“It was a cold, wet, inhospitable day and the wild West Highland scenery looked menacing from where we sat inside the warm croft house. As the light began to fade, Alistair lit the paraffin lamp. Maggie brought crisp oatcakes, home-made butter, cheese, jam and soft floury bannocks from a cupboard in the corner of the room while Alistair put the finishing touches - chopped leeks - to the mutton broth which had been simmering over the peat fire.

Now into their seventies, Maggie and Alistair had lived all their lives on this remote croft on the Applecross penisular. As we ate together, it seemed like stepping backwards into the past. But not a deprived past. They were content. Everything had been home made, even the mutton for the broth was from Alistair’s own hardy Blackface sheep which had roamed the heather hills winter and summer.

I made my farewells and left. Driving back along the narrow twisting single track road I made no declaration that I intended to write about these people and the fascinating self-sufficiency of their lifestyle. But I realise now that they were an inspiration - and a benchmark.”

I grew up in a Glasgow tenement and had always been interested in cooking. My mother encouraged me to cook. There were grannies, too, who were always willing to let me mess about in their kitchens. One lived in a Glasgow tenement, but the other was from an East coast fishing village where fish and shellfish - fresh from the boats - arrived daily and we spent summer holidays fishing from sandbanks and rummaging the beach for crabs and whelks. My first catering job (aged 16) was in a Clydeside docker’s canteen where filling crisp Glasgow rolls with fried eggs and bacon began the cooking day.

Later, there were other goals which took me, briefly, into teaching catering and then into more study for a postgraduate research project investigating British Cookery at Strathclyde University’s Scottish Hotel School. For a while, during the 1960s, I also worked as a professional chef in hotels and restaurants, one post taking me to the Loch Torridon Hotel in Wester Ross, which is when I first met up with Alistair and Maggie.

Writing about food in Scotland began when a publisher heard me on a radio programme and wrote a letter saying I sounded so enthusiastic, he was sure I could write a book about Scottish food (this became Scottish Regional Recipes in 1981). Then the same year I met an editor from The Glasgow Herald at a party and she asked me to write for the paper.

More than twenty years on, I still write for The Herald (as it is now known). In between there have been other books - all about food in Scotland - plus several years as the restaurant critic for the Scottish Field. In 1999, I joined Grampian and STV’s Scotland’s Larder, as co-presenter (with Derek Cooper), a series which highlights Scotland’s natural food resources and the people who produce, sell, prepare and cook it, with particular emphasis on traditional foods and artisanal products.

Over the years, I have been fortunate to win three Glenfiddich Food Writing Awards, and in 2001 was the Guild of Food Writers Food Journalist of the Year. I am also a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, as well as a member of Scottish Pen International, the National Union of Journalists and the Society of Authors.

Catherine Brown