It was a while before I realised that other children didn't do what we did at the seaside. They went windsurfing or on donkey rides, or spent their pocket money at funfairs. But my family went looking for food: my snapshot memories of those summers are all hunter-gatherer scenes: my brother sliding down cliffs to snatch gulls' eggs, Dad wrestling with the ancient outboard as our tiny lobster-potting boat drifted further out to sea, my little sister busy on the beach stuffing a jelly-fish in her mouth. Well, she liked jelly.
Tiree, the Hebridean island where my four brothers and sisters and I spent most of our summer holidays, is thus the only place where I know I'd never starve. I know how to eat everything you can gather on its rocky coast and bone-white beaches: razor shells, cockles, mussels, whelks, carrageen seaweed, winkles, crabs (velvet and red), conger eel, mackerel. This lore was passed on by my mother who had spent many of her childhood holidays on the same beaches, as had her mother before.
We were proud of living off the island - I was Mowgli, living wild, except my jungle had no trees, just an expanse of wind, sky and water with a trace of low green land squeezed between them. Tiree doesn't look promising if you arrive on the ferry on a day when the rain clouds are crowding in from the west. But one of the island's many Gaelic names is 'Land of Plenty'. Another is 'Land Below the Waves'.
Off the land there were mushrooms, snails in the dry-stone walls, watercress in the ditches, rock pigeon and hare - my brother had a lurcher dog called Jess. She would run down hares on the grassy dune-land and then sit looking innocent by the dead animal until we came and picked it up. The island's one butcher's shop sold - and still sells - the world's greatest cuts of lamb, sweet and tender from a life spent grazing the Hebridean clover. In season, you can buy the exquisite little new potatoes that the crofters grow in the island's sandy soil. There is a Co-op, for essentials - how we mocked the holidaymakers who we found buying fish fingers. Ridiculous, with all that food sitting out there.
It must sound a bit like boot camp. It's true that we spent most of the daylight hours working for our stomachs - looking for food, working out ways of catching food, helping get the food ready. But it was adventure and luxury. My mother told us that we could eat the most expensive, delicious food in the world here - for free! Which would obviously make it taste better. This made an impression. 'Do you know how much French people pay for six snails? A month's pocket money!' my older sister and I would brag. We ate them for nothing, as many as we liked. The skittering velvet crabs, so numerous they were a pest in the lobster pots, were a delicacy in Spain. Sometimes planes would land on the island, buy a load from the fishermen, and fly them to Madrid. And lobsters: 'Millionaires eat lobsters!' But, my mother said, we ate better lobsters than millionaires - because ours were fresh from the Scottish sea.
She was right. I can't to this day eat a lobster happily in a city restaurant - unless, perhaps, someone else is paying for it. Nowadays most are imported semi-frozen from the other side of the Atlantic. Rubbery, empty of flavour, they just don't taste anything like those royal blue monsters fresh from the lobster pots in the Sound of Gunna. Eating a lobster was childhood's best treat - an epic event. By the time we'd finished sucking the sweet watery contents from the antennae and all of the eight legs, the family had been at the table for two hours. One of my sisters gave a horrified account of her first restaurant lobster - bought by a boyfriend somewhere smart in London. 'It cost £20 and that was just for the tail and claws. They didn't even give me the head! I asked for them to bring it back from the kitchen and they said they'd thrown it away.'
In the sea around the island we would potter with Dad in a tiny boat on the days - often rare, even in summer - when the waves had no white caps and Mull's blue mountains showed clear, 15 miles away across the water. We'd fish for lobster-pot bait with feathered hooks and sometimes hit a shoal of mackerel, their sharp tugs on the handline thrilling compared to the duller pull of the tasteless saithe (coley) we caught for the pots. If you hit the mackerel, you could find yourself pulling up six on a line at a time - we would shout with excitement. Fresh mackerel are a feast - utterly different from the dull and flabby things in the supermarket. These were muscular daggers, petrol blue and dashed with iridescent rainbow, when we pulled them, fighting, into the boat. We'd fry them as soon as we got home in butter and oatmeal and eat them on toast. The flesh was so firm your teeth seemed to creak when you bit into it: my mouth waters thinking about them.
Almost every outing - picnic, swimming trip or exploration - was a hunter-gathering adventure. On rainy days, we'd go to the ferry pier on Gott Bay. Here, while the younger children dangled worms on hooks to catch the tiny fish that swarmed around the piles, my oldest sister and I would climb down a rusty ladder to balance on a crossbeam just above the waves. There you could wrestle clusters of huge mussels off the girders, and then scramble back up, the heavy buckets slipping from our hands.
