Kirsty Nicholson

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With the winter nights truly upon us and the weather turning increasingly horrible, there’s no better time to indulge in this moreish Scottish classic. You don’t need much in the way of equipment, maybe a slow cooker if you have one. The main thing is patience. To fully appreciate this recipe, things need to gradually reach boiling point over time.

For those of us of a certain age, stovies will bring to mind wonderful memories of grannies’ kitchens saturated with the whiff of this stew. I remember my own granny would gather up all of the slightly sad looking veg leftover at the end of the week and whatever meat was available and chuck the lot into the Big Pot. The Big Pot was like a cauldron where magic took place; it had the power to transform some of the most miserable ingredients into life-giving nourishment.

That’s the big benefit of stovies: you don’t need to be a particularly skilled cook. You can hide a multitude of sins in the thick gravy!

 

Stovies were one of my late husband’s favourite things to eat. I don’t think a month went by during our marriage when he didn’t ask me to whip up a big vat of the stuff for him. His love for gravy-drenched slice (that’s square sausage to some of you) was legendary, and it was more than apparent by the excess of gut that drooped over his stupid too-tight denims. I don’t miss the touch of that clammy cushion of flab weighing down upon me whenever I was to perform my wifely duties. Or the many other times that the bastard pressed himself on me without invitation.

My husband was a man of passion—for the football, for the horses, for creative prejudices that couldn’t even be semi-excused as those shared by other bigoted men like him. He seemed to have his own take on the world, a singularly nasty and twisted perspective on things. But there are a lot of other bigoted men like him. You might be married to one yourself, in which case this recipe is for you.

The stovies I made for my husband used the cheapest cuts of meat I could find, usually from the reduced bin. Take your time over this part. Forage deep in the fridges to find the slimiest, smelliest, dodgiest looking cuts you can find.

 

If you’ve read this far and haven’t clicked the “Skip to recipe” button, I applaud you. I often joke with a couple of other food bloggers that nobody ever actually reads our stories; that we could write or confess to anything in these few hundred words above an ingredient list and nobody would ever know. I’m no better, right enough. I skip to the recipe, too. But then I’ve had a lifetime of deferring satisfaction and enduring seemingly endless unpleasantries. I’ve paid my dues, so to speak, and I mean to spend the rest of my life skipping to the good bit.

I’ll say it outright: I killed my bastard husband. I put a handful of Destroying Angel mushrooms in his stovies one night, ten years ago (Google them, I won’t link to anything here). I sat back and watched as he dribbled down himself in a claggy death rattle, keeled over out of his chair and vomited his insides out.

It’s a strange sight, a grown man writhing in distress and pain. It simultaneously makes a baby and a beast of them. I didn’t do much research beyond what I needed to know: vomiting, diarrhoea, dehydration, liver damage. He had stolen and squandered enough of my precious time and attention over our lives together. I didn’t feel his death was owed any more of it.

I’m not a naturally scheming or vindictive woman, but it’s amazing the things you can learn from these true crime podcasts and books. It’s been a bit of a golden era for offing abusive husbands, I think. If you’re thinking of doing it yourself, I say why wait? Do it now while the going is good. Before people start checking who’s really listening to these serial killer shows. Many men, especially those of my husband’s ilk, don’t realise that the most dangerous person in their life is unlikely to be some other egotistical has-been squaring up to them in the pub, but the person that cooks their meals, washes their drab, stretched clothing, and raises their kids. The people behind the scenes of a life are the ones best positioned to ruin it if they must.

And I have raised that arsehole’s kids. Bought their Christmas and birthday presents, made their packed lunches, sung their bedtime stories, while he fused his backside with the sofa that I picked out.

I was going to wait until the kids were older before I did it. I thought they should be mature enough to deal with the grief of losing a father, but the longer it all went on, the more I worried about my daughter and the example it might set if she saw me settling for what I was given. And I was given it at least one night per week. Twice when his team played, or his coupon didn’t come in.

