Eggs Haemoglobin

Eggs modifier always makes a splendid weekend brunch, whichever of the species you happen to choose. Eggs Benedict started it all of course, spawning such hamless variations as Eggs Florentine (spinach), Royal (smoked salmon), Neptune (tuna) and that mass-produced, bastard half-cousin Eggs McMuffin. Whatever you stick between the egg and the toasted muffin, it generally turns out pretty superb.

I decided to try adding my own variation to the canon, and looked to the traditional British fried breakfast to find the ideal filling: black pudding. This was not mere fancy, my family has the stuff in its blood. As a wee boy, my grandfather used to make his pocket money mixing black pudding up in the back of the butcher's shop, stirring the giant cauldren of boiling blood and fat while the butcher tossed in the oats and spices, waiting for the mix to congeal. As childhood memories go, not exactly Cider With Rosie.

I'd planned on buying a full black pudding link, chopping it into big cubes and making a fashionable tower of fried bloody goodness. Unfortunately, I got to Waitrose too late and they only had the wider individual slices of Bury pudding left, languishing in their little plastic packets in the bottom of the chiller cabinet . I soon cheered up when I realised the slices were almost the exact same size as the muffins. Clearly, Eggs Haemoglobin was simply meant to be.



I used super-healthy wholemeal muffins for this dish, and in that vein my hollandaise sauce also needs particular mention: while one ideally wants the blood pudding congealed, this is not true of the blood pumping through one's arteries. Silky and decadently rich as real hollandaise may be, it is nevertheless an emulsion of eggs and clarified butter and so about as healthy as smoking a carton of filterless Gauloises for breakfast. As this was meant to be hangover recovery food, an alternative was necessary.

My version of the hollandaise uses a savoury custard made from virtually fat-free yoghurt, and so the science is completely different to the traditional emulsion of fats: egg yolks are whisked into the yoghurt and then slowly heated together in a bain-marie, allowing the yolks to form a network of proteins which holds the rest of the ingredients together. Lemon juice is added to speed up the formation of the protein strands, while the bain-marie ensures the sauce isn't overheated, cooking it slowly to achieve a thicker and more velvety texture.

I whisked a 500ml pot of plain yoghurt with three egg yolks and the juice from half a lemon, then cooked it in the bain-marie for about twenty minutes. This is a great recipe for the lazy cook as it doesn't need the constant and crucial agitation of a real hollandaise. I took the rubbish out, made some tea and emptied the dishwasher while it was cooking, whisking perhaps every three minutes just to evenly distribute the heat.

The sauce has thickened when it evenly coats the back of a metal spoon, and at this point I added another egg yolk and a big knob of butter, whisking them into the warm sauce to make it richer and more glossy. A teaspoon of dijon mustard and plenty of salt and pepper finished the sauce, which went into the fridge overnight. This is perhaps the most significant difference between a custard hollandaise and the real thing: letting real hollandaise cool down is a disaster, allowing it to split and spoil, which generally means cooking the whole thing laboriously from scratch on the day. Putting my version in the fridge only improved the flavour, taking the bite out of the mustard and softening the taste of salt to let the lemon juice stand out. Better yet, in the morning I only needed to heat it through in a pan and pour.



Hungover, a cup of coffee in one hand, I toasted the muffins, fried the black pudding, poached the eggs and assembled the lot on plates before spooning over the warm sauce. I dropped some cherry tomatoes in the frying pan while things were cooking, letting them blister on the bases and cooking through their juices, which made a refreshing and tasty accompaniment.

This dish is totally recommended. The mustard beautifully matched the earthiness of the black pudding, and while the sauce lacked the silky mouth-feel of a full-fat hollandaise, in the trade-off we got a superbly light sauce with a fabulous lemony bite, and perhaps three years saved on our lifespan.

(I should add that hollandaise sauce can also mask a thousand sins. My eggs poached poorly and came out flat and straggly, but still ended up looking most jolly wrapped up in their little yellow blankets, and of course tasted fabulous to boot).

Vanilla from the rainforests of Glasgow

Did you know that the vanilla pod grows on an orchid? I had no clue until we stumbled into the orchid house at the Glasgow Botanic Gardens and saw them for ourselves. Quite plain things they were, straggly grey pods hidden behind the flamingo-like glories of its sister breeds. Still, they’re the only orchids which have a popular flavour of ice cream named after them so I guess they’ve still doing okay for themselves.