Mussels were a hassle: the excitement of collecting them was followed by the long chore of chipping away the barnacles, your cold hands stinging with tiny cuts, until they were ready for my mother's sumptuous moules marinières. (Later, my brother invented a brilliant system - steam them open, pull them from their shells, rinse and sieve - no need for the cleaning. But that way you don't get the fabulous pile of gleaming midnight-blue shells, stacked over the broth of wine and cream.) These mussels tasted like no others. They grew so big and juicy on the ferry pier, it was said, because nearby was the exit point of the little town of Scarinish's sewage pipe. So my mother would always have the first plate of mussels of the holidays: 'Just to test them - it's better if I die of food poisoning than if everyone does.' But we children always suspected this wasn't so much martyrdom as plain greed.
Picnics for the seven of us were a major logistical operation. As every parent knows, a picnic takes 15 minutes' preparation per participant. That's only just enough time to round up the gear and the children, find fleeces and macs and wellingtons, and get everyone into the car. We had to pile all the food-finding gear in as well. Cockle rakes, shrimp nets, buckets. An old saucepan, some newspapers to light a driftwood fire, and a shelf from the oven to act as a grill. The only food really necessary was bread, butter, perhaps a container of salad. And, crucially, salt and a jar of Hellmann's mayonnaise.
Our picnics also had to be timed by the tides. Ideally we'd get to the beach - not very hard, since it is difficult on Tiree to get out of sight of the sea - just as the water was approaching its lowest. This exposes the greatest playground on the planet - seaweed gardens, rock pools with whole societies of sea animals, swathes of sand to build castles in before the tide returns. And of course, the low tide exposes food.
There's no shortage of this. Most Scottish rock pools are full of winkles, their round olive-green or brown shells as easy to pick as daisies on a lawn. Between the rocks we pushed our shrimping nets, scooping up tiny baby flounders and the translucent shrimps, sometimes as long as a child's finger. Boiled they went pink, with a fine grainy texture and salty taste quite unlike prawns - but not hugely interesting. So we melted butter and a little garlic and parsley and potted them. After a few hours in the fridge, you can spread them on toast.
Just as the tide restarts its invasion of the beach is the best time to catch the cockles that lurk under the sand. If you were lucky you could feel their hardness in the wet sand with your bare toes and pounce on them before they burrowed deeper. If we found one, that meant there would be more: we would jump up and down across the sand - somebody once said that this brought the cockles to the surface, and though this was never truly proven, a mass jumping session became part of the ritual. Then we'd dig a trench across the likely area with a garden fork, the children diving into the holes to grab the ridged double-shells. We kept an eye open for strangers. The spots on the beaches where cockles lurk are rare and move mysteriously. So if a group of tourists wandered past we'd stop pogoing on the tide line and pretend to be digging sandcastles so that they would not learn the secret location of our cocklemine. They must have thought we were completely bonkers.
Picking winkles is much easier: put to work, a team of toddlers can get half a bucket in a few minutes, and they cook just as quickly. At my ideal picnic, in a cove under Tiree's sole mildly impressive hill, Ceann a'Mhara, others have already gathered driftwood and lit the fire while the beach crew has gathered the shellfish. The bread is buttered. The saucepan has a couple of inches of seawater in the bottom of it, simmering, so we can pour the winkles straight from the bucket. (This bit can be painful - winkles are strangely charming and it is not easy boiling a mollusc your child has just given a name to.) But after a couple of minutes they are ready. There is no explaining to people who don't know them the peculiar pleasure of winkles - a subtle, bitter-nutty flavour and a fascinating rubber band texture. Last summer, with great ceremony, I prised one from a shell with a genuine winkle-picker - a safety pin - for my four-year-old son's induction to the Joy of Winkles. He looked at it and screamed, predictably, 'bogey!' Children don't know how lucky they are.
I think they are much more interesting than snails. Eat them on bread or oatcakes - the only thing to drink with them is thick Scottish tea or malt whisky. So obviously addictive are winkles, when you get started, that my brother once planned a business freeze-drying them to sell next to the pork scratchings in pubs.
The only British chefs that I know of who can find time for winkles are Rick Stein, who puts them in his Padstow fruits de mer, and of course Fergus and Margot Henderson, the proprietors of London's St John restaurant, prophets of the real-food movement. Fergus picked his first winkles on Tiree, too.
