“They say Glaswegians have more fun at a funeral than people in Edinburgh have at a wedding.” Awe’ n bile yer heid. This was Anthony Bourdain on a bonnie day in Scotland, in May 2015.
A vegetarian boarding school?
“That’s unthinkable to me,” Anthony Bourdain says, barely able to conceal his shock, just past the halfway mark of the 5th-season Parts Unknown episode Scotland.
Americans abroad. Scots have suffered their share of American incursions, from a characteristically gauche Trump golf course and country club on environmentally sensitive land, a development project that naturally raised the ire of many of the local clans — still does — to the steady parade of American visitors with surnames like McDonald, MacDonald and Macdonald eager to get to the bottom of their ancestral roots.
There’s no such danger there with Bourdain — his surname bears more of a French feel, you know, the other, l’autre, one of them, and the funny thing about the French is that, traditionally and historically, they found more succour in Scotland than in hostile England, from France’s Catholic connections to France’s support of the ill-fated Mary Stuart, aka Mary, Queen of Scots — eventually done in, wouldn’t you know, by the English Queen Elizabeth I, beheaded in fact, an act so egregious it provoked a long line of noisy protest films from Mel Gibson (Braveheart!), Sean Connery, and others.
And therein lies a tale that continues to this day — a Scottish yearning, in some quarters anyway, for independence from Westminster and an embrace of Scottish cuisine over the English kind, all for one and one for all, once and for all, and all that
Bourdain samples the brew at a Glasgow pub (EST 1510) before heading to a country estate in the Scottish Highlands to shoot a stag and experience first-hand where venison comes from, all the while ruminating about an independence vote that was turned down by 55% of Scottish voters. At the time.
Now, after decades of misrule from a Tory government in London — think Republicans, but better spoken and with a keener grasp of the English language, not to mention better manners — there’s talk of another vote, and this time it isn’t just the 16-year-olds who’ll bite (yes, the age of eligibility to vote was dropped in Scotland, in part to encourage more young people to be involved in politics, and in part because if you ask virtually any 16-year-old on the planet, ‘Do you want more freedom,’ you don’t need a poll by Angus Reid to tell you the result.
What has all this got to do with food, you might ask, and the answer is that this is CNN, the self-styled “most trusted name in news,” and not the Food Network, a difference that Bourdain embraced when he originally signed on to do a show that allowed him to trek across the globe on somebody else’s dime.
And while Scotland won't top too many foodies’ lists of their favourite Parts Unknown episodes, good eating is never too far away from Bourdain’s mind.
"Last night, in Glasgow, I had enough with the deeper issues," Bourdain says at the 19-minute mark.
“Now, I want to go no deeper than the bottom of a bubbling cauldron of hot grease. It's out there. It's calling to me. I want it now. A happy place from my past where once I frolicked young and carefree in the field of related arts. The University Cafe, where I learned at the foot of the masters the Tao of hot fat and crispy batter.
“Yes, they do a deep-fried Mars bar here and deep-fried pizza. Been there, done that. But Carlo here and his twin brother have been keeping the Verragio family tradition alive since 1918, and it ain't about no Mars bar.
"I order the fish and chips and some haggis. Haddock battered and floating, a drift in a sea of mysterious life-giving oil. The accumulated flavours of many magical things as it bobs like Noah's Ark, bringing life in all its infinite variety. Deep-fried haggis, my personal favourite. Sinister sheep parts in tube form, in this case. And if you don't like chopped-up liver and lungs and all that good stuff, believe me, the curry sauce sets you right. The combination of French fries, or “chips” in the local dialect, with curry sauce and cheese is perhaps a bro too far, Guy Fieri in a kilt, but, what the hey.
“I'm pretty sure God is against this.”
But back to the vegetarian boarding school.
“Heading north out of Glasgow, Scotland quickly becomes something else. A savagely beautiful, harsh, but absolutely mesmerizing landscape that seems to have changed not at all for thousands, even millions of years. And across Loch Maree, and only accessible by boat, one of the great isolated estates: Letterewe. It's the favourite retreat of my friend, Adrian Gill, more widely known as A.A. Gill. He's the much feared and widely followed restaurant critic for the London Sunday Times, a regular columnist for a spectrum of magazines, author, traveller, and one of the finest essayists of our time.”
Gill, it turns out, went to said boarding school, despite now living within a stone’s throw of a country estate where venison rules the roost.
“My parents sent me to a vegetarian boarding school, and for nine years, the year after I left, I was a vegetarian,” he tells Bourdain.
“Nine years,” Bourdain says ruefully. “That's unthinkable to me.”
“Then I decided not to be,” Gill responds. “I made the decision that if I was going to eat meat again. Then I had to be prepared to do the whole business.”
Bourdain: “Right. You’ve got to be accountable.”
Accountability. That was Bourdain’s stock-in-trade.
The last word, as seems only fitting, hails from the visiting American with the French name.
“I came to Scotland this time to shoot an animal in the heart, to take part, to be fully culpable in a practice nearly as old as these hills. You walk this country stalking an animal across the rocks and wet heather. You feel little has changed from how your distant ancestors must have searched for their food, with a rifle, with a spear, with a club. I drag my knuckles up a hill and, like my ape-like predecessors, return tired, happy, and covered in blood.
“Everything changes. Nothing changes at all.”
Strange as it seems, it makes perfect sense.
Supplementary reading:
https://medium.com/writerontherun/retracing-anthony-bourdain-in-scotland-3b9031c978f0
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