Arbroath smokies recipes (2024)

Doing my family genealogy a couple of winters back, I traced the Scottish side as far back as the 18th century to Arbroath, home of the smokie. A few miles north of Dundee, this fishing village reeks of oak and smoke as the locals artisanally hot-smoke the haddock. It’s one of the protected foods (PGI) of Britain.

I visited Alex Spink’s smokery at 7am while they were building the fire to smoke the cured haddock. The fish are paired and tied with hemp twine and hung over a wooden lathe or ‘kiln stick’. Hempcontains oil so the string doesn’t burn, is difficult to get hold of nowadays but the area was a flax spinning centre in the 19th century. The phrase ‘done to a turn’ derives from the half hour that it takes for the haddock to turn a golden brown. The lathes are then lifted out and switched around to smoke the other side.

Unfortunately most of the haddock are now caught in Norwegian waters: the British ones aren’t big enough.

Gary, the head smoker at Alex Spink, does this every morning. He also smokes and colours haddock filets, hanging them to cold smoke in a dark cupboard – they look like delicate but yellowing handkerchiefs hanging up on a line. They also hot-smoke salmon, but it’s nothing like the bland stuff you buy in supermarkets, rather it is a mahogany-hued deeply oaked piece of ‘red fish’.

Most of the fishing families are called Spink (Scots for ‘active or agile’), Cargill or Smith and even today you will see several smokie establishments called Spink. Everyone is related but sometimes, suggested a laughing tradesman, the families are rivals ‘they all can’t stand each other’.

The women would wear red striped skirts and blue flowery blouses and according to one 18th century cobbler, had bigger feet than the men. Before the development of harbours, these doughty wives would carry their menfolk on their backs to and from their boats in the sea, skirts kilted up, so that the men’s feet remained dry. The fishwives were responsible for selling the fish, they had long rounds inland and up the coast. A fisherman would never marry outside their community: he needed the skills of a woman brought up to the life.

Speaking to a local woman she remembered from her childhood that ‘the fisherfolk didn’t mix with anyone else: they had their own culture and ways’.