DEEP FIRED MARS bars where being served up in Moray years before they achieved world-wide fame as part of the menu at an Aberdeenshire fish and chip shop.
That is the claim being made this week in the wake of a row over a sign put up by the Carron Fish Bar in Stonehaven claiming to be the ‘birthplace’ of the dubious delicacy.
While Aberdeenshire Council now appear to have relented to public pressure over their order that the sign should be removed after previously insisting it lowered the tone of the local community, a new claim over the true source of the idea is being made – in Buckie.
Tom Cumming insists that he remembered deep-fried Mars Bars being served up as early as 1984 – nine years before the Stonehaven venue started serving them up. The 72-year-old former owner of a shop in Banff said his first attempt at frying up a Mars Bar was in the early 1980’s – and insisted that the fad had been born in Buckie.
Mr Cumming said: “A young lad came in one day and asked if we could fry a Mars Bar for him – I think it was Dodie’s Chip Shop in Buckie that it had originated from.
“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.”
Mr Cumming said that the results were “sickly things” and while he wished the current owner of the Carron Fish Bar every success, he insisted that they were not the first to come up with the idea of frying the chocolate bar.
While Dodie’s Chip Shop no longer exists in Buckie – the site is now occupied by (perhaps appropriately) a funeral directors, local Councillor Gordon Cowie agreed that was indeed where the idea had first been put into practice.
The current owners of the Stonehaven shop insisted that not only would their banner remain but so would their claim: “I’ve owned the shop for three and a half years and the banner was there long before I took over,” Lorraine Watson said, adding: “Everyone wants to claim they were the first.”