Grants ofSpeyside

The Grant family have been making haggis since the eighteen-hundreds — the recipe traces to Jessie Grant, cooking for the family firm in Sutherland around 1890, five generations back from Stuart Grant, who runs the business today with his wife Ellen. The line has not been entirely unbroken: the original company failed in 1994, and Stuart rebuilt it in Grantown-on-Spey two years later, which is the honest version of the story and a more impressive one than an uninterrupted century would be. What survived was the recipe and the family's stubbornness. Grants haggis and black pudding are good enough to have been served, once, as part of British Airways' Concorde breakfasts, and the factory shop on the Grantown industrial estate is where to buy them at source. A Highland food business that went under and came back rather than quietly disappearing: worth supporting for that alone, and for a genuinely excellent haggis.