Haggis: a reputation before a mouthful is taken

At thirteen, sitting at a friend’s white Formica dining table, I had already decided that I probably wasn’t going to like my dinner. His parents were considerably more adventurous with food than mine, and they had placed an odd-looking, opaque sack in the middle of the table and announced that it was haggis. The name meant nothing to me, but its appearance was enough to raise objections which, as somebody else’s guest, I wasn’t in a position to make. I tried it, found it reasonably inoffensive and felt no particular desire to eat it again. These days I love haggis, although I can hardly criticise guests who approach it suspiciously when my own introduction went quite so reluctantly.

The subject usually comes up within our first couple of hours together, often before anybody has encountered it on a menu. Once we reach the ingredients, I can understand the hesitation. Traditionally, haggis contains a sheep’s heart, liver and lungs, chopped and mixed with oatmeal, onion, fat and seasoning, then cooked inside its stomach. Modern recipes and casings vary, but the idea makes sense when you consider the value of the animal. You want to use as much of it as possible, and grain helps make a substantial meal from parts which might otherwise be overlooked. The stomach provides the cooking container, rather than something you must chew through before reaching your dinner.

Not that we always make the explanation straightforward. The photograph accompanying this article shows about thirty first-year geology students in hard hats and yellow high-visibility jackets descending a hillside. When guests asked what was happening, I told them it was the annual haggis hunt and left out the field training. The genuine history has its surprises too, including medieval English recipes which make it difficult to insist that haggis began in Scotland. Its Scottish fame owes much to Robert Burns, whose poem helped turn a practical pudding into a dinner deserving a bagpiper, a recitation and an audience.

By the time you taste it, there can be quite a lot to live up to. My preference is to steam haggis or use the microwave, so I get its own savoury flavour and seasoning. A breakfast slice fried on a shared griddle can pick up the flavour of the cooking fat and everything cooked alongside it, which may give a first-time diner entirely the wrong impression. There is good haggis and bad haggis, but good haggis can suffer in the preparation too. In the audio blogcast, we explore that unexpected English paper trail and how Burns helped give Scotland’s dinner a ceremony of its own.

To learn more, listen to the blogcast or book one of our North Coast Explorer private tours.