How would you describe the cuisine of the Hebrides?
Our food is very simple; lamb and mutton are our traditional meats and potatoes are our traditional vegetables. We use mutton because we can’t really grow lambs big enough here unless we move them to the mainland to fatten up, so we have to keep them for longer. There’s a bit of snobbery around mutton elsewhere — that it’s not as good as lamb — but in the Hebrides, the animals are fed on heather hills that give them a really distinctive flavour, which I love. And our potatoes are grown on the machair, fertile grasslands by the beaches; I think that makes them the tastiest in the world.
What shapes Hebridean food culture?
The food culture in the Hebrides is influenced by a few things. The first is our landscape. We have a very harsh, dramatic landscape and not much grows on the islands. We also have a very long winter. In the deepest winter, we only have four or five hours of daylight, so hearty, wholesome foods play a big
