Butteries

With Spotify playlist & Rhynie Butter Biscuits by Colin Herd, and Onshore Breeze by Claire Reynolds. Bonus BTS content from the day!

The Great Buttery Adventure, Aberdeen

This week’s Spotify Playlist by DJ Seagull is exclusively North East folk songs, as Colin got back to his roots.

Rhynie Butter Biscuits by Colin Herd

At the beginning of this week’s episode we talk a bit about the Rhynie Butter Biscuit, from Sinclairs of Rhynie, which along with the Buttery was the main pull up to Aberdeen to record this side dish. Somehow we don’t end up really talking about them in the main part of the show, distracted by our all consuming engorgement of enough butteries to pave a driveway.

Rhynies, as they’re known in my family, have a kind of cult status, somewhere between an obsession, a genuine fondness and a joke. At some point - I don’t exactly know when - my grandad, who lived in Aberdeen, had brought us some of these crisp, flaky, buttery biscuits. I must have voiced a particular appreciation for them, and I can well imagine me doing so, because I’m always keen to fall in love with a new thing, a new treat, a new place, a new hobby. I think I sensed his wanting me to love them, and I must have more than fallen into line. As a child - and I think I’m still like this a little - I was hungry for something to bond with people over, a kind of in-joke. The weird thing is it is and was a kind of deflection. You talk about your shared love of butter biscuits in a suit and tie to avoid talking about anything else. My enthusiasm for the biscuits gave us the opportunity of a little ritual, the sort of ritual that he loved to play out, and I learned to love too. 

I’ve already mentioned Redoxin on the podcast, his ritual of preparing the fizzy orange drink every morning which was perplexing and fun in equal measure to us kids whenever we would visit. Some more examples: he always cut apples into what he called apple pennies, little meticulous disks. Eschewing the wedge or the cube, invariably apple was served in these little spheres that I’ve never really managed to recreate myself. When he went to a restaurant - they went out for lunch every day in their later years - he would go armed with a miniature bottle of lemon juice to squeeze over his fish. Whenever you were eating a meal together he would cut some food off his plate and leave it on his side plate, saying with a glint in his eye that he was “just leaving that there in case a little hand pops out for it”. At Christmas, he’d somehow manage to sneak out unnoticed while we were all eating, get round to the front door, leave a bag of presents for us kids, ring the doorbell and get back to the table before we even realised he’d got up.

Rhynie itself is 30 miles north of Aberdeen and is kind of a byword for requiring effort, as you’ll gather if you listen to the John Strachan song on this week’s Spotify playlist. It’s a “cauld clay hole”, where the farm work was bruising and didn’t pay much. It’s a place that “doesn’t suit a lowland loon”. The point of these biscuits in a way was that they were the reward of travelling miles to buy them, the payoff for an element of toil. 

For years, every time I’d visit my grandad or he’d visit me, he’d go out days before to stock up on the biscuits and score me a couple of packs. I came to adore them, getting withdrawal when they ran out which was usually about 2 days after I saw him. I’m going to try to describe a Rhynie. It’s flat. Big for a biscuit, like it’s spread. It’s thin. They’re pretty much but not totally uniform in the packet. They’re not rich or buttery enough to be a shortbread, but they’re too buttery to be a cracker or water biscuit. They have a passing resemblance to a Bath Oliver. They have fork marks on the top, which is their only decoration. They’re austere, in a way, nowhere near as decadent or sweet as an Abernethy which is their nearest mass market sister. They’re not sweet at all in fact. They’re buttery but salty. Not as buttery or salty as a buttery though. They crumble - and often one in a pack will be broken. A perfect pack of butter biscuits must have been transported by a psychopath, someone who transports their groceries home on a tray. There were bargain piles of particularly crushed ones in the shop we bought them. I know it’s almost unbearably pretentious of me to say that I feel like this fragility only adds to their appeal, like a food version of kintsugi, or “golden joinery”, the art of repairing kiln-damaged pottery into even more prized objects, their damage adding to their appeal. 

You could eat them with cheese but I always prefer them on their own. Biting into a butter biscuit, as Claire and I did in the car after stopping off to buy some packs, chalks the mouth up a little. They literally stop you blethering on because they soak up all the saliva in your gob until you can re-lube with tea. Of course, I’m sure my love of them doesn’t have all that much to do with the biscuit itself, although I have to say anyone who doesn’t appreciate their tender crumb is in my book lacking in critical tastebuds. 

