees surrounding the guesthouse lawn.

“So—wha'd'you think, David?” she asked. “Was that fun or what?!”

“And you pulled all that together since six o'clock?!” I asked. It was barely nine-thirty.

“Six-thirty…I think,” replied Katie.

“Amazing—and almost everything you created came from the islands?”

“Pretty much. The miniature vegetables and asparagus are from the mainland, but I try to use as much local produce as I can. I like to know who's supplying my beef and lamb and game. That's what I'm doing tomorrow night—a salmon and game dinner. The salmon is wild—not from the fish farm—and the game is from the Amhuinnsuidhe Castle—plenty of good venison…”

“I don't think I can think about food anymore tonight,” I said wearily.

“Och, you're fine. Surely y'can manage a wee dram.”

Once again the Scottish solution to everything—“a wee dram”! In Yorkshire it's a cup of tea, but when in the islands…

“You know what would be fun,” I mused as we sat sipping together. “You remember we've got some friends coming up to stay with us for a few days next month?”

“Yes, Dondy told me you're expecting company.”

“Well, I'm wondering if we could commission a real traditional Harris dinner from you. I mean I know they'd love the kind of dishes you produced tonight, but I'm thinking of something that captures the ‘old times'—the black-house days…”

“Like what?”

“Well…you know—things like
cullen skink
soup, fresh cockles steamed with seaweed, salt herring, or herring in oatmeal with Kerr's pink potatoes, maybe some game—venison or hare or pheasant—aged to get that rich gamey flavor and—”

“Anything else?”

“Well, maybe a haggis flamed in whisky, and then sweets—something with crowdie and cream and homemade jam—maybe oatcakes or Scotch pancakes or bannock cakes and, of course, your Clootie dumpling—full of all those sultanas and raisins and black—”

Katie started to giggle. “You're not asking for much now, are you…”

“Well, it doesn't have to be all of those. Just a selection to make them realize that, despite all the hard conditions and subsistence lifeways of the
islanders, people ate pretty well here just using whatever was at hand…you know, real honest and simple—and very tasty food.”

Katie sat for a while, smiling. Then she said, “Well, it's certainly something to think about.”

“Yes—that's right. Just think about it—it's only an idea.”

“Anything else—sir?”

“No—no, that's fine—oh! Except I'd like you and Dondy to come up to the cottage for dinner one night—if you ever get a night off—I'm not going to compete with your masterpieces but—well, I've got a few tricks up my culinary sleeve too.”

“Oh, and what kind of tricks might they be now?”

“Ah, that,” I said, suddenly wondering if my offer was really a good idea in the light of my rather spontaneous, ad hoc approach to cooking, “is something you'll just have to wait and find out…isn't it?”

D
ESPITE THE INCLEMENT WEATHER
(a polite euphemism for “distinctly lousy” in the case of Harris in 2004) and those devilish clouds of minuscule, maddening midges, the surge of summer events rolled on unabated in the Outer Hebrides. A spate of agricultural shows, galas, Highland games, and mod musical competitions filled the weeks around the grand summer climax: the hugely popular Hebridean Celtic Festival in mid-July at Stornoway.

Anne and I unfortunately were off-island for much of the time, not so much to avoid the rain showers and persistent biters but because of the sudden loss of Cynthia, my mother's younger sister.

The ensuing weeks were a marked contrast to the slow-paced hours and days spent on Harris. We traveled the four hundred or so miles south to green, sun-soaked Yorkshire, where the funeral was arranged, endless forms were signed or witnessed, probate lawyers were dealt with, and a house was cleared and readied for sale. Fortunately, it was a small house, snuggled away in an idyllic Constable-type spot—a cozy village overlooking the Vale of York and the great upland plateau of the North Yorkshire Moors to the east. Bishop Monkton possessed all the seductive characteristics of pure English rurality: a chuckling, duck-dotted stream winding its way alongside a narrow main street lined with quaint cottages and rose-bedecked gardens, and two village pubs, intimate and oak beamed, full of the kind of central-casting regulars that constitute the backbone of British sitcoms and soaps.

But without Cynthia, the village seemed a little forlorn. “Let's just get the house ready,” Anne said, “and then it's back to our island.”

Every once in a while, for diversion and delight, we'd call our
Hearaich
friends to hear how the summer was progressing. “S'better this year than last,” Roddy told us. “Katie's guesthouse is full of tourists and her cooking is getting real popular. She's just got an award for the second-best new hotel in Scotland, and second-best hotel breakfast in Scotland. So, wha'd'd'ya think about that?! Not bad, eh? She's got quite a reputation now and it's only her third year…”

“Wonderful! Send her all our congratulations…couldn't happen to a nicer person…oh and tell her when we get back I'd like to spend some more time in the kitchen with her—see what new magic she's concocted,” I said.

“Well, you better ask 'er y'self…last time she had dinner with you and Anne at the cottage, she said she'd feel nervous if y'ever started peepin' over 'er shoulder again.”

“Oh, really—was my cooking that bad?!”

