FANS describe the taste of guga as being something between duck and salted mackerel.
They have been rated as a delicacy by celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, who has praised the distinctive taste.
He cooked and ate a gannet on on his cooking show the F Word.
Traditionally served with boiled local potatoes and a glass of milk, Herald food writer, Cate Devine, describes it as an “acquired taste”.
She writes: “The meat (once the oily skin has been removed) looks like duck but tastes like a cross between anchovy paste and highstrength cod liver oil; some say it’s like eating boiled car oil.
“I enjoyed it; it tasted salty, fishy and also very gamey, due to the fact that it has been dead for about eight weeks (it’s been steeping in brine for many of them).
“My companions, however, not so much. One said he’d made up his mind in advance he wouldn’t like it because it had had so much bad press (he’d read it tasted like boiled car tyres).”
She said that eating guga reminded her of the “superhuman efforts that had to be endured in order to survive the most unimaginable of dietary privations”.
According to poet and journalist Donald S Murray, historically, everyone in Scotland used to eat seabirds.
The Lewis-native, whose book the Guga Hunters tells the story of the men who voyage to Sula sgeir each year, said that the Union of Crowns destroyed the national taste for them.
He said: “Eating them was not seen as the mark of a civilised society and they were not consumed at court. We tend to mimic the behaviour of our social superiors, so suddenly it became unfashionable.
“Even Mary, Queen of Scots shunned them because she was very influenced by the French.”
In 2013, 33-year-old oil worker Peter MacCritchie was crowned World Guga Eating Champion after he ate his portion of gannet chick and potatoes in three minutes 44 seconds.
In Greenland, the Inuit delicacy of kiviak involves the bodies of auks — from the same family as guillemots — that are fermented in a seal skin for seven months.
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