When I passed my driving test at the first attempt aged 17 - I add in my age and first time because my driving instructor told me the night before that I had no chance of passing - I started to drive up every month or so to visit my grandparents. To reduce the journey for me, and to avoid me driving through the Aberdeen traffic, we’d meet in Stonehaven, where Claire and I also went after the butterodyssey. After a while, without being able to pinpoint exactly when, I was seasoned enough on the roads to make it into the granite city and drive to their house. I’d then drive us out for a meal at one of their regular places, invariably for mince and mealie for me, and fish of course for my grandad. My grandparents were both quite Aberdonian and I remember once my gran instructing me quite sternly while I drove up Anderson Drive that it was about time I got my “winker oot”, to let the other road users know I planned on turning soon, which expression baffled and amused 17 year old me. For these excursions, by the way, we’d all get dressed up. I remember my first boyfriend almost pissing himself that I’d put on a suit to visit my grandparents. 

These drives posed a dilemma because my grandad never in his life wore a seatbelt, to which he objected vehemently. I think this was partly due to a stubborn belief in not being told what to do, and also a fear of being stuck. When he was behind the wheel he absolutely refused to belt up. But when I was driving, he felt that not strapping in incriminated both of us, because it was the driver’s responsibility to ensure all passengers were strapped in. I’m not sure if this checks with the Highway Code but it seems credible enough. His solution to this dilemma was to pull the strap over his body and hold it near the clip while I drove, meaning that any passing bobbies would see what looked like an obedient citizen. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them - or me. 

When Claire rang the bakery about us coming to buy some butter biscuits, they seemed surprised we’d drive up from Glasgow for them. If I’d been on the line I of course might have suggested they lessen the burden and meet us in Stonehaven, just to cement their sense of me as a lowland loon. They obviously didn’t know my ability to mystify and elevate the ordinary - when it comes to food - into something to obsess over, a trait which my grandfather had so diligently passed on. I think they were being a bit coy though. You can order them online, through Sinclairs, something I know empirically, but I believe Rhynies have something of a local cult status, and people make that 30 mile journey to travel for them. Admittedly that loyal fan base consists of one fewer customer in the last fifteen or so years.

• Some Rhynie out-takes that didn't make their way into the podcast

• The Buttery-Soup-Dunk

Onshore Breeze by Claire Reynolds

It’ll be a bright and hot thirty degrees in the city, with a constant onshore breeze keeping it a little cooler on the coast, making it feel more like twenty-five.

I walk from city to coast, they’re on top of one another and I really don’t feel a difference until I’m planted on the sand. There the breeze comes off the sea and dries the sweat on my torso when I take my top off.  The sky here is as cloudless as it was in town, and I think about how I had always associated wind with cloud. I apply a little more sunscreen. 

          The sand sicks to me; it’ll be an unwelcome exfoliator on sun-kissed skin in the shower later. Fragments of crustacean and bones and detritus will wash down the drain and back out to sea. 

          I lie and think about the song he wrote for me. It’s too cheesy he says. Can’t play it for anyone else, but sometimes he plays it for me. We’ve had a bad week, and I know he likes the way my skin smells when it’s been in the sun, he says it’s like a buttery even though I don’t come from here. 

          The main beach is becoming crowded, my quiet beach is now being claimed by others. One family unfurls their children from their car and carry as much furniture from their vehicle as I have in my whole apartment. The mother’s t-shirt declares she’s a feminist. Empowered Women Empower Women. She’s instructing her husband on how to carry their copious bags, and when he puts them down I worry it will attract seagulls, so I think about moving a little further away, then I worry about offending them. 

          The seagulls don’t stand a chance against the children, two boys and a girl. They’re tearing through clingfilm and foil to get at the sandwiches before the dad has even set up their tent. These tents are quite common now. Families buy them with no realisation how difficult they are to assemble on a gusty beach. The mother looks at me, holding her hand to her eyes to block the sun. Has a really good look at me. The look says interloper. Like I’m the one who just pitched a tent on her land. 

          I stand and put my t-shirt on. It sticks to my shoulders and feels clammy on my chest. I shake the sand from my towel, feeling like I need to do something because I’m being observed. The split second before I do it, I realise the onshore breeze will carry the sand straight to her. She sees what I’m doing and turns just before it strikes, shouts Jesus Christ! and all of her family turn towards me. It’s like I’ve struck her, and they all huddle together for a moment, then they laugh. 

          I’m glad I’m wearing sunglasses.