A new book, Shetland Food and Cooking, is sure to find a place on worktops in the islands and beyond.
Shetland booksellers" shelves are crammed with volumes about the history, archaeology, environment, wildlife and people of Shetland, and there's a remarkably wide range of fiction and poetry, too. Books about food have been rarer. In 1925, Margaret Stout's Cookery For Northern Wives – now available as a facsimile reprint – was a landmark, a selection of recipes that were part contemporary and part recovered from earlier times. Since then, Shetland cooking has had a place in other authors" work, such as Alan Davidson's classic, North Atlantic Seafood (1979); and of course a Shetland student, James Morton, has made his mark as finalist in the BBC's Great British Bake-Off and subsequently published Brilliant Bread (2013). However, the book that local cooks have most often turned to is probably In Da Galley, an accessible and inspiring guide by another local writer, Charlie Simpson.
There are obvious parallels between Marian Armitage's new book and Margaret Stout's 1925 collection. Both women studied cookery in Edinburgh; both cooked in London before returning to Shetland; and both books offer a wide range of recipes that make the best of Shetland's food resources.
But Marian's volume is in every sense a book for a new century. Her perspective is that of someone who, teaching in London, was exposed to