In the end, they managed just fine without a father. They didn’t miss what they never had in the first place.

These days, when I make stovies, I buy the nice stuff, like slice from my local artisanal butcher, with little black pudding medallions in the centre. It’s something of a treat for me now. It has sentimental value, so I like to make sure it’s as good as it can be.

 

The night of my husband’s last serving of stovies wasn’t remarkable. I couldn’t tell you what day of the week it was without looking back over obituaries and records and all sorts. On paper, it was a significant, traumatic evening. But for me, it was just another Tuesday or Thursday, only this time it had a happy ending. Had he been out at the pub, or had he been drinking at home? I honestly can’t remember. Either way, there was the tell-tale whiff to his breath when it slithered down my neck and curled under my collar. And his hands had the bloated, clumsy touch of too much alcohol. Or not enough.

My husband thought I was something that would chip away over time with repeated wear and tear—something he could beat into a more acceptable shape. And I mean “beat” in the truest sense. But he was wrong. Every time he raised his hands to me, I was being tempered, honed. And on that particular night, I moved from theory to action.

Fortunately, the kids were out of the house and staying with friends. I was spared the responsibility of trying to muffle and bite back my loud protests against my husband’s actions as I usually had to. The pain and humiliation were one kind of torture, but the idea of my children hearing it through our thin walls was something I could barely fathom. Many nights when I would tuck them into bed, I’d be unable to make eye contact with them in case we traded a silent acknowledgement.

Yet, funnily enough, on that night when I could have been as loud and hateful as I wanted, I was silent. We’re always told that it’s impossible to achieve important things while distracted, with our minds on our dinner. But I was planning this very recipe as I endured his pissed-up punishments.

When he was finished with me, and he slouched from the room, I set to work on his stovies. He’d worked up an appetite with all his exertions.

 

One thing I do know for certain is that the last thing his watery, piggy eyes ever saw was me. I showed no remorse as I sat by his bedside for two days, watching him twist with a flexibility I’d never have guessed of the lazy arsehole. Of course, it wasn’t quite the way I dreamed it, but then nothing in life (or, I suppose, death) ever is. I fantasised for years about violent revenge, long monologues when I had him at my mercy, sinister torments and so on. But I’m nothing if not a conscientious mother. I had to do something less obvious that wouldn’t arouse suspicion, so that I could still be there for my children. Besides, anybody who knew my husband and his habits and his diets would have expected nothing less than eventual liver failure. The mushrooms just sped things up. To be honest, falling foul of a mouthful of fatty meat was probably his ideal way to go. He deserved worse.

Now that both my children have grown up and flown the coop, I have no fear in confessing to the killing. It felt dishonest to enjoy this second wind I’ve found as a food blogger while never discussing my finest dish. It’s time to come clean.

If you intend to follow my lead, make sure to add only as many of the mushrooms as is required for the desired effect. Don’t be tempted to “over season” the dish. You’re aiming for subtlety. You don’t want anything to be easily traced back to you. Just a small amount right at the start. Make sure to mix them in and give them time to cook through the sauce to mask any strange tastes.

 

If you’re still here, then I thank you for listening to what I have to say. It’s an experience I knew very rarely in my time as a married woman, and I take it to heart when my words are met with genuine attention.

I think the real test will be to see how long it is before someone comes knocking at my door. Then we’ll know who actually reads these blogs. I almost hope to get arrested. It’ll be proof that one regular woman’s story didn’t go unacknowledged.

 

And to Josh and Beth: if you read this, or any part of this ever comes to light, I want you to know that your father deserved it, and that you were never to blame. Please don’t take the news too harshly. I would hate for this to ruin stovies for you.

 

For best results, let the stew simmer for a good few hours. Allow it to bubble away by itself and resist the urge to stir the pot unnecessarily. Try and find some good rustic bread or oatcakes to dip in the gravy, when it’s ready. You don’t want a single drop of your hard work to go to waste.

The Strange Sheep of Greshornish

 

Poison is a funny thing. People assume it comes in a black bottle etched with a white skull and crossbones, but they are wrong. Poison comes in less solid, less black and white forms.

