It’s a fairly typical day in Stonehaven, located on the corner of northeastern Scotland just a few miles away from Aberdeen, Scotland’s third largest city. Settled directly on the coast, the high wind cuts deep and whips the steel-gray sea into a frenzy.
It’s the kind of day well-known by the Carron Fish Bar, formerly the Haven, perhaps Scotland’s most famous spot for fish and chips. It’s also the restaurant with one of the best claims to inventing the snack which has become synonymous with one of the most unhealthy aspects of the Scottish diet: the deep-fried mars bar.
But the Carron’s title of being first to the game is not without controversy, as along with the Carron, several other restaurants up and down Scotland claim that they are, in fact, the originators of this indulgent dessert.
To hear the Carron’s telling of how this all came about, a story which is exhibited proudly on the walls of the restaurant, it all begins in 1992 when a group of local schoolboys came into the then-Haven chip shop during their lunch break. One of the boys, John Twaddle, had bet his friend, Brian McDonald, that he would not eat a deep-fried mars bar for his lunch. The amused staffer at the Haven at the time, Evelyn Balgowan, loved the concept. After a quick call to check with the owners of the Haven how one goes about frying up chocolate, she served up a piece of Scottish culinary history.
Brian McDonald loved it. The boys took their invention back to their school, spreading the word to their friends. From the school, news spread to the town of Stonehaven, Aberdeen city and finally UK-wide when the press took notice of the story.
The practice of coating the chocolate bars in batter and plunging them into hot oil has focused a spotlight on Scottish cuisine and its effects on the health of the population. Nowadays, the dessert is strongly associated with Scotland. There are even guides for tourists on where to find the best deep-fried mars bars in various Scottish, and even English, cities.
“We feel it brings tourists to the town,” says Murray Watson, who works at the Carron. “We’re very much a tourist town. We’ve got the fireballs; We’ve got Dunnottar Castle; and we’ve got the battered mars bar.”
”People go out and take their photo with the Mars Bar Sign and really enjoy the experience.”, referring to the large banner pinned to the side of the restaurant declaring the Carron’s claim to the world.
It’s from this banner that the wider health-versus-tourism debate intersects with a more bizarre local argument about the dessert’s supposed true origins. In 2012, the Carron attempted to seek EU geographic origin protected status for the deep-fried mars bar, putting it on equal footing with the likes of French Champagne or Dutch Gouda cheese. The application fell through when the chocolate bar’s manufacturer of the same name refused to support it, citing their promotion of healthy lifestyles.
A few years later, the snack made the news again when the Aberdeen City council issued a strongly-worded request to the Carron to take the banner down, supposedly for the good of the community. The city council later backtracked, indicating that they had merely asked the Carron to “consider removing their banner”.
The Carron was having none of it, citing the sales of 150 per week and the positive effects on tourism. The sales figure, now up to 400 per week in 2021 during the busy summer months, is where other chip shops began to pay attention - driven by the banner controversy.
Buckie, an idyllic maritime town on Scotland’s north coast, claims that it, not Stonehaven, is the true hometown of the famous treat. Tom Cumming, the ex-owner of the Duncan Street chip shop in the nearby town of Banff said in an interview to the Aberdeen-based newspaper The Press & Journal (P&J) that he remembers deep frying mars bars as early as 1984, eight years before the Carron’s (potentially) apocryphal tale.
“A young lad came in one day and asked if we could fry a mars bar for him.”, said Cummings to the P&J. “Best of luck to her”, referring to the Carron’s owner Lorraine Watson, “but she wasn’t the first person to think about frying a mars bar.”
“We did it for a while but it was just a fad. We did Twix, Milky Way, oranges and tangerines – you would fry anything, even pickled onions, but in a matter of six or eight months it was all over.”
Cumming doesn’t claim that his establishment invented the dessert however, and credits the invention to the now-defunct Buckie restaurant Dodie’s chip shop - a claim seconded by the Buckie councilman Gordon Cowie, who allegedly confirmed with the former owners of Dodie’s that they had been frying mars bars since the early 1980’s. Another claimant to the claim that the origins may be even further back, stating that deep-fried mars bars were on the menus of chip shops in the Hillingdon area of Glasgow in the 1970s.
The Carron fired back, asserting their claim and their banner would be there to stay, with Lorraine Watson adding “Everyone wants to claim they were first.”
So who’s right? Murray Watson invites interested parties to examine the evidence and see that theirs is the stronger claim, pointing to the decades of news coverage around the subject. It is, of course, also possible that both establishments came up with the idea separately. After all, both the Carron and Cumming stories are rather similar and Scotland’s supposed love of deep-fried foods has been a staple of commentary in British newspapers for decades. As pointed out by an excellent article on the subject, Deep Frying the Nation: Communicating about Scottish food and Nutrition, the long association of the practice of deep-frying food with the working-class in Britain, together with historical commentary of the Scottish diet and the emergence of scientific studies into the negative-health effects of saturated fats, beginning in the 1960’s, created the perfect conditions for the creation of the deep-fried mars bar.
What this story may show is the phenomenon, described by Michael Herzfeld as cultural intimacy, when a culture collective begins to embrace and reimagine its own stereotypes. This manifested throughout the 1970s and ‘80s with the ‘deep-frying craze’, described by Mr Cummings. It may be then that idea was picked up, perfected - and effectively marketed - by the Carron on that fateful summer day in 1992.
Their story was first picked up by the Daily Record in a 1994 article entitled ‘’Mars Supper, Please’’, the story quickly caught on in the national press. In 2004, what had been a discussion up until that point in local then national British tabloids, went global when Comedian Jeno Leno mentioned the practice on his show. In 2012, the Economist ran an article on the surprisingly low Glasgow life expectancy, citing “an excessive love of deep-fried mars bars’’ - as a totem representing poor diet in Scotland generally - as one of many lifestyle choices which may contribute to the phenomenon.
So just how bad for you is the deep-fried mars bar? Is all the fuss justified? Well, perhaps - reliable nutritional data on the subject is difficult to find. The most sensational (and now debunked) estimate claimed that the dessert could cause strokes and be as high as 1200 calories, 48 and 60% of recommended daily caloric intake for men and women, respectively. Myfitnesspal estimates a figure of 600 calories - still 24 and 33% - while contributing up to 66% of your daily recommended fat intake. The low-ball estimate, from a study by food scientists supposedly commissioned by the Carron itself is 306 calories, a relatively modest increase on the 230 calories of a standard mars bar.
Regardless, everything in moderation is the message from the Carron:
“It's something we like to say, you enjoy as a snack. It’s not a snack you’d have every day” said Murray Watson of the health question. Wise advice.