Our trademark symbol of Angus, the diminutive Scottish piper dressed in Morrison tartan, is a somewhat whimsical caricature, loosely based on the first Morrison of our line to come to North America. Sometime in 1828, probably the spring or early summer, he, his wife and their first five children were unceremoniously dumped onto the shore of the Bras d’or Lakes in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia at a spot where the Seal Island Bridge now stands. The Captain of the freighter, which had carried them from the Scottish Island of Harris in the Hebrides, had missed the entrance to St. Anns Harbour where they were supposed to go. If Angus had known that they were only a short, but arduous, walk over Kelly’s Mountain to Englishtown, at the mouth of St. Anns Bay, he could have shortened their agony but, alas, he had no way of knowing that in this strange new world.
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| Harris, Scotland - Photo by F. Morrison |
The area where they had been deposited was totally unpopulated at that time and only occasionally visited by Mi'kmaq Indians in transit and occasional fishermen from the coastal French settlements. After several weeks, during which time they had to eat the seed potatoes that they had brought for planting, a fishing vessel out of Arichat finally rescued them. These friendly souls kindly took the Morrison family to the proper destination and our genealogical story continues from there.
We don’t know exactly what Angus looked like because there are no surviving photographs or paintings of him that we know of. We do know, however, that he was a tailor by trade and an accomplished piper.
We don’t know for sure if Angus or his wife were the first in our line to have made the Scottish Tablet but in any event the original recipe has come down over the years through our family. Our ancestral trees contain names such as Ferguson, MacKillop, MacLeod, MacDonald and many others. All of our “fudge”, as the American’s began calling it in the late 1800’s, is more properly called Tablet because whether it is brittle or creamy, it is just a variation of the original recipe passed down to us. For the most part, the ingredients are the same but may vary in amounts, cooking time and temperatures. However, most people have never heard of Tablet and in order to market our confection we too have to call it Fudge but not just any fudge - Homemade, Scottish Fudge!
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