by Jenny Colgan
Sincere thanks to the organisers of Faclan (the Hebridean Book Festival), Orkney Library and Worldplay (the book festival of the Shetland isles), both for inviting me and treating me with such wonderful hospitality when I visited your beautiful homes. Do have me back!
There are many versions of ‘The Herring Song’, quoted here (it has about 179 more verses too), but the one I like the best is Eliza Carthy’s, from her wonderful album Red.
Special thanks to Dominic Colgan, Laraine Harper-King and Serena MacKesy.
Recipes
BANNOCKS
Bannocks are round, crusty, delicious flat rolls, best eaten warm and fresh. They’re not a million miles away from what Americans call ‘biscuits’ (which aren’t actually biscuits, obviously, friends. A jaffa cake: that’s a biscuit).
You can either bake or fry them, and you can add fruit – blueberries are good, or raisins – or if you prefer a savoury taste, some grated cheese in place of the buttermilk or even some chilli and salt (skip the sugar for those ones obviously).
500g self-raising flour
50g butter
10ml milk
250ml buttermilk
1 egg
250ml natural yoghurt
Crumb the flour and the butter together. Add the sugar, egg, buttermilk and enough of the yoghurt to make the dough sticky.
Knead, adding extra flour, until the dough isn’t sticky any more.
Roll out until it’s about an inch thick, then cut into whatever shapes you like.
Bake at 160 degrees Celsius for 12 minutes or fry in a buttered pan until golden brown.
JAM
When I was growing up and would watch my mother making jam, it always looked like a kerfuffle with pots boiling and things bubbling over and a lot of steam in the kitchen. It isn’t at all! Jam is really easy. The trick is not to try and make too much at one shot. A couple of jars is fine; it only takes half an hour. And it’s lovely at the end of an afternoon bramble pick. If we didn’t get enough brambles (blackberries), I just bulk it out with a couple of apples. Purists will balk, but I peel and chop the apples, add a touch of water and bung them in the microwave for five minutes to soften them up.
The big thing is, it gets so hot that kids want to help but they really can’t. I make sure to buy stickers for the jars and send them off to decorate them while I’m doing the really boiling bit.
I use jam sugar, but I always add a touch of pectin powder at the last minute, for nerves. Also, running your jam jars through the dishwasher should sterilise them fine.
As much fruit as you’ve managed to collect plus apples if it isn’t much/the five-year-old has a suspiciously sticky face
Exactly the same weight of jam sugar, or slightly less
Lemon juice
A knob of butter
Rinse the fruit. Some people like to sieve out the seeds. I don’t – I like them, but I still have my own teeth, so maybe I’ll think differently one day.
Cook the fruit and sugar over a low heat, stirring constantly. Add a squeeze of lemon juice. As the mix comes to the boil, add a knob of butter to keep it glossy and smooth and keep the scuzz down. Allow to simmer for ten minutes, stirring all the while. Skim off any fuzzy scuzzy stuff you get on top and wait for all the fruit to be completely soft.
Then bring the mixture to that most mellifluous of states: a rolling boil. You’ll know what this is when you see it: great big glorious bubbles popping. Keep like that for five minutes if it’s brambles, longer for strawbs. If you have a thermometer, it should be 105 degrees Celsius. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter – it’ll be fine.
Take off the heat for five minutes – long enough to cool but not long enough to set! – then pour into jars. Very, very carefully.
STEAK AND ALE PIE
Yes, I buy the pastry.
500g stewing steak
1 can of ale of your choice. May I recommend the Swannay Orkney IPA?
250g mushrooms
2 carrots
1 onion
Butter for frying
500ml beef stock
Rosemary
Packet of puff pastry
Pre-heat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius.
Toss the steak in flour, salt and pepper, and sear quickly in butter. Set aside.
Gently sauté the onions until golden, along with the carrots. (You can either just add the mushrooms to this or use another pan and sauté the mushrooms separately in butter with two cloves of garlic and white pepper, which is also super-delicious.) Add the steak, the ale and the stock, and let simmer for an hour or two with the rosemary on top. Don’t let the steak boil hard.
Pour the mix into an ovenproof bowl and cover with the pastry, adding a hole in the middle for the steam and, if you like, some nice leaf designs. I think you should – this is a lovely meal.
Bake for 40 minutes or until golden brown on the top; serve on a cold night with mash and some nice dark green veg: cabbage or spinach or kale or something.
APPLE AND FRANGIPANE PIE
With huge and heartfelt thanks to my friend Sez, who is the best fruit pie-maker I know.
