Top chefs planning taste trip to the Edinburgh of 100 years ago
Snails, ox tongue and sheep’s heid will be on menu,
IT TAKES a lot of effort to be a Michelin-starred chef – which is why you will usually find Tom Kitchin working away his restaurant in Leith while his friend and business partner, Dominic Jack, is almost always fully occupied in the kitchens at Castle Terrace.
But recently the two bright stars of the Edinburgh restaurant scene have been spending a lot of time in the National Library of Scotland, researching the kind of food people in the capital enjoyed 100 years ago.
Kitchin and Jack have been collecting traditional recipes for their new venture – the Scran and Scallie pub in Stockbridge – where they plan to sell handmade Scottish ales alongside hearty meals inspired by rediscovered dishes from the past.
Jack, who trained alongside Kitchin in Gleneagles and who earned his own Michelin star in 2011 a year after opening, said: “We always wanted to have our own restaurants but also to have somewhere people can find nice, tasty food in a place where you can go with your family.”
The Scran and Scallie, in a former Italian restaurant in Comely Bank Road, opens on Easter Sunday – but the chefs are still perfecting their pub menu.
In their kitchens they have been experimenting with oysters, tripe, home-made pork scratchings, snails, ox tongue and classics Scotch broth.
Kitchin said the chefs had been inspired by some forgotten classics of Scottish home cooking. “We have spent hours in the National Library of Scotland – the people there have been fantastic. What people ate 100 years ago is not a million miles away from what we are going to do.
“A lot of the menus were written in French, because rich people could afford French chefs and there are often illustrations. In one they show you how to hang venison until it drops from
like
sheep’s
heid