 

Some say drink is poison, and they are wrong about that, too. I make sure to pour a little whisky in my Thermos full of coffee every day, and honestly, I am indebted to the stuff. It has got me through many a damp day manning the tourist information booth at the Fairy Pools car park.

 

The tourists have so many questions. It helps to have a little inner glow to get me through a shift without drowning one of them in a rock pool.

 

Where are the Fairy Pools? (right in front of you, moron, walk a mile)

 

Will it stop raining today? (no)

 

Is there anywhere to buy food that isn’t chips? (no)

 

Are there real Fairies here? Can I see one?

 

These people are inevitably children, American, and/or have watched too much ‘Outlander’. When it comes to magic, I say, maybe it’s better not to look too closely. You can’t put a microscope to a fairy.

 

Still, not everyone wants to take life lessons from a drunk woman in a plastic kiosk.

 

Fair enough.

 

I get many predictable questions every day here, but my least favourite one is always asked after a disappointing trudge to the pools with five-thousand other disillusioned day-trippers.

 

Where is the best wild place to go on the island? For the real island experience?

 

The question is rarely accompanied by a smile, or any consideration for me. It is my land after all. My reality.

 

But, I don’t mind. Not really.

 

I suppose I even understand.

 

I can’t even hate them anymore. By the time the tourists come to my carpark, depressing reality has hit, hard. They have often driven for hours before they cross the bridge, or travelled on a toddler ridden vomit-stinking car ferry, and flown oceans, and driven north for hours, only to land here, in this tarmac wasteland. The island is not what they expected, back when they were booking their trip in Texas or Mumbai or Croydon. Where are the tartan clad chieftains, the handsome maidens in a fairy glen, the native forest, the mist, and monsters?  It’s all 1970’s bungalows and white-sliced-bread, sheep farming and Nescafe. I see their nausea and disappointment. Aren’t the Fairy Pools supposed to be shimmering crystal depths of aquamarine ice? Why do I have to pay for a car park? The public toilet is blocked.

 

The farming shocks people, too. The extent of it. The industry of it, on an island they were hoping to be full of hobgoblins and bagpipes.

 

Some days I even feel it myself, the pall of tractors and corrugated barns, the stink of diesel, the oily slick of traffic jams and tourism.

 

Still, it’s all quite functional, at its core. Although I appreciate not everyone loves function. They want enchantment.

 

Once Skye had many Gods, and all the monsters you could dream of – as well as Selkies and fairies that fluttered about in the full-moon, flitting between myth, devilry, and human form. But Skye only has two monsters now – farming, and tourism – and so, visitors are disappointed.

 

And to be fair, the tourists often disappoint me, too.

 

The bad ones, anyway. The ones I see throwing their Costa Coffee cups in the Fairy Pools as they take a naked dip with only a selfie stick and 50,000 of their closest Followers for company. These are the same ones that picnic on the ground and abandon their trash, their fag ends, vape pens and used condoms. They ‘wild camp’ in the grass, with disposable aluminium barbeques, burn holes in the moss and heather, scorch the peat, start wild-fires.

 

Shut the gates and bury your excrement, I want to say. And please, don’t shit directly on a fairy mound.

 

The good tourists take only memories, and leave only footprints.

 

And when the good tourists turn up, with a smile and a bin-bag to collect litter along the way,

I send them merrily on their way, with a map to my favourite walks, to the sea stacks, or the black sands where the golden eagles nest.

 

When it comes to the bad tourists, the ones who chuck Coke cans out their car window or drop steel-canisters of nitrous oxide in the carpark, I can be less kind.  I like to send them on an alternative type of adventure. My hope is they will find themselves.

 

These days, when the bad sort come whinging to me for advice – Where’s the real Skye? – I answer them as honestly as I can.

 

You have to drive north, I say. Far north. To the tiny peninsula of Greshornish.