Pastry
1 ¼ cups of plain flour
1 (or less) tbsp sugar
½ cup (about 115g) of very cold butter, cubed. It’s worth cutting it up, then sticking back in the freezer for 5 mins, as the colder it all is, the crisper the pastry comes out
A pinch of good salt
⅛–¼ cup of iced water
A spot of cream and a bit of sugar for scattering
Combine flour, salt, sugar and butter and process to a coarse meal. Best done in food processor as it’s quicker so everything stays colder.
With the processor still running, very slowly add very small amounts of iced water till pastry holds together but is still on the dry side. The aim is to get it as close to shortbread as possible, but in pastry form.
Chill in the fridge for an hour before rolling out.
Roll out to fit your pastry tin. It’s quite prone to breaking, so a) make sure there’s a good, generous overlap round the edge of the tin and b) don’t worry about any tearing – just fill in any holes with little wads of spare pastry.
Brush with cream and scatter with a wee bit of sugar.
Blind bake with beans in for 15 minutes at 180–200 degrees Celsius.
Blind bake without beans for another ten minutes or so, till it’s golden.
Frangipane
½ cup ground of almonds
¼ cup of granulated sugar (vanilla sugar if you’ve got it)
3 tbsp of butter
1 tbsp plain flour
1 egg
½ tsp vanilla essence if using plain sugar
A pinch of salt
Process the dry ingredients, then add the egg and vanilla essence and process to a smooth paste. Chill in the fridge for an hour before using.
Apples/topping
Peeled, cored and thinly sliced 2–3 eating apples (not cooking apples) with the juice and rind of a lemon on them to give them some oomph (and stop them browning)
A jar of jelly of some sort: you can use pretty much any, but goosegage is my favourite for this. But plain old redcurrant from a shop works absolutely fine
When the pastry shell comes out of the oven, immediately spread the frangipane on top so a bit of it soaks into the hot pastry and makes it go ngggh.
Arrange the apple slices all over the top so they look pretty.
Sling it all back in the oven for 10 minutes.
While it’s in the oven, tip the jelly into a saucepan and melt it gently over heat till it’s liquid. When the tart comes out of the oven, pour the jelly over the top. Leave it all to cool in the tin.
Chapter One
When my brother was about eight or so, and I was fourteen, I took him (heavily bribed by our mother, who was raising us on her own, and had remarked several weeks in a row that if she didn’t have an afternoon off to get her roots done and drink several margaritas, she was going to crash the
car on purpose) to a superhero movie, and he didn’t enjoy it one tiny bit.
He was an unusually literal child, and he came out scowling.
‘What’s up?’ I said, finishing up the horrible blue candy he’d insisted that I buy him and then didn’t eat. I was still calling it ‘sweets’; hadn’t learned to call it candy.
‘The baddies,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘There were goodies and baddies,’ he said.
Then he looked at me, blue eyes frowning in the freckled face which was so similar to mine. The freckles looked cute on him. I looked like Peppermint Patty. My sole goal in life at fourteen was to get enough of a suntan to join them all up. This is what dermatologists call the ‘kamikaze’ method.
‘Yep,’ I said, not really listening. There hadn’t been nearly as many cute guys in the cinema as I’d hoped.
Vincent shook his head.
‘The baddie kept doing an evil laugh, Holly,’ he said. ‘Like, he knew he was evil and he really enjoyed being evil.’
‘Yes, he did,’ I said. ‘In case the horns and the fangs didn’t give away that he was quite evil enough. And the poisoned tail. And all that killing and destruction that he did.’
He shook his head again, even more crossly.
‘I don’t think real baddies look like baddies,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they even know they’re baddies.’
And he wandered off to the subway ahead of me – leaving me licking blue sherbet off my fingers – and I never knew why that stuck in my head.
‘No. Definitely not, absolutely not, totally no and also no way.’
‘What do you mean, “no”?’
The bar was dark and pretty noisy, but anyone could hear my no, and I really wasn’t enjoying Gertie asking me about absolutely every man in there over and over again, like some kind of singleton torture interrogation.
Twelve years on from taking Vincent to that movie, my freckles were under quite a lot of make-up, my sandy hair was ironed into submission, but I was still eating – or in this case, drinking – blue stuff.
Gertie was in one of her ‘PIN HOLLY TO THE GROUND ON TOP OF ANY AVAILABLE MALE’ moods, and all I could do was let her talk and drink her curaçao cocktail, mostly at exactly the same time.
I sighed and glanced again at her latest suggestion. He looked like a tree trunk had wandered into a bar by mistake.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. Look at the muscles! They’re one, gross, and two, I don’t think a gym bunny is going to be very interested in girls, do you? Come on, he’s like all sculpted and stuff. Can you imagine? He probably eats nine raw eggs a day. And looks at himself in the mirror all the time. Oh, and you know – sleeps with men.’
‘I can’t believe you have a problem with handsome.’
