Blustery winter weather requires big bold comfort food. Shetland has some of the most extreme weather in the country and the locals keep themselves happy with hearty food, such as slow cooked roast mutton. Chris had the opportunity to sample some of the island's finest food. Fortunately he didn't have to face the crashing sea, as the event was a short hop from his East London home.
I spent a recent Saturday night feasting Shetland style just down the road from my East London home. Nice one! Mussels, roast mutton, whisky ice cream and more with a live fiddle performance soundtrack set upon the Regents Canal at Waterhouse Restaurant with guest chef Jospeh Trivelli of the River Cafe at the helm – it was a deliciously convivial way to spend a blustery night.
Shetland Night in London was the brainchild of Shetland native, Helen Nisbet. As so many of us Londoners can relate, Helen loves her life in London but misses the charms of life 'back home'. The day after the dinner, I dropped Helen a line asking if she would like to provide a quote for my write up. I was expecting a line or two. Instead I got a passionate and extremely cut-and-paste-able response. So, I could carry on rambling about my own impressions of Helen's yummy and sociable evening … or do you a bigger favour and allow the host to share her own account of the event.
Keep reading for Helen's take on bringing a bit of her island's comfort food and cosy culture to the table here in London and how you can find out about the future happenings she hoping to host.
Here's Helen:
"The idea has been coming to me slowly for years. I love food with a huge and throbbing passion and spend most of my tiny salary on eating out all over London. Coupled with this cosmopolitan foodiness has always been a melancholic homesickness for my island. For fiddles, for the people, the crashing angry sea and the food.
"I have been telling friends for years how great Shetland mutton is and how we would have it slow cooked on a weekend. The smell would drive you crazy and everyone would fight over the black bits, and you would delve into the fridge days later to pull off a piece of the pinkish flesh, or slide your finger across a bit of bone in the hopes of scooping off some of the brown, salty sticky loveliness.
"I have been asking butchers in London, and indeed in Glasgow, for years if they have 'mutton'. Sometimes they do, but it is nothing like the mutton from home (or the mutton we ate on Saturday night). But most often they tell you that no one wants to eat mutton, and they offer you a bit of lamb.
"So I started a quest to get some good, old mutton down here so my friends could try it. The mutton we eat in Shetland is around 5 years old, at least, and has been roaming the hills, eating seaweed and getting in the way of cars all its life). Then I realised it might be most sensible to make a bit of a night of it. You can eat food from all over the world here in our fair city, so why not food from Shetland?
"I started planning the night, and with Twitter, local interest (back in Shetland) and good friends, it grew from there. Initially we were going to try to feed 20, then it turned into almost 50. My next door neighbour back home sent down the mussels for free. He has a business in rope grown mussels, the finest you can find, but he ends up sending most of them outside the UK.
"So that's how it happened.
"I'm good friends with Joseph Trivelli who is Head Chef at the River Cafe, so he was able to take my Shetland produce and turn it into something even more incredible. I hope to work with him again. We sat and spoke about the food I had grown up with, and how we cooked it, and the best recipes for 'bannocks' and we sat in bookshops looking for books on Scottish/Shetland/Nordic cooking and couldn't find anything that spoke about the food I knew. So I hope I'm bringing an awareness of it to a new audience.
"In my day job, I am a contemporary art curator/consultant. So I've been mixing the organising of this with plodding in to work as usual, and trying not to say mutton when talking about art.
"I would really like to do more, and I'm exploring options for that, but hoping the next one will be in early 2013, around the same time as the Viking fire festival Up Helly Aa takes place. I want it to be about the hospitality, the fun, the fresh food, the sense of joy and camaraderie that I feel on nights out in Shetland. So I'm hoping it can be a regular thing for folk who live in London and beyond. I'm looking into doing one in Scandanavia too, as once upon a time Shetland used to belong to them."
Keep a watchful eye out for updates on Helen's shetlandnightinlondon Tumblr blog and @shetlandnight on Twitter for updates about future events.