 

In Greshornish, the true spirit and soul of Skye will enter you. The place has something unique that never leaves you. But remember, I say, the wee folk are not all of the happy-go-lucky Seelie Court. Some of them are mischievous – so behave – I say, I smile. I warn. I offer them the option. No one can say I don’t do my tourist guidance job well. Then I drink from my Thermos until I feel myself shimmer, and we all go on our way.

 

I live in hope. I’m positive, cheery even, and on the good days I don’t need to hand out a single map of Greshornish.

 

On the bad days, I leave it to the island. The island has its ways. You just have to pay attention to how a place feels, and react accordingly.

 

For example, it still feels isolated in Greshornish, because it is. There is less modern life there, less hurly-burly, and zero farming. Sheep have never been grazed on the peninsula, because it was said the fairies will enchant them and make them run around in circles until they die.

 

The tourists often laugh at this, raise an eyebrow, but you can’t ask a local who lives among the fairy folk to tell you a fairy tale, without expecting a little darkness and a few possessed zombie farm animals. Especially when it is 3pm and I am coming to the end of my Thermos.

 

No, believe me, it’s true, I tell the tourists, as they start checking their phone signals and Googling up Wikipedia, asking Siri to prove me wrong.

 

The fact is, it is all true. In the mid 1800’s the new owner of the Greshornish estate didn’t believe in the fairies either, and decided to scientifically investigate the mystery of the mad, dead sheep.

 

He sent his people to gather up local flowers and weeds and whole sacks of fauna, to have the plants tested by experts in Edinburgh, for poison.

 

Naturally, they found nothing. The plants and grasses all came back proven innocent, and entirely devoid of magic.

 

As if poison is that easy to find. As if it is stupid enough to glow pink in a test tube, or throb under a microscope.

 

Vindicated, the landowner put out fifty sheep to graze.

 

Within a month they ran around in circles. In another month, they were all dead.

 

Magic said the locals.

 

Fairies.

 

Anyway. Greshornish is a magical spot, I tell the tourists. You have to see it to believe it; the wet grass is thick with dew and lush with moon and the gorse is butter yellow and smells like fried pineapples. Everything is a little flusher and a little plusher there, and as for fairies – well. You will have to decide for yourself.

 

You should go. Look, but don’t touch.

 

The tourists drive off there at a thousand miles per hour, hoping to find a unicorn.

 

They don’t need to hear the rest of the Landowners life story. Many years after his sheep all died, and died again – he employed a new botanist to take a second look at all the plants he suspected to be poisonous – and the new botanist found them to be covered with tiny snails. Perhaps the snails were the mystery toxic element?

 

Again, this turned out not to be so.

 

A decade passed.

 

The Landowner attempted – again and again – to graze new flocks of sheep at Greshornish, with the same maddening, deadly result. Eventually, tired, furious, bitter, and broke, the elderly Landowner took a dead sheep and some snail covered plants to an even more eminent scientist, to crack the mystery of the mad sheep, before he died.

 

The eminent scientist discovered microscopic creatures living within the tiny snail shells. Parasites. These same monstrous tiny critters were soon found living inside the autopsied brains of the sheep.

 

It turned out, merely lollygagging among the fields of Greshornish was enough to turn the brains of the sheep. Take care – warned the scientist, the brains of humans may be susceptible too.

 

But only if those humans were stupid. Stupid enough to linger, and to scrabble around like animals in the long grass, lighting up a barbeque on the ground, say, or ‘wild’ camping on endangered flower meadows, or shitting on a grassy hillock, drunk swimming and drinking from the deep snail filled waters.

 

But, as I say, I don’t like to ramble on. Giving them the full story would only ruin the tourists’ days. They want to experience the real Skye after all, with all our real fairies and real monsters. I try to give them what I can. I like to smile, and let them have their magic. As far as I am concerned, they can go to Greshornish and tread lightly, or they can go to Greshornish and swim and trash and hump and sleep wild, and then go home to Texas, and Mumbai, and Croydon, to walk around in circles forever, until they die.