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The wind-blasted beach of Auchmithie, Scotland is where Iain Spink brings friends to demonstrate a centuries-old food tradition. Here, wrapped up against the searing east coast gales, they explore the original home of the Arbroath Smokie, salted haddock he fixes in the original fashion over a split whisky barrel.

The Scottish village of Auchmithie sits above a barren crop of rocks and crumbling quay. At the end of the road some four  miles north of Arbroath Auchmithie was a thriving fishing community in the late 1800s, with a population of about  400. It supported 12 boats for white fish, six larger herring fishing boats  and around 20 small boats for lobster and crab. Now the fishing boats have moved down to Arbroath, but Auchmithie is the true birthplace of the Arbroath Smokie. It is  a hot-smoked haddock that is emphatically not to be confused with a kipper (those are cold-smoked herring). 

Not content with the fact that salting and smoking fish was a process that came over with the Vikings about the year  725, Auchmithie has its own interpretation of the origin of the smokie. It is a variation on the Chinese tale of how roast pork was invented: A fire breaks out in a cottage where haddocks are hanging to dry, burning it to the ground. Sifting through the ashes, the owners scorch their fingers on hot fish, lick them and are transported in an ecstasy of delicious discovery.

Spink doesn’t buy this story any more than most people swallow the mock Chinese tale by Charles Lamb it mirrors. What he does respect, though, is the tradition of smoking haddock that has produced the Arbroath Smokie.

One of Britain’s highest award-winning food producers, Spink is the fifth generation of an established fishing family. The family business, R. R. Spink, was the biggest smokies producer by far in Arbroath. For 25 years, Spink was involved in every side of the business . Then in 2002, a major U.K. supermarket chain began making demands to lengthen the shelf-life of the smokies they were buying. Iain believed this would compromise the quality of their product.

So at 40, he resigned from the business and took himself off to the University of Inverness to get a degree in environmental sciences. For the first time in Spink’s life, he was earning no money. Once upon a time, He had done a couple of demonstrations smoking haddock the original way in a whisky barrel for fun, and wondered if there might not be a chance to make pocket money doing it at country shows.

With a sawn-down barrel and a supply of salted haddock, Spink headed for the Highland Games. “What I didn’t think about was people liking it fresh-smoked to eat right there instead of hot dogs,” he said.  He sold out almost faster than he could cook them.

A friend who organized markets and shows asked Spink to come down with his barrel and fish to the farmers’ market at Cupar, just north of Edinburgh, the Scottish capital. “I thought, it’s such a long way to come. I could never make it pay.” But for six months the friend kept badgering him, and as a favor one weekend, Spink drove down from Inverness. “It was an instant, massive hit,” he said.  “I sold everything in an hour! I thought, this is seriously worth doing.”

Word spread.  As Spink completed his final year of studies at Inverness he was also working the farmers’ market and county show circuit. In the summer of 2006, he and his wife, Sue, a teacher, moved to Arbroath to run a haddock smoking business from there. These days  he’s lucky if he gets a dozen days off between June and the end of September. “All my friends are doing things at the weekends: meals out, car rallies,” he said.  “Me? I’m working.” It’s very restrictive socially.  “A big price to pay,” he says.

But he’s not about to abandon his customers. After all, 7,000 of them nominated him in 2006 for the U.K. TV Food Awards. He won the Scottish regional final and went down to Bournemouth on the English south coast to compete for the Top Ten in Britain. While other producers were filmed working at stainless steel stations in a fancy kitchen, the TV cameras zoomed in on Spink outside the window with his smoking whisky barrel. He won third place in the U.K. The awards came thick and fast after that: BBC Radio Food Producer of the Year, a Rick Stein Food Hero, as well as the Daily Telegraph’s Taste of Britain Best Regional Produce. “Four of the judges said if I’d entered the Best British Food category, I would have won that,” Spink beams.

Each weekend he drives SMO3KEY or SMO4KEY  down to Cupar Farmers’ Market , setting up his two whisky barrels. He doesn't call the haddocks “Arbroath Smokies” down there, though. His father fought a three-year battle to get the fish recognized with a Protected Geographical Indication  label – one of only 20 PGI  foods in Britain. The name can only be used to describe haddock smoked in the traditional fashion within a five-mile radius of Arbroath.

Spink always tries to buy fish that has been gutted, washed and iced at sea. "The sooner the better - gut will taint fish,” he said.  Working alone, he takes the head off, tosses the fish into a simple machine filled with water and a revolving wire brush that in a couple of seconds will remove any blood and muck.  Then he salts them. “It’s the most important part of the job – even more than smoking,” Spink said.  “The bigger the fish, the longer.” Typically, it’s around six to eight hours. But should you get salting wrong, you’ll get various problems.  “Salt prepares the fish for taking the smoke in,” Spink explains.  “Not high enough and it won’t taste right, won’t smoke right, the fish won't keep. Too much and it tastes disgusting.”

Once the salt has been washed off in clean, cold water, the fish are hung out to dry. To smoke them, he ties fish in pairs by the tail with jute  from the Scottish town of Dundee and loops them over sticks. These are laid across the wide maw  of one of the two slate-lined whisky barrels in which wood fires have been lit. Water is sprinkled over the fires to tamp  them down, then Hessian bags draped over all, to keep the smoke inside the barrels. Even with the fires covered, Spink comes home reeking of smoke.

Forty minutes later the smokies are ready to eat. He’s not so respectful of them that he won’t turn them or the smoked trout he also likes to prepare into an unctuous pate with a little Philadelphia cream cheese, some double cream, lemon juice and plenty of black pepper.

Julia Watson is the editor of local food site eatWashington.com.