We spent more time and more thought on lobster-potting than anything else. My parents had learnt the tricks of the trade from Donald Kennedy, who was the island's postmaster and a friend from my mother's childhood. It was according to his precise instructions that we laid our three pots. The bait was the coley we'd caught on those fishing expeditions, left to lie in a barrel for a day or two until it had started to stink - getting the bait from the barrel was my least favourite job. In our little boat we'd steer among the rocks until the perfect spot was found; not too shallow, not too deep, just on the edge of the sea-tangle. Then we'd drop the pot, pay out its rope, make sure it was set so the high tide wouldn't carry it out to sea.
A day later we'd go to lift the pots. Leaning over the side of the boat, you'd watch intently as the shapes coalesced while the pot came up from the darkness. Was something there? Was it seaweed? A crab? Several crabs? Or, and as the pot surfaced, water dripping, there could be a furious blue shape, trimmed with gold, claws up ready to fight - a lobster!
It was rare to see a pot come up with nothing. And everything could be eaten - even the giant whelks that sometimes swarm a pot disgustingly could be boiled for hours (and still keep the texture of car tyres). Conger eels, some as long as my father's leg, were hard to deal with but good to eat - we tried to smoke them by sticking them up the chimney and burning pine driftwood underneath. The crabs, in good years, were so numerous, you would throw back all but the bestlooking ones.
Tiree is a harsh and beautiful place. Though the beaches are glorious, it's not Scotland as advertised: there are no beautiful lochs and Tiree boasts probably the least impressive ben in the whole of the country. But as a kindergarten for a foodie, there was nowhere else.
Snails with wine and garlic
serves 6
approx 72 snails
1 bay leaf
1/2 bottle white wine
knob of butter
ground pepper
1 clove garlic crushed
1 tsp cayenne pepper
Clean snails until the water runs clear, put them in a saucepan and cover with cold water. Add freshly ground pepper, the bay leaf, a splash of wine, and the butter. Put the pan on to boil and a scummy foam will develop, when this has completely covered the surface the snails are fully cooked. Drain and eat warm or chill and eat cold. Alternatively add a crushed garlic clove before cooking, or skim the foam off the liquor and leave the snails to marinade overnight with a teaspoon of cayenne pepper (drain before serving).
Where to eat great seafood ... by the sea
Tides Café
6 The Digey, St Ives, Cornwall
(01736 799600)
Down a side street - away from the mad hustle of peak-season St Ives - this charming eatery offers wonderfully informal lunches on its mosaic tables, surrounded by local art. In the evening (dinner £25), St Ives Bay mackerel are popular simply grilled with herb salad. It's no surprise that the owners come from London; this is every urbanite's dream.
Wheelers Oyster Bar
8 High Street, Whitstable, Kent
(01227 273311)
This tiny 'oyster parlour' has three tables and seafood bar that seats only four. If you can't get in, take a lobster or seafood tart home. If you can, bring your own wine (there's no corkage).
Oyster Shack
Stakes Hill, Bigbury, Devon
(01548 810876)
This former oyster farm next to the tidal road floods twice a day. Don't worry though - the rustic charm of the place is not about to be swept aside. Alfresco lunches may well be extended to dinners, the evenings warmed by heaters and your own wine supplemented by a short in-house list. Otherwise it's plain home cooking as usual with locally sourced fish.
The Company Shed
129 Coast Road, West Mersea, Essex
(01206 382700)
About twice a month the coast road floods and the tide comes up to the door of this wooden shed, which doubles as fishmonger and impromptu lunch venue looking out over the fishing boats and pleasure cruisers. You can't book and it's always full - perhaps because a typical platter of whole crab, smoked salmon, smoked mackerel, cockles, prawns and mussels costs just £8.You bring the wine and the bread and butter. Simplicity? This is it.
Creelers
Home Farm, nr Brodick, Isle of Arran
(01770 302797)
Visitors to Edinburgh will know the name Creelers from a sibling restaurant on Hunter Square, but this is the James family's first smokehouse and bistro, set in the old byre of Castle Brodick's farm. Just 50 yards from the sea, the place has a jolly atmosphere, with lots of families tucking into enormous seafood platters.
The Anchorage
Harbour Street, Tarbert, Argyll
(01880 820881)
This harbourside restaurant is a favourite with yachties and locals. Most of the seafood comes from Loch Fyne. Langoustines and lobster are summer treats. Try the famously rich Orkney ice cream.
Sue Webster
