New Year’s Eve is the highlight of the year for the Scots, celebrated over a two-day holiday with much enthusiasm, fireworks, bonfires, partying and whisky.

For about 400 years, up until the middle of the last century, the Presbyterian national Church of Scotland actively discouraged, in fact virtually banned, any celebration of Christmas, although it did acknowledge the religious significance. For the Scots it was just an ordinary working day, so they adopted New Year as their annual winter holiday, with friends and family gathering together to exchange gifts and have parties.

Christmas is now celebrated, but New Year, or Hogmanay, is still Scotland’s most important holiday, and the traditions surrounding it continue, the most famous of which is ‘first-footing’, when the first foot to cross the threshold after midnight should hopefully be a tall, dark (male) stranger, bearing gifts of coal, shortbread and whisky.

My New Year’s Eve menu begins with smoked salmon, some of the best of which is produced in Scotland. Served on Scottish oatcakes and topped with crème fraîche and lumpfish caviar, it makes a light and tasty starter, or you can make them canapé-size and serve them with a whisky-based cocktail before dinner.

Scotland’s most famous dish is, of course haggis, which I have eaten and quite enjoyed, but the thought of mincing up all those sheep’s innards and cooking them in a sheep’s stomach somehow didn’t appeal to me, so I looked for a different main course.

‘Chicken in the heather’, a dish of chicken with heather honey and mustard, has been cooked in Scotland since Victorian times, but I’m always slightly puzzled by it – grouse, pheasants and partridges might all roam the heather-clad hills, but a farmyard hen? Somehow I don’t think so.

However, as it’s a special occasion, and as grouse, pheasant and partridge are about as easy to find in Malta as a chicken in the heather in Scotland, I have substituted guinea fowl instead, which is available from freezer shops, or your butcher will order it for you. They are not terribly big, so for six people you will need three guineas.

They’re tasty birds, slightly more ‘gamey’ than chicken, and I’m afraid they are fairly expensive, but you can use chicken instead of course. Serve them with ‘clapshot’, a Scottish dish of potatoes and swede or turnips, mixed with butter, cream and chives. I add a couple of carrots for a bit of extra colour.

For pudding, there’s ‘Clootie Dumpling’, the Scottish equivalent of Christmas pudding.

It was, and in some homes probably still is, traditionally boiled in a floured pudding cloth, or clootie, but being an English Sassenach, I can’t be doing with that and I make my mine in a basin – or in this case, several small basins. But I do like to anoint it, or them, with a very Scottish whisky sauce.

The words to Auld Lang Syne, sung all over the world on New Year’s Eve, were written by Robbie Burns, Scotland’s greatest poet. He also wrote the ‘Selkirk Grace’ which is often said at the start of a Burns Night Supper on January 25. I think it could also be said before a New Year’s Eve dinner as well. It goes like this:

Some hae meat and canna eat, And some wad eat that want it; But we hae meat, and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thankit.

I hope you all have a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.