The Sutler's Table

Before You Cook

This isn't a book of recipes so much as a book of defaults.

It started with a plain belief: food that's stalked, caught or picked by hand is better than food that isn't. Not sentimentally better. Actually better, in texture, in flavour, in how close it sits to the ground it came from. A stag off the hill has more to it than one that spent a year standing in a shed. A mackerel an hour out of the water tastes like nothing that's travelled. Sutlers & Co. was built around that one fact, and everything in this book follows from it.

What We Believe

There's no hierarchy here between the showpiece and the humble. A venison loin gets the same care as a bowl of skirlie fried in dripping. The heart, the liver and the kidney get cooked properly rather than thrown away, because wasting an animal that gave up its life for the table is the one thing we won't do. A stew of neck and shoulder trim sits in this book next to a whole grilled lobster, and neither one apologises for what it is.

We don't believe in improving on this food. No foams, no gels, no technique that exists to prove a point rather than serve the ingredient. Simple technique, done properly, beats invention every time.

Every expedition we run ends the same way, at a fire, with whatever the day gave up. That's not a slogan, it's the actual structure of the evening: the menu gets decided at dusk, not months in advance, by what came off the hill, the loch or the hedge that day. Guests dress the birds, fillet the fish, pick through what they foraged on the walk back. Supper gets cooked in front of everyone and told through the history and ecology of the land it came from, not just served. Nobody's in a hurry to leave the fire once the plates are empty, and that's the part we actually care about: not the trophy on its own, but the table it leads to, and the people gathered around it. See The Highland Stalk for the expedition this all comes from.

None of this is precious about itself. Sutherland is a hard, beautiful, unglamorous place, and the food matches it: oatmeal, barley, butter, salt, whisky, and whatever the land happened to give up that particular day. The recipes that follow come from this specific place, not from a general idea of “wild food” borrowed from somewhere else. A few of them are old enough that nobody working here now remembers who taught them first.

This book exists because guests keep asking for the recipes once they're home. These fifty are what we've learned about doing that food justice once it reaches the fire.

How to Use This Book

Use them as a starting point, not a rulebook. If a recipe calls for brambles and you've got bilberries, use the bilberries. If you've landed a salmon on a night the book only planned for sea trout, turn to The River chapter instead. The ingredient always outranks the instructions.

A few things worth knowing before you start:

• Everything here assumes you're cooking what's actually in season and actually local. Swap freely within that constraint, not outside it.
• The Appendix at the back holds five sauces that turn up more than once. Learn those five and half the book opens up.
• None of this needs specialist equipment. A fire, a heavy pan, a pot, and a girdle or dry frying pan will get you through every recipe here.

Cook it simply. Serve it to people you like. Don't rush the bit at the end where everyone's still sitting by the fire.

Sutlers & Co.