“Oh no, no—not that at all. It's just that she didn't even recognize half the stuff you used…she thinks maybe her dishes are too simple f'ye.”

“Just tell her, Roddy, that if that one dinner we all had together at her guesthouse was anything to go by, I've got an awful lot to learn from her.”

Another friend, a crofter, insisted on giving us a full—far too full—account of the delights at the many agricultural shows, galas, and games, with their whirlygig mix of clay pigeon shooting, falconry displays, llama rides, crafts, flower and baking competitions, greasy pole battles, caber tossing, and hammer throwing, in addition to all the scores of livestock judgings that seem to award cups, medals, and rosettes to just about every crofter-farmer on the island.

“Ah—but y'missed the best of all,” said Jack MacLeod, one of our younger friends and an avid Celtic music fan. “This year's Hebridean Celtic Festival. Fantastic! The ninth one we've had and the best by far—three nights on the castle grounds at Stornoway. A real madhouse…over twelve thousand people and wow! This was really good stuff! The
whole place went wild—even outside the marquee, in the rain, there were hundreds of us just dancin' an' singin'—people from all over the world—loads of foreigners! I'll tell ye, Dave—you two really should 'a been 'ere…”

I explained the reason for our absence and he was appropriately empathetic, but I knew he was right. “We should 'a been 'ere.” With a good dollop of Irish blood in me, and a checkered past of singing English/Irish folk songs with my sister long ago, I truly would have liked to experience that
Gaidhealtacht
spirit of ancient Celtic music and heritage.

“Not to worry—we'll go next year,” said Anne.

“Okay,” I said, wanting to believe her.

But all was not lost.

When we finally did return, toward the tail end of summer, the islands were slipping back into their more introspective and introverted personas. Most of the tourists had departed, leaving a generous fiscal largesse behind them despite the somewhat mizzle-and midge-plagued season. All the big flash-bang-and-dazzle events of those warm weeks were now replaced by far more modest but authentic “entertainments” for the locals.

Stornoway, of course, tended to be the focal point of such activities, and Anne and I loved those afternoon drives up over the surly monoliths of North Harris and out across the Southern Lochs, the infinitudes of the central peat bog plateau, and into the bustling intimacy of that little town.

The harbor, as always, bristled with the masts and sea-stained gear of the fishing boats. The shopping streets were still abuzz with scores of students from the Nicolson Institute hovering around their favorite fish 'n' chip haunts, swigging on that rust-colored and uniquely Scottish soda, Irn-Bru, and nibbling on deep-fried delights. McNeill's, the Crown, The County, Criterion, and all the other twenty or so pubs and hotel bars here had their coteries of regulars, telling the same tall tales and sipping their whiskies and pints of Tennent's in a haze of early-evening bonhomie.

Nothing had really changed since the spring except for the impressive new arts center and theater on South Beach now nearing comple
tion. We wished the same could be claimed for poor old Lews Castle, peering elegantly but emptily over the town from its lush woodland grounds across the harbor. The place was still closed up and awaiting yet one more “feasibility study” to justify funds for its long-postponed restoration—funds in addition to the hundred thousand pounds it apparently took each year just to keep the place empty and unused.

Fortunately, the woods themselves were open for languid strolls on that still-warm afternoon, as we whiled away the time before two evening events that had lured us here from the home comforts of Clisham Cottage.

After the barren, wind-scarred plains and mountains of the island, it felt so beguiling and strange to be walking through these meticulously nurtured and dense flurries of trees and bushes, including many exotic species originally planted well over a century ago. In contrast to the uncluttered openness of the moors, here we vanished into a flurried half-dark—an edgy mosaic of spidery shadows and filtered sunlight—interspersed with eerie, echoing bird calls and slithery rustlings in the dense undergrowth. Out over the harbor we could hear gulls screeching with their typically aggressive hysteria as we walked silently on cushiony moss paths veined with roots and tangled vines. A little slice of clammy labyrinthine jungle, moist and mysterious, and yet so close to the tingling small-town tumult across the water.

Following our long stroll up to Gallows Hill, with its broad vistas across the town and the dark, treeless infinities to the west, it was with some relief that we ended at the park's Woodland Center—an airy café and interpretation room. We mentioned our curiosity about the fate of the castle to Kevin Brown, the young park ranger here, originally from Yorkshire. His reaction, like that of so many other incomers, was incredulity tinged with a shruggish humor.

“Well, officially it's a listed building, so they have to preserve it no matter what the cost. The basic problem here is the fact that Lord Leverhulme loved to entertain and he decided to enlarge the ballroom by knocking down a few walls. Unfortunately, some were structural walls—he'd been told this, but the good lord had a bad habit of not always listening to his advisors—so, the place sort of got all bent and buckled and
never recovered.” Then, when he realized that the three of us all came from the same part of England, Kevin waxed philosophical: “Y'know, y'keep assumin' y've got a handle on island life here and island thinking—but then something happens and you realize you've got to constantly reevaluate things. I remember when I first came here, I wore a Harris Tweed jacket—y'know, to show respect. And suddenly I realized that I was the only one wearing tweed—it was all Gore-Tex and Kagool and jogging clobber. The islanders hardly ever wore the stuff!” He laughed and then became serious. “I've been here fifteen years, but my perceptions always keep changing—always getting deeper. It's endless, in a beguiling kind of way. Particularly Harris—‘an old soul' of an island. I love that place. I live in Stornoway at the moment, close to my job here, but to me these islands are all about Harris, particularly the mountains of North Harris.”

