Monster Rowie/Roll/Butterie

Quote: THE ABERDEEN ROWIE

Legend has it that the Aberdeen rowie, roll or butterie came into being when a local fisherman, scunnered with living off hard ship's biscuit on long forays into the North Sea fish, met up with his friendly local baker.

'Fit wey can ye no mak a better rowie for takkin on the boatie?' asks the fisherman.
'Nae bother ava,' says the baker. 'Jist gie me a few days, an I'll hae something for ye.'

So the baker starts off with a lump from his daily bread dough. To make a keeping-rowie, he knows he must add fat. The most readily available is meat dripping from the butcher, it's also the least likely to toughen the rowie. He mixes the dripping with some dough to make it more pliable, rolls out some plain bread dough and covers it with the fatty-dripping dough. Folds it, rolls it, kneads it and then cuts it up into misshapen mounds which he flattens into the same large thin round shape as his normal softies.

His fisherman friend is delighted. And so, too, are the people of the town, who have sampled the new fisherman's rowie. The news of this crisp, crunchy rowie, with its faintly burnt saltiness, spreads. It's soon being made by every baker on the East coast from Caithness to Edinburgh. Its endearing homely shape and good taste, ensures its success. It may have none of the stylish pretensions of a French croissant, but for the people of Aberdeen it has become the favoured roll.

The first recorded literary mention of a butterie (in the Scottish National Dictionary) is of a street-seller in Arbroath in 1899: 'Between butteries, Rob Roy's [a kind of Bath Bun], an' turnovers, her basket was weel filled.' But the name of the baker who first took up the fisherman's challenge remains a mystery. No written evidence has yet been found and my search among the elders of Aberdeen's baking fraternity to find the first butterie baker has drawn a complete blank.

The important thing, however, is that they survive, despite attacks by healthy-eating propagandists on foods with a fatty overload. Aberdonians, and all those who face a chilling blast, need sustaining inner fuel. Butteries fulfil that practical purpose.

Though they are known in Aberdeen as rowies, or just rolls, outside the city the term butterie has become attached to them. On a rowie crawl around the town one arctic wintry day (total sampling: 16) the textures varied enormously from very crisp to very 'bready', while the taste also varied from quite bland to very salty and well-fired. Chalmers of Brocksburn, just outside Aberdeen, made a wee rowie, about two thirds the normal size, and in some of their branches they sell a double rowie for serious rowie eaters, which is two stuck together with butter.

In rowie technology, the differences between its finished characteristics can vary from one batch to the next coming from the same baker's oven. Some rowie experts claim that baker George Robertson, ten miles south in Stonehaven makes the best-flavoured and textured rowie. Food writers, myself included, have attempted to explain the rowie technology with recipes, but none, myself included, have got it right.

The only way to unravel the correct baker's procedure is to visit in the middle of the night.

At Aitken's bakery in Glenbervie Street the night's production is counted by the thousand - all shaped by hand. David Aitken is the fourth generation on this site among the grey granite tenements in the Torry district of the town. When I arrive at 4.30am it is cold and dark. There are lights shining from an open doorway and a police car is drawing up outside. Not to investigate a crime, but to collect their daily supply of hot-out-the-oven rowies. I make my way through the lighted doorway and into the source of warm, yeasty smells where the bakers are about to begin the last batch of rowies for the night. The dough is lying in a giant mound on the table, waiting to be made into 4,000 rowies. It is Friday night and by morning a total of 27,000 will be shaped by hand for the weekend consumption (through the week the production drops to 18,000).

At their stations round the white mountain of dough on the table are a team of flour-dusted bakers, ready to start carving it up. It has been made from two separate doughs, already mixed: the fatty-dough and the bread-dough. The men start to cut it up.

'Want to have a go?' says one of the young bakers and he pushes a tray towards me. Flouring his hands and lifting one of the soft, sticky lumps of dough, he shows me the knack of using masses of flour which prevents the sticky dough sticking to your hands.

He picks up the piece of dough and throws it onto the floured board. As the soft dough hits the board it spreads out into a misshapen mound. He now spreads it out more thinly. I copy him, pressing the sticky mass out with four outspread floury fingers. Next, he flours the backs of his fingers on his right hand and the fronts of those on his left.

'Yes, I've got that.'

Now he clenches his right hand into a fist and presses the rowie simultaneously with his left outstretched fingers till it is roughly a quarter of an inch thick. It takes a bit of practice, but after the fourth tray I'm beginning to get the hang of it. Now they go off to a hot steamy cupboard beside the ovens where they will prove for about 20 minutes, before going into the oven for another 18 minutes or so.

Some come out darker than others and they are put in a separate pile for customers who like a 'cremated' rowie. Some are so brittle that they break up, so the broken bits are put into paper bags for those who like a 'baggie of bities'.

Over breakfast tea and freshly-out-the-oven rowies, David Aitken tells me that he was waiting for a plane last summer in Majorca when he spied a family with a bag of Aitken's rowies. They had, he discovered, taken a fortnight's supply on holiday. Aberdonians love their rowies.