A small yellowing sign explained that vanilla flavouring is mostly produced synthetically from wood pulp these days, which is the last horrifying discovery that will put me off cheap vanilla ice cream forever. What could be more heavenly than a thick mix of cream, sugar and the nectar from an orchid pod? And what could be further removed from that than a tub of commercially produced ice cream - a thick combination of vegetable oils, fatty acid emulsifiers and sugar, whipped up with air, stabilised with seaweed extract and then flavoured with extract of wood pulp?

Seeing vanilla growing fresh in the Botanic Gardens resonated nicely with our lunch at The Ubiquitous Chip, a Glaswegian institution on Ashton Lane where we were seated in a glass-roofed courtyard festooned with tropical plants and vines, and where we were served a splendid starter of scallops with black pudding sauce, all drizzled with a light vanilla oil. I think of vanilla as a sweet and flowery scent, but here it added a rounded earthiness which complemented the delicate scallops perfectly. And what wonderful scallops too: their fat roe sweet, soft and caramelised, the bodies so lightly cooked as to be nicely moist inside, the fishy cousins of a chocolate truffle. I would only have changed the black pudding sauce. Less a sauce and more a streak of cat vomit, it tasted lovely but did nothing for the eye. A nice crispy bit of black pudding might have varied the textures a bit too.



The Ubiquitous Chip has been around since the 1970s and proudly claims to have changed Glaswegian eating habits forever, championing good and local ingredients at a time when processed foods and white carbs were the fashion. Crucially, it also once claimed to be the only restaurant in Scotland not to serve chips, although this is one political stance they have abandoned - as the platters of fish and chips so popular on table 103 demonstrated.

The Chip has also served as a backdrop to my boyfriend’s life: his parents dined here when they were courting, he brought them back to celebrate his graduation, and here we were again for a Bank Holiday lunch to celebrate his new job.

A celebration must mean only one foodstuff: steak. The up-market Argentinian chains may have captured the London market with their romantic tales of gauchos herding steers across the pampas, but in Scotland they still know that the best steaks come from the Angus breeds plodding around the soggy Highlands. My rare Aberdeen angus fillet was seared and peppery on the outside and soft and almost mousse-like inside. Paul took his medium, which came thiner, tougher and flavoured throughout with black pepper. We each preferred our own, which is precisely as it should be.

Pudding was a disappointment. Brown bread ice-cream has been a classic since lucky school boys took one last tea at Gunters before going up to boarding school, but The Chip’s house version, Caledonian oatmeal ice-cream, hit very far wide of the mark. The little crumby nuggets should have been burned and sweet – a sort of poor man’s praline, a decadent surprise cutting through the blandness of the cream – but the oatmeal here was merely bland and chewy, surprising in the same way one might feel upon finding a fly in the jam.

The lemon and rosemary pudding – a tight little ball of sticky sponge rich with egg yolks and sugar – might have saved the day, had it not been for the complete and utter lack of any rosemary in the dish. The best part of pudding thus proved to be a single ginger crisp served on the side, which was so fabulously rich and toasty I would order the entire dessert again just to taste it.



I usually come away from a restaurant determined to try making at least one of the dishes on the menu, but I think in this case I’ll go off piste and try inventing my own oaty ice cream, inspired by The Chip but based on something closer to Gunters. My aim was to create a real, thick and delicious oaty ice cream. Elevated from the bland with some extract of orchid, and as bereft of wood pulp, chewy oatmeal and seaweed extract as anything I’ve ever made.

Mix around two cups of Scottish rolled oats with one cup of brown sugar and a cup of ground almonds, lay them out on a lined baking tray and place under a hot grill until golden. I found they needed a lot of mixing to get them evenly brown.

Once the oats have started to cool, whisk up three eggs whites until stiff and then turn into a glossy meringue by gradually adding half cup of ordinary sugar (I use unrefined and unbleached castor, but you can consult your own conscience). Set aside and whip up a cup and three quarters of double cream, whisk in the egg yolks and a few drops of vanilla extract (not essense or flavouring or anything else bashed out of wood pulp – see above), then fold the cream into the meringue along with the oats.

Place in an ice cream maker and churn ... or if you don’t have an ice cream maker, stick in a tub and freeze until solid. The egg whites do most of the hard work for you but it won’t be quite so nice.

The verdict? Really quite splendid, and so much nuttier and more flavoursome than that of The Ubiquitous Chip.