“That's our favorite part,” said Anne.

“It's fantastic, isn't it—the Lost Glen, the track over to Tarbert from Rhenigidale, those amazing sands out at Scarista, and Seilibost, and Luskentyre—so much on such a small island…”

We wondered, after our walk in the woods, about an early-evening dinner picnic by the harbor, or if we felt flush, a gourmet meal at Digby Chick, one of Stornoway's most creative small restaurants—before moving on for the evening's “entertainments.”

While “entertainment” is perhaps an inappropriate term, before leaving for Yorkshire we had attended a truly inspiring revival kind of event at a local church hall here just up from McNeill's pub. It was advertised on local store-window flyers as an “Ecumenical Praise Night.”

“All the churches in town have been invited,” a young man at the door told us. “Well, except the Baha'is. They don't recognize Jesus Christ as the Lord, y'see.”

We suddenly became rather skeptical of the evening's intent. Such a remark reminded us of the prime dilemma impacting “organized” Christian religions in general—heaven is only an option for members of the faith, and everyone else, over 80 percent of the world's population, no matter how good and loving and contributory their lives, apparently seem destined for eternal damnation. In addition, of course, there are
certain ultrastrict Christian sects, most notably in Scotland, convinced that only membership (very limited in numbers too) in their specific schism of the church will ensure opportunities for celestial eternity. It appeared to us that such attitudes were not only needlessly divisive but also contradicted the very foundations of a Christianity advocating godly love, forgiveness, and universal harmony.

We almost turned around and walked away. But in the end, curiosity won out and we joined over a hundred and fifty bright-eyed, enthusiastic adults and youngsters in an hour or so of rousing anthem songs delivered by a local folk-rock band. Arms were raised together, hands outstretched and waved in unison to the driving rhythms. Moving personal testimonies of reformation from sinful Stornoway living to soul-nurturing salvation were given by some of the young attendees. Tears rolled, laughter boomed, and the scene throbbed with true spiritual intensity.

“We're all looking for God!” cried out one young girl, to thunderous applause.

“We should enjoy Him in ourselves every single day!” shouted the lead guitarist as he improvised that one simple line into a Keith Richards–inspired riff and had the whole audience up and dancing in the aisles. It was an impressive spectacle and so very different from the somber church services we'd attended in Harris. It was just a shame they hadn't invited the Baha'is. I'm sure they would have enjoyed it just as much as everybody else.

There was still a while to go before the evening's entertainments—a couple of tempters I'd lined up for us involving live theater, and a bagpipe recital at the An Lanntair Arts Centre.

I suggested to Anne a spell in the library, a place I'd come to love for the enthusiasm and expertise of its staff. One man in particular, David Fowler, had helped me delve into the intricacies of island history and heritage on many occasions and invariably greeted my visits with a “Now, d'y'remember that thing y'were askin' about last week? Well, a' think a' may have found…” That man was indispensable as a reliable source. (Or, of course, as a recipient of blame and grave retribution if any information in this book turns out to be inaccurate! Authors always need a scapegoat…)

Anne suggested the museum instead. So, up the long slope of Francis Street we trundled to a stately stone edifice, built as part of the beloved Nicolson Institute in 1898. Today it is truly one of the best-designed and most informative small museums we've ever visited anywhere in Britain. Somehow, in two modestly sized rooms, they have managed to create a succinct summary of the whole history of Lewis and Harris from 7000
BC
to present times. And despite the amazing amount of information and the remarkable variety of items on display—including a re-creation of part of a crofter's black house complete with central peat fire, the ubiquitous dangling pot on a chain, and huge sideboard with its modest display of chipped crockery—the place never palls. It provides information with imagination, which is more than can be said for some of the far larger British museums that often leave us bedraggled and befuddled.

There was just time for a light dinner before the evening's activities. I suggested the Indian Balti House, overlooking the impressive new octagonal ferry terminal built as a replica-tribute to the old fish market. This was once the nexus of the town during the golden days of the endless fish shoals in The Minch and Atlantic, with hundreds of gut-saltand-pack “herring girls,” the lines of “kipper houses” on Kipper Road near the docks (where the split herrings were smoked overnight to “a rich hammy flavor” before being packed in wooden boxes and sent by boat and train to the great Billingsgate fish market in London), and the grand Victorian mansions of the town's merchants all along Matheson Road. Anne, as I thought she would, pressed for the new Digby Chick restaurant, with its baked mussels in a sage and onion crust, but located incongruously among the fish 'n' chip and pizza places on Point Street, it's the haunt of the town's rowdiest youths.