Tag Archives: Burning the Clavie

Aberdeen butteries

WARNING 1: if you want to live as long as the Duke of Edinburgh do not eat too many of these. WARNING 2: if you fancy making some Aberdeen butteries set a whole a day aside.

By this time you may be wondering why we are making them. Well, principally because we were prodded with a big pointy stick by one of our Trossachs correspondents. She was brought up eating Aberdeen butteries in Burghead, one of our favourite places. It is home to one of Scotland’s best eating establishments, the Bothy Bistro … banana and bacon croissants to die for! Burghead also has two New Years. One on the 1st January (a kind of light rehearsal) and and then another on the 14th. The 14th is the Julian calendar new year and they celebrate it with Burning the Clavie.

the Clavie King
with the Clavie King at The Bothy

The Clavie King goes all round the town to the Doorie Hill carrying a blazing barrel of tar on a pole above his head. And then the whole town dances in the street until the wee small hours. It’s great fun. Not sure if this sort of behaviour has anything to do with them eating Aberdeen butteries but it may well be a contributory factor.

Rowies

Oddly, in Aberdeen itself  these butteries are more commonly known as ‘rowies’. “The toonsers ca’ them rowies and the teuchters ca’ them butteries,” most probably said by a resident of Aberdeen. We must be teuchters! They have also been referred to as “evil bricks of tasty.” You’ll understand why when we take you through the making process but maybe just a look at the ingredients will give you a clue: 250g butter, 125g lard, 1 tablespoon soft brown sugar, 500g flour, 2 teaspoons of dried yeast, 450ml warm water, pinch of salt … there’s a lot of fat! preparation of Aberdeen butteriesFirst you make a paste with sugar, yeast and a little warm water. Then mix the flour and salt and add the yeast paste once it has bubbled up. Leave it for 30-40 minutes to rise.preparation of Aberdeen butteries

Then cream the butter and lard and divide it into three equal portions. When the dough has doubled in size, give it another good knead and roll it into a rectangle about 1cm thick. Spread one of the butter portions over two thirds of the dough. Fold the unbuttered bit over half of the buttered bit then fold the rest over to make three layers then roll it out again to its original size … phew! Leave for 40 minutes in the fridge.

Yawn!

Then you do all that again using the rest of the lard/butter portions … TWICE! By the time we had done all that it was getting near our bedtime! Then divide the dough into 16 pieces and shape into a circle before putting them on your baking tray. Then leave for another 45 minutes until they rise. What … another 45 minutes? It’s now past our bedtime however fear of the big pointy stick drives us on! Finally you can put them in the oven … hallelujah! 15 mins at 200C is all they need … that’s the shortest bit of the whole process!Aberdeen butteries

Trawlermen

We have no idea what these things should look like  except we have heard of them being referred to as “roadkill croissants” and judging by that description we felt we had just about got it right. How do you think they taste? Surprise surprise, buttery … very buttery. Due to the constant layering, the texture is firm but flaky and not at all unpleasant. They were originally made for the Aberdeen fishing industry because they would keep longer than any other bread on lengthy trips at sea. And we can completely understand that a couple of these would easily keep a trawlerman going for a whole day. The “evil bricks of tasty” presumably comes from folks knowing that with each bite they were knocking a month off their lives but were unable to help themselves.Aberdeen butteries

We had ours in various ways … just as they were, lightly toasted with jam, with a sprinkling of salt. All perfectly acceptable. However, we’ve also heard that they are excellent with cheese (preferably roquefort) or even with corned beef? Versatile or what? Anyway, with a bit of luck, the big pointy stick has been put away … for a wee while at least!

David Cameron has ended up in the doodoo for a bit of under the table wheeling and dealing. Wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t seem to typify this  entire sleazy self serving Tory administration. Probably unfair to tar them all with the same brush, there must be one decent one … musn’t there??

The Royal Hotel in Comrie

In recognition of the fact that Canada came to our rescue in the last post, Second Cup, we thought we would come here to Comrie because it is twinned with Carleton Place in Ontario. Actually, that’s rubbish, it’s entirely coincidental, we are really visiting an aunt who lives nearby. The twinning bit is correct. But first, please bear with us if we digress a little.

Declaration of war 1914This is how the start of war was reported the day after it was announced in 1914. According to the headline, Scotland was not at war with anyone, yet somehow that trifling piece of misinformation didn’t matter. Scotland was most definitely at war. There is some equivalence in the here and now where, in spite of Scotland overwhelmingly wishing to stay in the EU, it is leaving anyway. Simply because England wants to leave. We mention all this for no other reason than the fact that it was brought to mind by a trout.

It had spent the day when WWI was announced quietly swimming around Loch Earn, presumably just minding its own business. Perhaps it was the last living creature to have died never having heard the words “World War”. That, along with its size, makes it pretty special.

20lb trout caught on Loch Earn at the Royal Hotel, Comrie
A bad day for this trout and the world. It couldn’t have imagined that the same fate awaited 17 million soldiers and civilians.

