SHIRLEY Spear’s mother didn’t make her own marmalade. A full-time teacher, she was far too busy struggling to keep on top of the cooking, ironing and other jobs for her family of five children, of which Shirley was the fourth. But the smell of marmalade, emanating from the kitchens of friends’ houses in Peebles, and later Edinburgh, has stayed with Spears. “Lots of my friends’ mothers made marmalade every year, without fail,” she recalls, “just as they always made jam during the summer time. It was part of life. And I remember I was quite envious of the fact that they did it. Everybody would exchange jars and if somebody came to your house, they would bring you a jar of their marmalade. It was kind of a social thing.”

Spear's affection for marmalade says a lot about her approach to food. Its rough-cut peel is an amber thread running through her cookery and stretching right back to her childhood. And when, 32 years ago, she and her husband Eddie began running the ground-breaking Three Chimneys restaurant on Skye, she made it a central ingredient, not only in her legendary Hot Marmalade Pudding, but in many other dishes as well.

Looking at the recipes in her new book, The Three Chimneys Marmalade Bible, it seems that almost everything can be bettered with a dash of marmalade. “Well, I wouldn’t quite put marmalade in absolutely everything,” she laughs. “But I have put marmalade in all the things that are in the book.” These include cheesecake, flapjack, roast gammon joint and fish kebabs.

We meet before the book’s launch event, in a cosy corner of Cannonball Contini near the castle. A conversation with 63-year-old Spear feels like entering a warm kitchen, filled with laughter. Though she partly grew up in Edinburgh, and now has homes in both North Berwick and Skye, it’s actually the island you feel in her, the sense of her having stepped in from outside the relentless frenzy of modern life.

She giggles frequently. Yet she is hugely serious in intent, and has an OBE for services to the food industry. Her The Three Chimneys restaurant has won many accolades, including a Michelin star in 2014, when its head chef was Michael Smith [he left last year and is replaced by Scott Davies]. As chair of the Scottish Food Commission, she is committed to the mammoth endeavour of changing the way the nation eats.

Spear's approach to food is particularly pertinent at this time of year, as we try to stave off the oncoming cold and gloom of winter. “Christmas is the festival of light," she says. "It's about lighting up the dark winter days and the cooking reflects that because it’s bringing in all the lovely dried fruits and things of summertime, and being able to store them for the winter months and preserve them so that we can have lovely goodies at this time of year. The fruits were dried and preserved for that reason.”

Her book also tells a tale of the origins of marmalade, from its beginnings as marmelada, a Portuguese paste made from quince, to Britain, where in the 18th century, it emerged as the shredded orange concoction we eat today. It’s a story that takes in how, in Dundee, Janet Keiller made marmalade from a huge cargo of bitter oranges from Spain that her husband John had bought at a bargain price from a ship sheltering locally from winter storms. By 1797, the Keiller factory had begun making marmalade on a mass scale.

Above all, though,The Marmalade Bible hints at a philosophy of life, one that extols the comforts of gathering together around a table for a tasty, often simple, plate of food.

Spear doesn’t like things too fancy. In her Sunday Herald columns, she purposefully avoids a "celebrity chef" approach, instead favouring “things that are homely and that can be done at home”. She kicks against the trend for food that resembles artworks, by making her recipes “really plain and dumpy”. “Because that’s what it’s like when you do it at home. It’s not all dressed up with six different people putting each little bit on.”

Spear has long championed Scotland’s larder: food grown here and brought together in traditional Scottish recipes. It's made The Three Chimneys revolutionary: at its heart was the type of cookery that would have been done in a Skye blackhouse, a Highland cottage or even a Glasgow single end. So it’s almost ironic that Spear, the great advocate of local produce, has put at the centre of her larder, a conserve that is created from an imported fruit.

But to Spear, the tradition of marmalade-making is thoroughly Scottish. Marmalade may radiate the sunshine of Seville, but it also speaks of Scottish winters, oatcakes and toast, scones and whisky. “I’ve always regarded it as a very traditional Scottish thing that you do during the winter,” she says. “When I was growing up the shops were always full of the oranges and everybody would be asking, had you made your marmalade yet? They would be displayed in boxes outside the greengrocer’s on the pavement. It was part of the celebration of food at different seasons.”

There’s a nostalgia to her message, a pining for simpler times. “If we could make more of home cooking,” she says, “and family togetherness, and inviting your friends round for a meal, and having the neighbours in, that would bring back much of the sociability that was part and parcel of family life in the 1960s and 1970s, before everything just got too rushed.”

