Scots cooking (3)

Gugas

Dods Macfarlane has lived in the port of Ness on the Butt of Lewis all his life. For most of the year he sells fresh and salt herring, mackerel, smoked haddock, cod and ling [leng]. Every summer, however, he and nine other men of Ness make a voyage to a remote rock in the Atlantic, Sula Sgeir, some 40 miles north of Lewis, to harvest guga, as part of a legacy that has existed for some four centuries.
     Gugas are young plump gannets [Jan-van-Gent], 2.000 of which are harvested every year. Although they are protected birds, a statutory order inserted into the 1954 Protection of Birds Act allows Nessmen to continue the tradition of hunting them. Once the men arrive on the tiny island they set up camp, then spend 14 days catching the birds, which involves remarkable rock-climbing skills, usually amid the most adverse weather conditions. After being killed, the birds are decapitated, plucked, singed, dewinged and split. They are then salted and piled in a mound (a 'pickling stack') with a wheel formation.

 When the men return home to Ness with their harvest, they are met on the quay by a queue of locals, eager to buy a pair of gugas, which will be desalinated, boiled and eaten with potatoes. It is one of Dods' favourite dishes - the taste often described as neither fish nor fowl, but somewhere between steak and kipper