‘I don’t have a problem with handsome. Handsome has a problem with me.’
‘That’s not true at all.’
‘You never fancied the handsome one in the boy band, did you?’
‘No.’
‘You used to like Louis not Zayn, right?’
‘Where are you going with this?’
I squinted once more at the man at the other end of the bar. He appeared to be all jawline. He looked uncomfortable, like he didn’t know what he was meant to be doing there, and also faintly familiar. He caught my eye and smiled in basically a pretty cheesy way.
‘Argh,’ I said. ‘Okay, oh God. Right, he just stared straight at me. And smiled! Weirdo!’
‘The problem with you is —’
‘Oh, how I love a game of “the problem with me is”,’ I said. Gertie was my friend, but she was also all loved-up and was buying a place with DuTroy in the suburbs, so she totally had the answer to everything all the time, telling everyone she knew that all they had to do was fall in love and behave exactly as she had. You can tell what good friends we are in that we can still bear to go out for a drink together.
‘You have talked yourself into not deserving the handsome boys. Because of, you know, thinking about stuff too much. And complaining about your freckles. Which are cute, by the way. So you go for the less handsome guy, thinking they’ll be an easier get for you, but they’re not, because you know why?’
‘Tell me.’
‘Because you think they don’t know they’re not the handsomest guy. But they know what you’re doing. Trading down. And that makes them furious and resentful. So they won’t be very nice to you because they know they’re second-best. And then it gets worse.’
‘How does it get worse?’
‘Because when we turn thirty, everything flips, and suddenly the geeky, weird-looking guys start making tons of money and growing into their looks while the big lunks all get fat and bald. So then the weird ones really are the hot ones, and all the women want them. And now they really are furious and out for revenge for all the times they got treated second-best when they were younger.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that handsome guys are probably going to be nicer to you just because they’re more basically confident underneath. Plus, added bonus: they’re handsome.’
DuTroy was extremely handsome and he treated Gertie really well. I wondered if she had a point. After two years with a furiously nerdy cartoonist who always looked faintly disappointed in me – not of my job, or the way I looked, or what I was saying, but just gently overall – and a variety of interesting, moody, often horrible poets and beardies, I did wonder.
I snuck another glance at Mr Muscle. He smiled again, showing very white teeth.
‘I think he’s a serial killer,’ I said. ‘There is absolutely no other explanation.’
‘You are wearing the red dress,’ said Gertie. The red dress, it was true, was a definite hard-worker. I didn’t have the lucky pants on – this was a night out with my best friend – but the dress was a definite sign of some kind. Gertie didn’t get out much since she’d met DuTroy, which was why she was sucking down blue cocktails like she secretly just wanted a hosepipe plugged into the bar, and urging me on to the kind of bad behaviour she didn’t get to do any more.
‘Hmm,’ I said.
‘Well, go get more drinks,’ she said. ‘Stand close to him. See what happens.’
‘ARGH,’ I said. ‘Is this what people used to do before Tinder?’
‘Physically stand in places?’
‘Physically stand in places,’ I said. ‘Yuk. Bleargh. Plus I love being single.’
‘What, even the Sunday mornings?’
‘Yes! No. Not the Sunday mornings.’
If I could get it together, I’d launch a breakfast club just for those Sunday mornings when you wake up alone and try to convince yourself you’re enjoying it. And you go out to get coffee and sit and read the papers with all those other people also trying to pretend they’re living in a commercial and love sitting by themselves on a Sunday morning being cool and drinking coffee. At the Breakfast Club, we’ll all get coffee and read the papers, but in a kind of all-together companionable silence. Maybe. The problem is, if someone else ran a Sunday morning breakfast club, I would absolutely totally one hundred per cent not go.
I stood at the overcrowded bar. It was hot and incredibly noisy. He was just a foot or so away, nursing a fizzy water, I think, and looking around.
It occurred to me suddenly that he didn’t look like a guy hanging around a bar – there were a few, and they were all pretending to talk to their friends, intensely involved with their phones, eyes casting around the room in a slightly suspicious manner. He was quite still. Observant, as if he was looking for something very specific. I swallowed, moving towards the bar. As I got closer, I realised he was gigantic, easily six foot five and built – not heavily muscled, but sinewy, strong. Nice. If I had a beard, I told myself sternly. And a penis. And testes.
He scanned the room, saw me again, smiled distantly.
The drinks were pulsing through me. And I was wearing the red dress. I made an uncharacteristic decision. I smiled r
ight back. Although his hair was very black, his eyes were blue.
‘Hey,’ he said, and even though I was sure this was all an absolutely pointless exercise, and I had no real idea as to what I was doing, I said ‘hey’ back.
The next second, he grabbed me and threw me across the bar.