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Interview: Cook Mary Anne Mackay

I’m Mary Anne Mackay. I live in Gerinish in South Uist. I’ve been staying here for the past two years now since I moved from my home in Kilphedar up at the south end of the island.

Well, I enjoy cooking the local seafood which you can get on the shores around here anyway. All you have to do is go down to the seashore and just collect it, like mussels and cockles and razorfish, winkles. Sometimes we used to get lobsters down by the shore where I was born and brought up in East Kilbride. My father used to go down to a certain rock that was there and there used to be a lobster there. I don’t think that would happen any more because of the lobster fishing, but we used to get it then, but that was maybe fifty years ago.

I enjoy cooking seafood because it’s so easy to cook. I find it just is the easiest thing you can cook really and it’s – it can be very tasty when you’ve just caught it fresh off the shore.

Well, usually with like the mussels and the cockles and the razorfish you just boil them till the shell opens and that’s it cooked then, because if you leave it any further it just gets overcooked, so you just boil it till the shell opens and that’s it cooked then. So you can eat it then, but there’s various things you can do with it as well, like I quite enjoy leaving it to get cold and cooking it in butter and having it, maybe having cockles on its own in butter on toast, or the same with the razorfish. You can slice them up and grill them in butter and have them that way and you can grill them with garlic or whatever your tastes are. But you can – there’s plenty of things you can do with them. All the – after you’ve boiled them they’re cooked anyway so you could put them in a chowder and just add stock to it and add cream to it. You can add potatoes to it and it’s a meal in itself then. But I mean all these things you can get for free down on the shore, but there’s also various seafood that you can buy in the shops around, like you can get salmon, you can get scallops. You can get different kinds of, all different kinds of fish.

If it was just razorfish I would just have it by itself with bread or with toast, toasted bread or just with bread itself, because I quite like that, just with the butter and the toast is quite nice.

When I was young all the meat had to be salted and we used to get maybe a big box of mackerel, and you’d take it down to the seashore, gut it and clean it and salt it, and that would do for the winter then. The same with herring, if there was herring in. Then you looked forward to the fresh herring in June. June time the fresh herring would come round and you could buy a dozen herring, maybe for a pound then but things have changed since then. You don’t get that now. You don’t get the people going round the houses selling the herring as much as what they did then. It doesn’t seem to be so plentiful now.

And with the meat as well, the meat was killed and salted at the, at the house then. You could – there were slaughterhouses with every shop, local shop really, and you’d slaughter the sheep there, and then they were salted and just kept like that, and that’s the food for the winter.

Maybe I couldn’t go back to eating the salted meat now, but when we were having it that was what we were used to and, and you enjoyed it then, but I don’t know now what it would taste like after having it fresh.

Clilstore Island VoicesRazorfishAlec Beaton

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