By way of compensation, however, this brownie has spent the intervening 100 above the fireplace in rather comfy surroundings here at the Royal Hotel in Comrie. If it could talk, we think it would have a few stories to tell. 72 years earlier Queen Victoria may have sat in the same lounge during her stay in 1842, hence the name “Royal Hotel”. Maybe she was eating a scone?Reception area at the Royal Hotel, Comrie

Flambeaux

Comrie itself is a picturesque little village which, amongst other things, boasts a New Year Flambeaux procession involving birch poles of burning tar being marched through the village. Somewhat akin to Burning the Clavie at Burghead. The procession is followed,  in the wee small hours, by a fancy dress competition. Sounds like fun, one of these years we might give it a try? A scone at the Royal Hotel, ComrieAlso, the village, by virtue of its location astride the Highland Boundary Fault, experiences more earth tremors than anywhere else in the UK. It is often referred to as the ‘Shaky Toon’. Unfortunately our scones were a bit ‘shaky’ too. There was no cream but other than that there was nothing particularly wrong with them. Just nothing particularly right with them either. Sadly they missed out on a topscone award.

Picture of HMS Inflexible and HMS Devastation
c1890 pictures from the hotel. HMS Infexible could be used by PM May on her outward journey to EU negotiations and HMS Devastation  for the return journey.

POW gratitude

Let us finish by continuing with the wartime theme. Comrie is home to the WWII Cultybraggan POW camp where Rudolf Hess is rumoured to have been held. Not something of which a village would be unduly proud, you would think. Last year, however, Heinrich Steinmeyer, a former Waffen-SS prisoner of the camp, left the village £384,000 in his will. It was an expression of “my gratitude to the people of Scotland for the kindness and generosity that I have experienced in Scotland during my imprisonment of war and hereafter.” It is now over 70 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps but they had rather different stories to tell. Well done Comrie!

ps: In the same edition of the Telegraph featured in the headline at the start of this post, a correspondent in Harrogate recorded his disappointment. “War is somewhat upsetting the season, and a number of visitors have left for home”. How utterly British.

PH6 2DN         tel:01764 679200         The Royal Hotel

The Bothy Bistro

You can tell by the signs above the door “Afa Fine Coffee,  Fancy Pieces and Hamely Fare” that we are quite far from home. We are, in fact, in Burghead on the Moray Firth at one of our all time favourite cafés, The Bothy Bistro. Why, we hear you ask, would you be in Burghead in the middle of January? Surely it’s not just for a scone? Well, believe it or not, it is actually all down to Pope Gregory XIII. In 1582 he decided that a new calendar was needed to better reflect the actuality of astronomical events. Hence the Gregorian calendar we use today.

It seems however that no one told the good folks of Burghead who still use the old Julian calendar. Soooo, having thoroughly enjoyed our own New Year celebrations, but being a bit down about having to wait twelve months for another bash, we decided that we would come here where you only have to wait eleven days. Their New Year is on the 11th January every year and is celebrated in some style with the Burning of the Clavie. Click on the image below to get a wee flavour.

Burning the Clavie on Doorie Hill, Burghead
These guys are not warming scones up

Health and Safety

Where else would you find a thousand people out at night in rain, freezing temperatures and  gale force winds that would cut you in half, thoroughly enjoying themselves? Definitive proof that “there is no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes”. Burning the Clavie, BurgheadThey are a hardy lot in Burghead and we had a brilliant time following the Clavie and delivering embers to homes around the town to bring them luck for the following year. Eventually we ended up at the Clavie’s final resting place on top of Doorie Hill. Burghead is fortunate in having some sort of force field surrounding the town. It precludes health and safety officers from entering. Anywhere else, throwing buckets of petrol onto a burning barrel of tar in a 50mph wind on top of a steep hill with lots of people standing around, would raise a few eyebrows. Not in Burghead.

We felt priviledged to be able to share the fun and enjoy the hospitality of the local people. There is no food to buy in any of the local pubs and hotels  … it’s all free! We think the whole thing is best summed up in the words of poet Mary Harding:

“For all our science and technical skill,
We watch with hearts that hungry still
 Leap with a wild primeval thrill
At the leaping flames on the Doorie Hill”.

Strip the willow

The last time we were here we ended up doing a strip-the-willow in the main street with what seemed like the entire population of the town at 1.30am. Great fun! In spite of the best attentions of the Church and its strenuous efforts to have it banned this ritual has survived for centuries. Long may it continue! Internal view of The Bothy Bistro, Burghead

Burned like the clavie

But back to The Bothy Bistro! Burghead is fortunate indeed to have this place which could happily stand against opposition from many more sopLogo for The Bothy Bistro, Burgheadhisticated places in London and the like. Their bacon, marmalade and banana croissants are to die for and their exclusive range of wines is second to none. The scones, however, on this occasion seemed to have come out in sympathy with the Clavie itself … burnt! Bothy Bistro sconeDisappointingly, not a topscone. Everything else was fine and we enjoyed  being back here again but the scone was just too hard and too crunchy!

Probably no more scones before Trump takes up the US Presidency. Maybe no more after it either, the world might just be too weird. And that’s saying something after the 2016 we have just had. You get the feeling though that, in Burghead, they will just carry on regardless no matter what happens. Happy new year to all our readers … again!

IV30 5UE    tel: 01343 830006    The Bothy Bistro FB