Before I ever heard of haggis pakora, I nursed an obsession with the chef Tony Singh, Scotland’s most famous Sikh, who combined the Scottish pudding of sheep’s heart, liver and lungs with the crispy deep-fried fritter from the Indian subcontinent to create a food that is far greater than the sum of its parts.
It started when I saw him cook lobster over an open flame for the actors Sam Heughan and Graham McTavish from “Outlander,” the TV series about a time-traveling nurse and a Scottish hottie.
Sam and Graham were doing a spinoff called “Men in Kilts,” driving around Scotland in a camper van. On the first episode, “Food and Drink,” they caught a net full of sea creatures and brought it to a dockside village in Fife where Chef Tony waited. He wore full kilt and his trademark red turban, called a dastar, sported a thick brogue, and grilled lobster with coriander, garlic and seaweed butter so inviting I wanted to swallow my television.
The Scots have a saying: “Whit’s fur ye’ll no’ go by ye.” So when I spotted the same man in the same red dastar in a social media post standing next to my friend, the chef Ian McColm, who was cooking for my friends and me for a week at the lodge we had rented in the Scottish highlands, well, clearly this was fate!
“Can you get him to come cook for us one night?” I texted Ian.
And so there we were, on a rare sunny midsummer Sunday evening at Stucktaymore, our vacation rental in the central highlands, living out what my friend Conley aptly described as my ultimate fantasy: There was the gorgeous 200-year-old former hunting lodge with 13 bedrooms on the northern shores of Loch Tay. There were 27 friends and family members who traveled from Oregon, Los Angeles, New York, Lisbon and Virginia to fish, eat, drink whisky, read murder mysteries, hike and stay up late. There was a massive dining table backed by floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the loch. And a celebrity chef coming to cook us a nine-course feast (eight removes!) with wine pairings.
My ultimate fantasy indeed.
Setting the whole thing up had been quite the to-do, as Ian was constantly on the phone with me over refinements demanded by our persnickety chef. The Aga stove in Stucktaymore’s well-stocked kitchen was deemed unfit to handle Chef Tony’s scallops, quail and saddleback (roast pork belly, I discovered) — we must rent extra stoves. Plus, there was no deep fryer for his haggis pakora. And the 125 wineglasses in the Stucktaymore cupboards were nowhere near enough; he needed 216. “He is bringing some pretty good wines to pair with each course,” Ian told me. And from unusual places like Georgia and Lebanon.
“I don’t see why we can’t just use two wineglasses each,” I whined to Ian. “One for red wines, one for white?”
Ian, I now realize, had become a master at quietly absorbing my bellyaching and then steering me in the right direction. Back to the rental place he went to pick up another 100 or so wineglasses.
Every time I thought I’d had enough, I went to my TV and played one of my many Tony Singh videos. There he was on “Great British Menu,” showing how to properly present a seafood platter, with roasted langoustines smothered in chile jam on a three-layer platter crowned with a vintage brass deep-sea dive helmet. Or on the episode where he made the judges pull deep-fried rabbit balls out of a top hat. Or on YouTube with a Punjabi-Salmon cooking video that Europeanized his mom’s salmon-bones recipe for people who don’t like fish on the bone.
“I am from Liberia and have trained my friends to eat fish on the bone!” I told Ian during one of our many phone calls. Chef Tony overruled me — gauging that not all 27 diners would feel the same way. He would make both. (He would be right, as it turned out.)
Speaking of the other diners, they had all been a pain in the heinie. There were pescatarians, weirdos who didn’t eat beef or fish but loved lamb, fish-eaters who wouldn’t touch “sea monsters,” lamb-haters, you name it. I duly sent all of their particulars onward.
At 2:45 in the afternoon on the appointed Sunday, Chef Tony arrived with numerous sheets of scribblings about who couldn’t eat what. He came with Scott Brodowski, his sous-chef, and his two children, Arrti and Balraj, who would be serving and, very importantly, setting the massive table in Stucktaymore’s dining room for 27 people (with all those wineglasses). Ian and his partner, Karen Torlay, were pitching in to help as well.
I heard Chef Tony before I saw him; he was in the kitchen talking to Ian in a Glaswegian dialect I could not understand, though I think I made out “bu’er” (butter). He gave me a big hug (OK, I initiated it) and said (I think) “I’m a hugger, tae.”
Chef Tony wore his red dastar but not the kilt, and took over the Stucktaymore kitchen. The rental stoves were being housed in the adjoining yoga room; one of them promptly blew out a circuit breaker. The Aga did something that had Ian and my brother-in-law Aleks huddling on the floor beside it. Me? I flitted around trying to decide when to change into my outfit for the evening, and eventually everything got sorted.
I had warned my friends to bring their A game for attire, and the women, of course, did not disappoint. Christina, just off the plane from Los Angeles, showered and changed in 12 minutes and presented herself in what looked like a Missoni dress. My lunatic sister, fresh from catching the ugliest pike I ever saw in the loch, appeared wearing an Indian salwar kameez tunic over tartan tights, representing Scottish Sikhs? Tanisha had on a backless lace number so elegant her husband just followed her around the Stucktaymore grounds shooting pictures from behind her.
It was a gorgeous evening weather-wise, so we gathered on the terrace for our canapés of haggis pakora; chorizo and onion pani puri, a small crispy fried dough ball; and Champagne. I was slowly coming around to the yumminess of haggis, as Ian had been making us full Scottish breakfasts, and that haggis pakora was spicy, intensely flavored, deep-fried gold. Pescatarian Laura came dancing over to me in delight when Chef Tony presented her with own special veggie haggis pakora.
Tony’s daughter, Arrti, had made place cards for everyone at the dining table, and after I made some minor changes (people were not allowed to sit next to their partners), we glided into the dining room for our nine-course dinner. Did I mention with wine accompaniments?
At 8:15 p.m. our dinner began.
I noticed many unwise eaters scarfing down our first course of quail roasted with honey and harissa, not pacing themselves. Amateurs. The chilled pinot noir it came with was immensely refreshing.
I knew Chef Tony’s dal for our third course would be good, but it came with tender flaky rabbit on top, accompanied by a big, bold and spicy Georgian wine. Wow.
Four courses in, we got to the Punjabi salmon (Salmon Bones for the Liberians). Every plate got both salmon bones and salmon, in a spicy sauce of garlic, chile, tomatoes and ginger, served with basmati. I sucked all the salmon off those bones like I was home in Monrovia, then went hunting on our friend Richard’s plate but my sis had already swiped his bones. He said he enjoyed his deboned salmon. Sigh.
By the time we got to the roast saddleback, people were waving their white napkins in surrender; we had been eating for three hours. We made it through the next course — of strawberries with cinnamon and black pepper and chocolate mousse — but just barely. I noticed the three teens in our group, who had been sneaking sips of wine all evening, quaffing down the sweet pellegrino passito dessert wine with gusto.
The last two courses were cheeses with oat cakes, paired with fine ruby port, and Tony’s tea cakes, but they simply could not be eaten because it was now midnight and our stomachs were toppling over those tartan tights and busting out of those cocktail dresses, so Chef Tony put them aside for us to eat later in our week at Stucktaymore.
To say this was one of the best dining experiences I ever had will sound like hyperbole, but it was one of the best dining experiences I ever had. And you know what? I’m not mad about the rented wineglasses anymore. We couldn’t be drinking our chenin blancs out of the same glass we drank our pinot noirs! We are not peasants.
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