By
Bill Currie
I found myself one late summer fishing the Carnock river for salmon, an hour by small fast motor boat from Mallaig up Loch Nevis that lovely arm of the sea with Kintail to the north of us and a great fastness of hills to the south. The Carnock river, at the head of the loch, on that occasion was not prepared to be very generous as far as salmon went. The river had dropped so low that there was nothing in its pools for us to cast over. So, being a boy again, as they say, I climbed up into the hills on the south side of the glen and fished a burn for trout. There were some splendid pools to deal with, - little rushing streams below rocky walls, waterfall pools with their sullen dark reaches where the white foam turns slowly over deep holding places and rushy glides. Every ten yards you found yourself casting your flies over different, highly individual pieces of water. It was testing fishing with difficult casting in what were often very awkward and restricted places. But the trout were there and, as west highland trout often do, they were very keen to rise vigorously to the wet fly. The best were perhaps ten ounces and there were plenty of quarter pounders to keep the rod bending.
There were three of us, the head keeper and stalker, the under-keeper and myself. You will appreciate that pretty well all our food had to come up on our motor boat from Mallaig and meals could be pretty basic. But thre larder was supplemented that day, since I came home to meet the others with a bag of ten very fresh trout which I had kept from the bounty of fish which sprang at the flies.
Oh, fried trout again then ? said the head man as if he was describing a penalty.
Dinner will be served in forty minutes, I said, and would tell them no more at that point.
I looked in my box of food. I had some of my stores wrapped in aluminium foil. There was a pat of butter, a bottle of wine a small onion and some tomatoes. Perfect. I made a purse of the foil, put in some lumps of butter, added a good glass of wine, chopped in the onion and, if my memory serves correctly, found some mint near the hut we were staying in. The trout were cleaned and put into the foil purse and, to the great interest of the two keepers, I popped this silver bag into our small calor gas oven and let it bubble away for forty minutes. The result was satisfying. The trout were succulent and as sweet as only the freshest trout can be; the butter, wine and herbs made a wonderful, aromatic bouillon. Indeed, the dish nearly qualified as one in which you would not mind missing out on the fish for the delight of supping the sauce. I think, that evening, I converted two unlikely candidates to haut cuisine in a fishing hut. At least I took the sting out of the remark that a bag of trout necessarily meant, Fried trout again then .
I have used the foil bag, bouillon and herbs by the riverside more than once. There was a fresh sea trout of a couple of pounds from the Dee in Aberdeenshire. We had a little barbecue going beside the fishing hut and I just cooked the sea trout in butter and wine in its bag over the glowing charcoal. Im glad the foil did not leak ! I have also used the same technique to cook a ratatouille of vegetables to go with a barbecued steak served on the bank of a salmon pool ( with claret all round, of course). Never go fishing without a bit of foil. Thats the new rule for 1998, if you are a hungry group of fishers lunching on the banks of the river miles from the nearest frying pan.
I have had some wonderful wilderness meals when I have been fishing in far flung places abroad , far from supplies and very far from the foil bag. In Finnish Lapland I was taught how to grill big grayling and trout on green birch sticks. The sticks had to be green to stop them burning easily. You clean the fish but leave the head on, then run the thin green stick through the fish and out at the mouth. Take your knife and cut parallel , fairly deep cuts on each side then push the stick into the ground beside your fire. The fat collects in the cuts on the flanks of the fish and bubbles away there, cooking the fish beautifully. An added advantage is that you do not need plates to eat this wilderness delight. You just pull out the stick and eat the fish off it like a barbecue skewer. I also noticed that the Finns I was fishing with on these wilderness journeys did not put dry salt on these grilled fish. They mixed up some salt and water and splashed this on to the fish as they ate.
My Finnish friends taught me a great deal about the wilderness which no amount of walking and fishing in the Hebrides or the West Highlands could have brought. They carried buckets with them into the wild and bags of salt. When we caught a decent fish we cleaned it and filleted it and laid in down under salt and pepper in the bucket. We pressed this fish down with a lid. In three days the fillets of fish would have produced a marinade of their own juices mingled with the salt and pepper. It was a kind of gravadlax. We sprinkled dill thickly on the slices and ate this with rye bread, a gastronomic delight two or three days march from the nearest road. On one occasion in the forests of eastern Lapland near the Russian frontier among great , centuries-old pines, giving the place a feeling of being in a wilderness cathedral, we found a bed of blueberries beside the stream and sat there eating our own gravadlax and handfuls of the dark berries. It was a miraculous event which no hotel or five star restaurant could ever have produced. The place and the meal were unique.
Two summers ago I was asked to try out a neat little smoking package on a trip to a Russian river in the Kola Peninsula. It was perfect in its simplicity. The package was a double foil envelope the size of a decent-sized fish fillet. On one side the envelope had oak sawdust and on the other there was room to slide in the fish to be smoked. A perforated foil sheet separated the sections. We caught a small grilse, filleted it and slipped the slices into the packet. We laid the packet over a small fire among the rocks and waited about ten minutes. The fish came out , hot smoked and cooked and was excellent.
Eating out, especially on the moors and in the hills while you are fishing is an experience to be cherished. Some of the most excellent tastes and some of the most atmospheric places combine to make the whole day, fishing and food, memorable. Of course, you can run out of food too on an expedition, even if you are just walking and camping among Hebridean lochs. We got pretty hungry once. We had been over a fortnight out on a backwoods wilderness river in that part of Lapland where Finland, Norway and Sweden meet. Four of us, three Finns and myself, were taking a Lapp boat down a long and often difficult river and we had more or less reached the end of our stores. Fishing had also been poor for a couple of days. The weather had turned against us. Then, not far from the end of our journey we met a Lapp boat making its way up the river. Naturally we all stopped and talked. Boat was moored to boat by the rivers edge. The Lapps pulled out a virtually solid loaf of hard, black rye bread and sliced off a chunk for each of us, cutting it with their long reindeer knives in that odd way, with the loaf clutched to the chest and the knife sawn back, alarmingly towards the body. Then they produced a dried leg of reindeer, cut a slice off it in the same dangerous way and handed it out. Solid rye, solid chewable air-dried reindeer. Chew, chew, chew. You wont believe this, but it was most welcome, and doubly delicious when real hunger was the order of the day.
In fishing in the Hebrides, or the West Highlands, - or on waters further afield - there are days of an apple and a sandwich and you can lie in the heather and feel glad of that. But there are days when it all happens differently and eating of a different class takes place. There are , of course, days when the fishing is so good you do not want to stop for lunch at all. Yes, I have fished often with a sandwich in one hand and a fishing rod in the other with all my senses concentrating not on what I was eating, but on what was happening in the loch. I can also remember days when I have left my lunch lying because a salmon has suddenly shown in the pool in front of me and I have been unable to resist swinging my fly over it. On one occasion four of us were lunching when this happened on a Sutherland river. Go and try that one, Bill, they said, a bit mockingly. I did, and caught the salmon. I looked back to see the whole party hastily leaving their lunch and making haste to the river to see whether lightning would strike in the same place twice - or three or four times. On one such interrupted meal I returned to the bank to find that my dog had eaten a whole roast chicken. On that occasion it was the dog which had the meal and the memory. I suspect it also remembered the clout I gave it and the unprintable language I used to add sauce to its meal.
You can find more articles in the archive under A Line On Scottish Fishing.
| Home | New | Table of Contents | Search | Archive |
Designed and Copyright 2004
Innovative Consulting Services, Inc.
Since November 8, 1998