Eat Like the Scots on Hogmanay
Soup and herring recipes, yes please.
It’s Hogmanay, wonderful witches! Enjoy this special issue with a menu for a quick celebratory meal.
Eat Like the Scots on Hogmanay
By Siobhan Ball
Hogmanay, or New Year’s Eve to everyone else, was the big winter festival in Scotland until relatively recently. Largely owing its dominance to the Scottish parliament’s 1640 decision to ban all Christmas celebrations out of an excess of Calvinist asceticism, Hogmanay combines some former Christmas traditions with the typical New Year’s magic you can find around the world. While Charles II swiftly legalized Christmas after he retook the throne, it wasn’t made a national holiday up here in Scotland until 1958, and so it’s only in the last few decades that Christmas fever has knocked Hogmanay out of its prime position. Despite this, Hogmanay is still a very big deal here with celebrations ranging from small family parties to large scale fire festivals, followed by a two-day-long national holiday afterwards to recover.
Like most New Year celebrations around the world, many of the small folk magics associated with Hogmanay are all about getting rid of the bad/old and welcoming in the auspicious/new. Cleaning the entire house, known as redding, is an important Hogmanay tradition if you wanted to avoid bad luck for the coming year. Clearing out the hearth and its ashes and laying a fresh new fire ready to light on New Year’s Day was especially important, blending the old Gaelic tradition of a new, ritual flame for a new season, and the near ubiquitous belief that for a lucky and prosperous year, starting out with a freshly cleaned house is essential. Finish off with saining, a smoke cleansing practice that makes use of Scotland’s native Juniper, and your house is ready to face the New Year with its best, cleanest foot forward.
While many of us don’t have a working hearth anymore, there are a handful of modern equivalents you can work into your Hogmanay rituals. Lighting a firepit or outdoor grill (after first giving it a good scrubbing the day before) and using it to cook a meal is a good way of translating this tradition into a modern context. Especially if you make some form of bannock on it, as bannock cooked on the hearth after it had been lit with a new ritual fire is an old Gaelic tradition found on the quarter and other festival days, bringing luck and prosperity to the household. And for those of us with no access to naked-flame-based cookery, giving the oven a good scrub before using it the next day probably also counts!
First Footing is another good-luck Hogmanay tradition that ties back to food. One old-fashioned way of celebrating the night is to wander house to house in groups, bearing gifts of food and drink, while in turn your hosts try to stuff you full to bursting. There are regional variations in how this is done of course; in Dundee, for instance, there’s the delightful tradition of dressing the herring—putting little paper-doll-style outfits on dried herrings and bringing one as a gift to every house you visit. These little herring dolls would be hung up in the kitchen for the next year to ensure good luck until the process would be repeated all over again next Hogmanay.
In another First Footing tradition, households endeavor to ensure that the first person across the threshold after midnight is a man with dark hair (my family lovingly tosses my godfather out in the cold every year just to make him come back in). A popular folk etymology is that it goes all the way back to the era of Viking raids, when finding a blonde man unexpectedly crossing your threshold was a very bad sign, and that the brunette acted as a form of sympathetic magic ensuring only friendly surprises for the year to come. Whatever the reason behind it, the First Footer would always bring a gift of whisky, coal (most welcome in the dreich Scottish winter), shortbread, or the little known Black Bun, a sort of heavy fruitcake enclosed in pastry that had once been a Christmas treat before Hogmanay’s rise to winter stardom. Whether sharing the food (or burning the coal) is necessary to seal in that luck… it certainly won’t hurt.
There are lots of traditional dishes served on Hogmanay. My grandfather always cooked a haggis for our second midnight supper (a classic Scots-Irish tradition on festive nights that fuels your partying til morning), eaten just after we’d toasted in the new year with champagne. Served with neeps and tatties, haggis is a Hogmanay classic, as well as pretty much the iconic Scottish dish—featured on all sorts of occasions from the formal Burns Night to the end of a drunken Friday night, where it’s best eaten deep-fried from the chippy. However, because haggis is one of those foods where it’s generally better to buy than try and make your own unless you’re a butcher or experienced chef, I’ve included some alternate Hogmanay favorites instead that you can make from scratch.
Cock-a-Leekie Soup
An old Scottish recipe going back at least to the 16th century, cock-a-leekie is a winter classic that’s also a traditional option for Hogmanay night. It makes sense, when your house is full of groups of varyingly drunk people, who’ve all been staggering house to house in the midst of a Scottish winter. A giant pot of soup that’s easily stretched for extra guests is just what you need to warm them up. It’s also, like any pot of soup, a good opportunity for magic. Put your intentions for the New Year into the soup by focusing on them while stirring sunwise (clockwise/left to right), and be sure to lean into the cold-fighting and immune-boosting leeks and chicken broth by emphasizing good health if your guests have also been wandering around drunkenly in the cold. This should serve four, or if it’s a first course, a lot more than that.
Ingredients
For the broth:
1 large onion
2 - 6 garlic cloves
1 whole roast chicken carcass, medium-sized
2 large celery sticks
1 medium carrot
1 bay leaf
6 black peppercorns
For the soup:
3 medium-large carrots
The leftover meat from the chicken
3 large leeks
Salt to taste
White Pepper to taste
Thyme to taste
120 grams white rice
Directions
To make the broth, first halve the onion and smash the garlic cloves, then place them and the other broth ingredients in a large stock pot. Cover the contents completely with water and allow to simmer for 4 to 6 hours, remembering to periodically skim the scum off the top. If you don’t have a pre-roast chicken carcass available, a rotisserie chicken is a great substitute. I recommend using an already-roast bird for this instead of a raw one because roasting it first is what adds a great depth of flavor to the soup—though of course if you only have an uncooked chicken available, that’s fine.
When the broth is ready, strain out the solids and set aside. Chop the carrots into bite-sized pieces and shred the chicken. If you’re using a whole rotisserie instead of a leftover roast, then you probably won’t want to include all the meat. Use your judgement. Slice the leeks into fine rounds and fry them in butter on a high heat, stirring quickly to keep them from burning, until they’re soft and start browning. Add the carrots, chicken, stock and spices and simmer for 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the size of the carrot chunks and how long the stock needs to deepen in flavor. Then add the rice and cook for another 10 minutes, or longer if the variety of rice you're using needs it. Finally, taste test it and adjust the salt and pepper as necessary before serving.
Herring in a Tweed Coat
A cheeky wee nod to the Dundee tradition, as well as the classic Eastern European New Year’s Eve dish that goes by Dressed Herring and Herring in a Fur Coat variously. There’s no beetroot in this version, however; instead this herring is dressed in a coat of Scottish oats before being pan-fried and served with pickled cucumbers and a side of sharp and creamy horseradish sauce.
Ingredients
Sea salt
Cracked black pepper
1 deboned herring fillet per person
2 tablespoons of oats per person
Sunflower or vegetable oil
Directions
Sprinkle salt and black pepper over the fish.
Coat the fish in the oats by pouring them into a dish and lightly pressing both sides of the fish down into it.
Fry the fillets in the oil for a minute and a half before flipping them over for another minute and a half, or until the oat crust has turned a lovely, crisp gold color. Serve with sliced pickled cucumbers and as much horseradish sauce as desired.