Shetland: food and fiction

It’s winter in Shetland. Last night, lying in our cabin on the 14-hour ferry trip from Aberdeen, the ship bucked and tossed as if we were on a fairground ride. We docked at Lerwick in the early morning and headed north. Now the gale has dropped and outside it has started to freeze. Weather is everything in Shetland. When we’re here we always know which way the wind’s blowing.

I first came to Shetland in 1975. I’d dropped out of university and a chance meeting in a south London pub took me to the islands to work. I was hired to be assistant cook in the bird observatory on Fair Isle. I couldn’t cook and knew nothing about birds but they were desperate and I was looking for adventure. I peeled tatties, cleaned bathrooms and learned to bake on the job. Fair Isle is small – three-and-a-half miles long and a mile-and-a-half wide. It’s the most remote inhabited island in the UK and supplies came in on the mail boat, the Good Shepherd. If the weather was too wild for the Shepherd to get in we baked our own bread.

In those days there was milk from the cows at Field and Midway crofts. At Midway they still milked by hand. Islanders went out in boats for piltock and gave us whatever they didn’t need from the catch. And there was the lamb that dominated the economy and marked the seasons. Even observatory staff were expected to take part in the annual round-up, collecting the hill sheep for clipping. I can still remember the smell of island lamb, roasting for Sunday lunch.

Though I left my observatory job and Fair Isle two years later, the islands pulled me back for regular visits. I watched as the oil industry brought affluence and incomers but my sense of Shetland remained. If anything, the security provided by the oil money allowed islanders to maintain their traditions. My friends still knitted and spun, musicians played the old tunes and the fire festival of Up Helly Aa was celebrated with as much enthusiasm as before.

One clear midwinter day in 2005 I had an idea for a new novel. It was freezing in Shetland and the ravens looked very black against the snow. I thought that if there was blood too the image would be almost mythic, recalling the fairytales of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. The book, Raven Black, would be about outsiders and what it takes to belong. My detective would be a Fair Islander with an exotic name, an outsider himself. I sat in the Islesburgh Community Centre in Lerwick eating soup, chatting to an ex-policeman about how a real murder would be investigated in the islands. In that conversation the Shetland series of books was begun.

I research all these novels by talking to people about their preoccupations. I gossip at kitchen tables and shortbread appears as if by magic from a tin. It’s the small detail that brings a book to life: what hens eat, how singling neeps is a back-breaking business, how the new Mareel arts centre in Lerwick has split opinion. Shetlanders are unfailingly generous to me even when I get things wrong. They seem prepared to excuse the impertinence of an outsider commenting on their communities. They know these are stories, and stories have been told in the islands for generations.

I’m still taking inspiration from my island experiences. It’s February and we’re headed from Lerwick for a party in Vidlin, in the north of the mainland. Inside the community hall there’s bunting and a big banner celebrating the bride and groom, Steven and Charlotte. Charlotte greets us in her wedding dress and the guests are in their finery too. The band from Cullivoe is playing and everyone’s tapping their feet and getting ready to dance. We follow the happy couple and their families around the hall in the bridal march.

Ann’s Shetland recommendations

Frankie’s in Brae, the most northerly fish and chip shop in the UK, serves scallops and mussels with chips as well as the more usual fare. In Monty’s in Lerwick slow-cooked lamb is served on creamy mash. The Scalloway Hotel in Scalloway waits to see what the fishing boats have landed before planning its menu. Hay’s Dock Café Restaurant at the Shetland Museum in Lerwick brings an original twist to island dishes. The Peerie Shop Cafe in the town is famous for its home baking.

This is a hamefaring, a party to welcome back to the islands a couple who have been married elsewhere. Steven is an islander and he’s followed tradition by bringing his bride home to show her off.

The food is traditional too: mugs of soup followed by big platters of bannocks (bread buns cooked on a griddle) and flesh (meat) carried by the newlyweds’ friends. Tonight’s flesh is reestit, or dried mutton and salt beef. In the days before freezers, daily ferries and flights from the south, Shetlanders needed a way to preserve meat and islanders still keep the old ways for special occasions. Then there are cakes, scones and biscuits, baked by Steven’s family and friends. We eat until we can hardly move.

And so, as all writers are parasites, my latest Shetland novel starts at a hamefaring. In the book, it’s not winter but midsummer, when the strange light nights confuse and disturb (Shetland is on the same latitude as Alaska and Greenland). The food my characters eat is just as I remember it from the party: soup and homebakes, bannocks and flesh. In fiction, food gives solidity. It roots the characters in reality. It conjures up memories. And, most powerfully, it evokes place.

‘Thin Air’ by Ann Cleeves is published by Macmillan on September 11

Illustration by Simon Pemberton