Shackleton's scotch

Ah, the delights of camping food. Modern camping food tends to be the sort of thing that, as a lad I thought astronauts, or people from the future, ate all the time. Freeze dried and packed with artificial flavour and artificial colouring, it is instead actually the sort of food that kids with ADHD eat all the time, hence the ADHD.

You see it in camping shops, on the same shelves as the wee stoves, one size up from the ones that Outdoors Barbie uses. Foil packets of bricks and powder, all with unconvincing pictures of, to be fair, pretty horrible looking food on the front that is supposed to be the final result of your efforts, which consist of dumping the contents of a foil pouch in hot water and stirring relentlessly until your spoon bends with the resistance of the gunk in the pot.

What these meals have in common; chicken curry flavour, stew flavour, chilli con carne flavour, slurry flavour and so on is that at home you'd think they would only be good for tile adhesive, fox poison or ballast and little else, yet half way up a frozen tor, they taste delicious.

Adventures and explorers from a previous age knew a little about provisioning for an expedition too. Essentials back in the age when more of the map was blank than filled in were; many, many cans of meaty stew, bovril and, that most important of kitchen implements, a bloody huge gun. This was because where others saw jungle, explorers saw a larder.

You know that scene in 'Predator' where the guy with the mini gun lets rip in the jungle, shooting at a shadowy figure, then the rest of the special ops team join in, and they let all hell cut loose with many types of automatic weapon, essentially levelling an area of rainforest? Well, your seasoned explorers would expect to achieve the same effect with one barrel, then wander into the devastation to see what hadn't been vaporised or liquified in the blast and was still fit for the pot.

But first and foremost, your explorer equipped themselves with a crate of scotch.

In tough times, when the jungle is closing in, the crevasse is closing up or the lost city refuses to be found, scotch can be a great comfort. No other drink is quite so right for a crisis. In an emergency, one does not drink gin, that's for later when, at your club, you are explaining the loss of your arm while standing on your new tiger-skin rug. Nor is wine acceptable. The only time a gentleman has anything to do with wine is when he is either plying a lady with it, or he is using a magnum bottle to crush the skull of some castle guard prior to shimmying down the drainpipe, across the moat and to freedom. No, scotch is a man's drink. Just look at the face of any man taking a gulp of the stuff. There's no beatific grin, no smile, instead its the grimace of a man who feels the chill finger of doom pressing on the tightening sphincter of his fate.

Scotch has many flavours. Peat, wood, bracken, grass, heather, moss, rain, granite, coo. Essentially a long list of things that drink is not supposed to taste of. If humans enjoyed the taste of the stuff that Scots throw on the fire, coke would have brought out 'catholic cola' years ago.

Paradoxically, because it is so...challenging, scotch makes certain dishes taste better. Not anything already palatable, obviously; a decent spag bol is not going to be enhanced by downing a tumbler of the true water alongside it. But it certainly makes any sort of frontier fodder, such as husky, pony, seal or penguin, tolerable. If scotch can make even Scottish cooking edible, then it's the perfect accompaniment to a plate of baboon's arse.

Despite their backpacks, sledges and tartan shopping trollies or whatever, today's explorers travel light, comfortable in the knowledge that nowhere today is that far from a Tesco.

But back in the day when men had whiskers like the sort of shrubbery a convention of flashers could hide in and you could still get rickets on the national health, explorers travelled heavy. This is because they had discovered that great secret of the British traveller abroad, that the only thing you can rely on in foreign parts is what you take with you. This extends to food, drink and religion but honourable exception is made for native gals and exotic tropical diseases, both of which were instead brought back to England and shown to your horrified family.

Equipping for an expedition, you'd send some junior off to buy a shedload of rope, brass instruments and wooly undergarments while you would spend the morning purchasing cannons and visiting various food and drink emporiums to secure provisions. The trick was to buy the food before the drink, or you'd end up with twenty crates of booze and a packet of twiglets.

So you had your ship, your crates of booze and your wild destination. Obviously, at some point, things are going to go wrong. There are, after all, no famous successful British explorers, so it's just a matter of how things are going to take a turn for the worse; wild animal attack, extreme weather event or, our old friend, unexpected native. At which point, hopefully before the sky falls in on the whole enterprise, you bury the booze.

This has two effects. The first is to give you peace of mind that at least nobody else will be tucking into your crate of twelve year old Glenglacier. The second is that nothing reminds a chap of the location of a camp in an otherwise featureless environment quite like a crate of buried scotch and, should you have to find your way back there, at least you won't need to worry about a drink on arrival.


The great polar explorer Earnest Shackleton apparently buried his stash as well. We know this because it was recently dug up and shipped back to Scotland for tasting and testing. Apparently the intention is to try and blend a whiskey that tastes the same or similar. But surely the thing to do is to drink the actual stash rather than keeping it as some sort of museum piece, or attempting to clone it like an alcoholic Jurassic Park. We'll never see men like Shackleton again so why do we need polar explorers scotch? Is the idea that we drink it and feel like an adventurer? If you want booze and adventure I suggest that you off a bottle of value vodka and walk the streets of Govan after chucking out time in a Celtic shirt. That'll give you all the adventure and excitement you could ever crave.


With the holds of their ships full of corned beef, handy recipes for cooking penguin and crates of scotch carried by bearer, pony or raft, it seems to me that what most of these chaps were really searching for was a decent picnic basket. And they’re are not the only ones.