The Biscuit Cafe, Culross - Restaurants in Culross | s1play.com

Taking the biscuit

Review published on 05/10/2009 © Sunday Herald

A friend tipped me off about the Biscuit Café in Culross: “It’s organic and the food is good,” he said. Fife is a happening place for food these days, what with the runaway success of the Fife Diet, the experiment where over 600 people in the region are eating a diet consisting of 80% local food. Anyone who thinks this sounds boring or limited needs to get up to speed. Under the auspices of the Fife Diet they are even growing quinoa there, the Andean super-grain.

The existence of the Biscuit Café also gave me another reason to reacquaint myself with this Royal Burgh which is surely one of the most atmospheric of our historic villages, thanks in part to the National Trust For Scotland, which has been actively conserving it since the 1930s. The Biscuit Café nestles unobtrusively in the conservatory at the back of Culross Pottery, just a stone’s throw from the Great Lodging, a late 16th-early 17th century house with mustard-yellow facade, crow-step gables and entrancing terraced gardens. Here you find an orchard with heritage apples, mulberry and quince, and where an ancient breed of hen – Scots Dumpies – runs free.

If you had thought that supermarkets introduced us to exotic vegetables and herbs in the 1980s, you’ll stand corrected when you see the diversity that grows here, much of which was cultivated in the 17th century: Asparagus, cavalo nero, Russian kale, artichoke, chard, runner beans, sweet Cecily, even redcurrants and grapes. If this is local food, then bring it on.

When we arrived in the Biscuit Café, all the salad leaves and many of the vegetables served had come from this abundant garden, and we spotted hens belonging to another neighbour pecking away among the trees behind the café, which all helped to create a charmingly rural mood. The food on offer is wisely simple and unpretentious, the choice fairly limited. It offers nothing extraordinary, but what it does have is very sound, making it precisely the sort of place which rounds off nicely a pleasant outing to lovely Culross. It’s perfect for kids too, with lots of healthy but enticing drinks such as organic fruit smoothies in suckable sachets and mini-portions of many things.

We started with a lip-licking sweet potato and coconut soup which was ably spiced and lent backbone by an invigorating chilli kick, accompanied by some decent walnut bread. Then there was venison pie, from John and Nicola Fletcher’s estimable deer farm at Reediehill, near Auchtermuchty. These traditional pies, in the classic Scots pie mould, are best served hot in my opinion, whereas here they were served cold. While this allowed the opportunity to appreciate the fine grain of the meat and its juniper seasoning, it left the crust a little lardy in the mouth. Still, the lettuce leaves from the Great Lodging freshened up the proceedings.

You might think there’s a limit to how good a toasted sandwich can be but those on offer in this café raise the game somewhat. The bread is much better than average (we chose focaccia) and the café has a seriously heavy Italian machine which flattens and crunches up bread most decisively. The fillings are quality too. We went for nippy mature cheddar with thickly cut smoked ham from Puddledub Farm at Auchtertool (a world apart from the usual slippy ham slices that turn up in your average toastie) slathering the hot, tasty sandwich in homemade chutney.

Of course, all of this savoury stuff is just to provide cover for indulging in the cakes which are baked using organic ingredients. These were a delight and it was hard to choose between them. My favourite might have been the moist lemon poppy seed cake, but then again, the cinnamony coconut loaf with fresh berries was a stunner. As a traditionalist, my lunch companion seemed sniffy about the caramel shortcake because it had peanuts in it, but I didn’t hear a cheep out of him once he sunk his teeth into its buttery shortbread base and caramel depths. All this you get to wash down with organic, Fairtrade tea (whole leaf) and good coffee. But then the Biscuit Café is a pitstop of a very superior sort.