Diary of a Shopkeeper, July 28th 2024

Thanks for asking. Roosters and Shetland Blacks.

After a dreich spring and a grey start to the summer, the sun is now visible on an almost daily basis. Farmers are happy, tourists are happy, our customers are happy. If customers are happy when they walk in the shop door, that’s a great start to making them feel even happier by the time they leave. A steady stream of folk leaving the shop happy means I leave equally happy at the end of the day. In fact, I leave the shop doubly happy, because I’m heading home clutching a small bagful of joy bought along the street.

For the sun is not the only golden glowing orb that’s appeared in July. We’ve also seen the arrival of Orkney new tatties.

What could be better than a plateful of boiled new tatties, their skin so thin and papery it virtually dissolves in the pan, revealing the creamy, lambent flesh beneath? Nothing, is the answer: nothing could be better than a plateful of new tatties. Unless, that is, it’s a plateful of tatties with a big lump of butter melting on top. Golden Orkney butter is the choice of many; I happen to prefer the paler variety we bring in from Normandy, with its exciting crunches of sea salt. Either is a glorious unction. And there are few sights that pique the appetite more than the sight of a nugget of solid butter on top of a pile of tatties slowing melting and covering them in a glistening swash of deliciousness.

Hold off for a minute. Lay down your eating irons. Just watch the steam rising, the tatties glowing, the butter melting and…oh, go on then, dig in!

I was wondering the other day, what did Orcadians look forward to in the summer before tatties were introduced from South America? And when did they first arrive here? ‘Some learned scholar,’ I thought, ‘maybe Marian McNeill or Willie Thomson, has undoubtedly written a chapter on this important question.’ But my fingers were too buttery to pull their books off the shelf to check.

The great English restaurateur, Fergus Henderson, is famous for his ‘nose to tail’ approach to cooking. If an animal has to die to feed us, then nothing should be wasted. Hence the focus at his St John restaurants on dishes like bone marrow on toast and various preparations of pig’s cheeks and lugs. Even more important than the headline-grabbing offal dishes is his belief in simplicity. ‘Faites simple’ – do it simply – has been a recurring dictum in French cooking for a century or more. However, what starts as a straightforward treatment of good ingredients often ends up over complicated; the human imagination loves to elaborate. So a lovely piece of fresh fish is jostled on the plate by something carby, a couple of vegetables, a puddle of sauce, some herby garnishes, and a fried egg on top. And the glory of the fish is lost. Far better for chefs to curb their generosity and just present the main ingredient perfectly cooked, with little or nothing obscuring it.

That’s the Fergus Henderson approach, anyway. A few years ago, when the first of the new tatties arrived at his London kitchen, he had a menu development session with his top kitchen crew. ‘Let’s treat these Cornish beauties completely simply,’ said one chef, and slid onto the table a bowl of boiled tatties with melted butter and a sprig of curly parsley for decoration. They all gazed at it. It was simple. It was beautiful. But Fergus Henderson looked slightly pained. Eventually he reached out and picked off the parsley sprig. He nodded, and everyone around the table beamed.

Then Fergus frowned again. ‘It’s too complicated,’ he said.

‘How can it be any simpler?’ wailed the chefs.

‘Lose the butter,’ said Fergus.

And so it was that a bowl of boiled tatties, and absolutely nothing else, made it onto the St John menu. Probably at £10, it has to be said – London prices! – which is about 20 times as much as it will cost you if you take a walk along the street, buy a wee bag, and cook them yourself. And if you grow them yourself they’re virtually free! Imagine that: one of the greatest pleasures the world can offer, and it costs you somewhere between very little and nothing.

French writer Philippe Deleren published a book called The First Gulp of Beer and Other Small Pleasures. His chapters have titles like, ‘The Smell of Apples,’ and, ‘The Mobile Library.’ An Orkney version would definitely have to include a plate of butter-drenched new tatties.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 1st August 2024. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.