But Spears isn’t out to deliver a Scottish version of hygge, the trendy new philosophy of cosiness and contentment imported from Denmark. She wants to create a profound shift in the way the nation eats: to bring back lost skills and traditions. If she is fighting anything, it’s "the commercialisation of everything", from the cheap costumes and "trick-or-treating" of Hallowe'en to the hyperdrive of Christmas spending and the sheer ubiquity of ready-prepared food.

One of her gripes is supermarket festive advertising campaigns featuring "all these huge long tables absolutely groaning with food. No family could ever consume that amount of food. Nor would they be able to afford to buy it all".

“Everything’s available,” she adds, “everything’s ready and off the shelf and there’s no inspiration to make do, invent, create and that’s from food to Hallowe'en costumes.” She bemoans the huge piles of presents, recalling that in her childhood they would only get one at Christmas. However, these days she does like to indulge in present-buying for friends, children and grandchildren. “I’m sure I’m the world’s worst now – I like to buy everybody loads of silly things. But I still like buying things that are personal.”

Meanwhile, she marvels at what her mother achieved, while working full-time, without access to ready-meals, a microwave, or a freezer. “I don’t know how people managed. But our lives were more simple. Meals were fairly straightforward – meat and two veg. We didn’t eat lavishly or expect to be able to have Chinese one night and Indian the next.”

Born in Peebles, Spears grew up in Edinburgh and, as a young woman, embarked on a career in journalism. She recalls pitching up at DC Thomson in Dundee, with her “wee suitcase” in hand and finding work there on Family Secrets, a magazine which published “ghastly love stories”. She later moved to London “in pursuit of a boyfriend” and did various jobs in magazines and PR. While working for British Gas, she had a “bottomless” expense budget for schmoozing magazine editors, who would take her to some of the fine restaurants across the city. At the same time she started cooking more and catering for other people’s parties and celebrations, driving across town with the food in the back of an old Ford Anglia van.

In London, she met her husband Eddie, had a baby, and decided that she didn't want to go back to what she'd been doing before. Rather, she and Eddie wanted to buy somewhere to run as a restaurant, and to bring up their children in Scotland. As it happened the remote Three Chimneys was on the market. “I had been there 10 years earlier," she recalls, "and had fallen in love with the place because it epitomised something. I thought about all the photographs that I had in my [1970 recipe book] A Taste Of Scotland by Theodora Fitzgibbon: sepia prints of the insides of croft houses, with the black pot being stirred on the fire”.

Spear was head chef at The Three Chimneys until 2005, and in her early years there, it stood out as a rare restaurant with traditional Scottish cooking and local produce at its heart. Since then, there has been a shift in the food industry, and more have embraced this philosophy. “In the early 1990s,” says Spear, “there was a movement back to all of that, but not on anything like the scale it is now. We’re going though a second revolution now where much more kudos is given to the provenance of the ingredients in restaurant menus, but also in what you buy for yourself to eat at home.”

That revolution, she believes, needs to continue. “We need to have far more people realising that it’s normal and not something terribly middle class and posh to make your own food. Because it’s complete role reversal from what it used to be. Once upon a time if you were a granny in a single end in Glasgow you would always know how to make a fantastic pan of soup and extract every last ounce of goodness out of whatever you could afford.”

But Spear acknowledges that the food and diet problems afflicting our nation are not going to be patched up with a smear of marmalade or a wholesome soup recipe. “They are very deep,” she observes, “particularly in poverty-stricken areas and I would hate my approach to come across as being dreadfully middle-class and out-of-touch with the realities of life we face. We have a long way to go before we can promote this kind of lifestyle without it being ridiculed. We need to be more realistic about the issues of poor diet, health and lifestyle in Scotland, which we have got to work hard to turn around.”

Spear believes the “movement for change” that the Scottish Food Commission is striving to create, will take “a whole generation to activate”. “It’s really hard,” she says, “because the more people like me preach to the unconverted, the more it seems like we’re running people down and condemning their actions. I hate to put across that holier-than-thou approach. I want it to be something that’s fun and liberating. Because you actually will enjoy it – and your kids will love it too.”

The Three Chimneys Marmalade Bible is published by Birlinn, £4.99

Glazed marmalade carrots

(Makes 4 portions)

Delicious with poultry, gammon or game, especially roast quail, partridge, pheasant or duck.

1kg carrots, cleaned and cut into batons

250ml water

50g marmalade

25g butter

25g golden caster sugar

Chopped parsley to garnish

Place the water in a saucepan together with all the ingredients except the carrots and parsley. Warm gently until the butter, sugar and marmalade are beginning to dissolve. Add the carrots, bring to the boil and simmer gently for 20 minutes without a lid, until the liquid has evaporated and the carrots are left coated in the glaze. Sprinkle with parsley before serving hot.

Recipe extracted from The Three Chimneys Marmalade Bible. Shirley Spear's Christmas pudding recipe (with marmalade!) is on page 21