case studies

Arbroath Smokies

The Arbroath Smokie is a small haddock that has been hot-smoked, but left whole and on the bone. It’s very different from kippers, which are herrings that have been split before smoking, and mackerel, which tend to be filleted before smoking.

The benefits of the hot-smoking process are that it stops the haddock drying out and gives the finished fish a very soft, almost buttery texture.

They can be eaten on their own –they’re delicious warm straight out of the smoker – or used in any recipe that calls for smoked haddock, their more easily available and less sophisticated cousin.

The Arbroath Smokie has always been a great favourite with chefs and food writers due to its combination of intense flavour and magnificent texture. So it’s no surprise that smokies have notched up hearty endorsements from the likes of Gordon Ramsay, Paul Rankin, Gary Rhodes, Nigel Slater and Sue Lawrence.

Like many genuinely traditional products Arbroath Smokies come with a story attached. For a start they should really be called Auchmithie Smokies, as that is the tiny fishing village where they originated in the 1890s. At the end of the 19th Century Auchmithie was a boom town with a population of around 400 people and was home to 38 fishing boats. Eager to share its success, Arbroath Council approached Auchmithie’s three principal fisherfamilies – the Swankeys, the Cargills and the Spinks – and lured them south with promises of new houses in the area of Arbroath known as the Fit o’ the Toon and moorings in a new and improved harbour. The Arbroath smoked fish industry was born.

Today there are a dozen small producers making Arbroath Smokies and thanks to the tireless work of Robert Spink of processor R.R. Spink, who shepherded the certification through, Arbroath Smokies have had official PGI status since 2003. To qualify, the fish have to be processed within five miles of the centre of Arbroath, a distance that (in a nod to the past) includes the tiny village that is Auchmithie.

One of the greatest supporters of the Arbroath Smokie is Robert Spink’s son, Iain. Like his father before him, Iain is a fish smoker by trade and he has gone on to win the BBC Radio Four Food Producer of the Year and also to be named Scottish Champion in UKTV Food’s Local Hero scheme in 2006. Iain R. Spink has put together a roadshow for outdoor events and food markets to give a practical demonstration of how Arbroath Smokies are made. For these demos he smokes haddocks the traditional way, hanging pairs of fish over wooden bars and smoking them in a halved whisky barrel with layers of hessian to retain the smoke, then offers the fish to the public while still hot.

It is somewhat ironic that while one branch of the Brussels bureaucracy was awarding PGI status to the Arbroath Smokie, elsewhere another division was severely limiting the haddock catch via stringent quotas. While fisherman report that stocks of haddock (at least in the North Sea) have never been more plentiful, due to the quotas there is not enough fish being landed to keep pace with demand.

Some fish smokers have been forced to try alternatives and there are murmurings about a “kind of smokietype thing” made using hake. But in taste tests the impostor couldn’t get close to the proper Arbroath Smokie and the project petered out. Iain Spink estimates that 90% of the Arbroath fish trade revolves around haddock, whether it ends up in a fish and chip shop or goes for smokies, which means that the latter will always be at risk from abrupt changes in EU fishery policy.

If you ask Iain Spink whether the PGI that his father fought for is helpful to his business he is generally positive.“I think that it has made a difference, people know that when they buy an Arbroath Smokie it is going to be the genuine article. The PGI is a tool that is there to be used.”

When the first Viking raiders put down roots in Auchmithie during the early part of the 11th Century and brought with them techniques for smoking fish for long sea voyages, they had no idea that centuries later the Arbroath Smokie would have become so highly sought-after – the kind of traditional product that richly deserves its PGI.

w: www.arbroathsmokies.net