Watch out for weasels – and don’t stir up the devil with your porridge spirtle

Another Monday morning and the countryside is carpeted with snow. I take Inka out for his early morning walk and the tops of the hills we see from the front door are streaked with a hesitant sunrise. There’s not a breath of wind and although the temperature gauge in the car shows -2 degrees, it doesn’t feel cold. It’s the wind chill factor that’s the killer but so long as I keep walking I feel quite toasty. Mind you, I expect the worst and dress appropriately.

Inka loves the snow and gets positively skittish, tearing about like an excited puppy – well, like a rather stiff-legged elderly gentleman. It’s good to see him having fun.

Breakfast at this time of year is a bowl of heartwarming porridge eaten with my traditional horn spoon given to me by grandson James. After breakfast I top up the bird feeders and start to think about this week’s column.

A reader phoned to tell me that most mornings when she opens her curtains there’s a stoat in ermine hunting round her garden. I shan’t repeat the corny old saying that weasels are weaselly recognised and stoats are stoatally different. Both are implacable hunters, their colouring is similar but the stoat is markedly bigger than the weasel. What establishes identification is the black tip to the stoat’s tail.

In winter, during periods of prolonged snow, the stoat’s fur changes to white except for the black tip on its tail. This camouflage metamorphosis is known as being in ermine. The tail tip is said to be a defence mechanism – the tail is held high and the waving black tip distracts pursuing predators such as buzzards from attacking its more vulnerable body.

As a historical aside, the black-tipped tails of stoats in ermine have traditionally been used to trim the ceremonial robes of their Lordships of the House of Lords. Abolition of the House of Lords has been threatened for years but seems no nearer than ever, so stoats in ermine could still be living on borrowed time.

The provosts’ robes of some Scottish burghs were also trimmed with ermine stoats’ tails. The burghs were abolished under the reorganisation of local government in 1975, which must have been an occasion for much tail waving by the stoats.

Motivated by conservation concerns, nowadays some of their lordships wear robes trimmed with false fur. But fishermen use the tails to tie the popular stoat’s tail fly – said to be deadly in the right conditions.

It is porridge weather – the halesome parritch, chief o’ Scotia’s food – as Burns wrote in The Cottar’s Saturday Night. Jamieson, in his Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, describes it as “oat meal, with milk or beer, to breakfast”.

Anyone can make porridge. The simple ingredients are measured by volume rather than weight – one cup of porridge oats to two cups of cold water. It should hardly be possible to spoil it in the cooking but, in my experience, if it is not stirred throughout, lumpy porridge may result. The last ingredient – a pinch of salt, according to taste – should be added when the porridge begins to bubble.

Macdonald Douglas in The Scots Book, published 1935, wrote – “If you cannot eat porridge without committing the ghastly sin of putting sugar on it, then don’t eat it at all.” My sentiments entirely.

It’s not surprising that such an essentially Scottish dish has its own traditions and superstitions. For fear of calling up the

devil porridge should always be stirred – with a wooden spirtle, of course –clockwise and with the right hand. Stirring widdershins – contrary to the course of the Sun (Jamieson) – will invoke Auld Hornie and land you in all manner of trouble.

That has always seemed pretty hard on corriefistit (left handed) cooks whose natural direction of stirring, I should have thought, was anti-clockwise. I’ve confidently stirred my porridge a’weys and never suffered any ill consequences.

For reasons lost in the mists of history porridge is not “it”, as erroneously referred to above.

It is “they” or “them” and they should be supped (never eaten) standing up – possibly affirming the old Scottish proverb that a staunin’ sack fills the fu’est.

One of my Loanhead uncles stood to his porridges, standing at the dining room mantelpiece and supping them with his traditional horn spoon and dipping each spoonful into a separate cup of cream.

I was too small to reach as high as the mantelpiece and had to suffer the indignity of eating my porridges sitting at the table with my aunt.

The Scotch vernacular has a wealth of expressive, pithy proverbs which condense a reflection on life into a few brief words. It’s back tae auld claes and parritch, we say – it’s back to the old normal.

So, it’ll be back tae auld claes and parritch once this coronavirus thingie has been sorted.

Such an essentially Scottish dish has it own superstitions

CHANGELINGS: Weasel may turn to white fur in winter while the stoat can be differentiated by the black tip, or ermine, of its tail.