A taste of the islands

By Catherine MacGillivray

March 2010

See this article as it appears in the magazine

WHEN it comes to the recipe for success, food writer Liz Ashworth has a few special ingredients to throw into the pot.

For Liz believes that cuisine and culture are intertwined and she is determined to play her part in ensuring traditional regional dishes do not disappear.

Her new book Orkney Spirit is just such a fusion of culinary heritage and community life.

Due to be launched at the St Magnus Centre in Kirkwall on March 26, the book has been illustrated by Slovenian artist Selena S Kuzman, with freshly created digital art images of Orkney scenes and people.

“It’s a cross-over book – a tapestry of life in Orkney, combined with recipes and a collection of true stories and anecdotes to give a flavour of the islands,” says Liz. “Orkney is a place of breathtaking, spectacular vibrancy – land, sea, sky, birds and weather. Every island is different yet has a common heritage of community caring and sharing. Selena and I have worked together to form a glimpse, a taste, a window of this.

“The images she has created are stunning. They bring out the feeling of light and colour in the Orkney landscape and sea and sky. They express in colour the kind of pictures I have had in my heart ever since watching the midsummer sun through the night over Pierowall on Westray.”

Although based in Lhanbryde near Elgin, Liz has Orcadian connections on both sides of her family.

On her father’s side, there are Cummings from Kirkwall and on her mother’s, Liz’s cousin Archie was brought up in North Ronaldsay where his father, the Reverend Stuart McAlpine, was the minister.

“Family connections with Orkney are like the roots of a tree: Long, varied and deep,” she says. “Suffice to say that it is wonderful to know that I have such a close affinity with all that is Orcadian.”

Liz, who is a member of the Guild of Food Writers, is no stranger to the publishing world.

She contributes articles to Highland Life, the Banffshire magazine The Knock News, and the Moray newspaper The Northern Scot, and has a regular monthly feature in Orkney Today.

She has written several cookery books, among them the popular children’s series which includes Teach the Bairns to Cook, Teach the Bairns to Bake and Teach the Bairns Traditional Scottish Vegetarian Cooking.

“I started off cooking at the age of three,” she recalls. “I’ve always loved baking and I remember my mother giving me a cup of flour to make white sauce and icing sugar for cakes.”

As a child she regularly visited the long-closed Austin’s bakery in Elgin to take afternoon tea with her mother and grandmother and she was captivated by the fairytale wedding cakes on display there.

A family friend, Frances Grant, who was the confectioner at Austin’s, taught her to bake and pipe icing by the time she was nine, even being given a special child-sized baker’s cutter, which she has kept ever since.

Years later, the shapes produced by that cutter were the inspiration for what is now the award-winning Nairn’s oat bakes.

Keen to follow a career in food, she studied in Aberdeen, during which time she worked on a placement in Liverpool where she had the opportunity to learn from Chef Moore who had been chef on the royal yacht Britannia.

After college, Liz worked at the Newton Hotel in Nairn where the manageress at the time, Isabel Iain, instilled in her the importance of customer care.

One of the guests that Liz met during her time at the Newton was Charlie Chaplin.

Liz then moved to Baxters of Speyside in Fochabers, where she started as a junior in the product development department, later working as catering manager for 10 years before being asked by the construction group Balfour Beatty to take up a new post in Edinburgh.

The company wanted to develop its hospitality side and Liz soon found herself catering for the likes of the Scottish rugby team at corporate functions.

But it was for health reasons that at the age of 32 she found life taking a different direction.

For a number of years she suffered from deteriorating mobility that prevented her from working, until the time came when an operation was necessary.

“It went back to my early twenties,” she says. “I started to find walking painful and a close family friend, who was a trainee orthopaedic surgeon, said that he hoped that one day he would be able to find out what the problem was so that he could make it better.”

Years later, when he became a consultant surgeon, Liz contacted him again as, by this time, the condition had become so bad that she could not walk.

A pioneering hip replacement operation was successful, and today, nearly 22 years on, she continues to be grateful that she can still walk pain-free.

“It was through being disabled and unable to walk far unaided, or drive, that I began to write,” she recalls.

Her first publication was Easy Recipes for Busy Housewives, followed by From the Kirk for the Kitchen, a collection of recipes from her church’s congregation to raise funds for repairing the kirk’s roof.

Greatly influenced by her former cookery teacher Catherine Brown and the works of F Marian McNeill, the Orkney folklorist and author of The Scots Kitchen, Liz began researching traditional Scottish recipes and writing guidelines on their use.

“I took over six years writing the first manuscript,” she says.

After many attempts to have the book published, she was invited by Scottish Cultural Press to divide the material into a three-part series for beginners of all ages and so the Teach the Bairns series was cooked up.

Working in recent years as a new product development consultant, she has developed various award-winning products for Scottish companies. Examples include Moroccan spiced crayfish tails with the Orkney Herring Company, and sweet and savoury biscuits for the Cairnsmhor range for Thistle products.

She has also worked on the development of conserve relishes for the Buccleuch heritage brand and continues to work closely with Nairn’s on various oat projects.

Work in Orkney has included a project on sustainable grain crops developed by Orkney College’s Agronomy Institute which involved the Barony Mills in Birsay and Groundwater’s Bakery in Kirkwall.

She also has close working involvement with Highland Park Distillery, and is a UHI Foundation business board member.

During the past two years, Liz has been developing food events for Orkney International Science Festival, and is working on plans for a special package of food and drink events to mark its 20th anniversary this September.

“This will be part of a fortnight of traditional food events in the first half of September,” she says. “It will be an opportunity for communities and producers to come together to promote the unique quality and healthy aspects of local produce.”

Like Liz’s book, the events will celebrate the Orkney spirit, bringing together all aspects of the islands – wildlife, culture and history, intermingled with a menu of local wholesome community food.

* Orkney Spirit costs £15.99 and will be available in bookshops and from the publisher, Sandstone Press, on www.sandstonepress.com