Post by kaber on Apr 7, 2004 21:39:15 GMT -5
Hello everybody and well met.
I found this in a magazine called Bon Appetit. I have taken the liberty of omitting some things to shorten the length of the article but very little. So for those of you who have ever wanted to know anything about Haggis here it is.
It’s funny. You’ll want to read this to your folks at the dinner table.
PEOPLE AND PLACES
Offal Peculiar
“Aye, I liked the old days,” said John Marsh, a Butcher dismayed by how genteel modern haggis-making has become. He picked a fine fat haggis out of the display case and pointed to the list of ingredients.
“nowadays,” he added, “it all has to be labeled. An old butcher I worked for, who started back in the ‘30s, taught me how to make haggis. He said, ‘The more crap you put in, the better it is.’ Anything left over at the end of the week you took out of the freezer and flung in the haggis. Making haggis then, it was a good laugh.”
I had come upon Marsh at the well regarded butcher shop Lindsay Grieve Family Butchers, located on the main street of Hawick, one of the Scottish towns with a name impossible to pronounce, no matter how simple it looks. I had driven there to purchase a haggis, which I added to the growing pile on the back seat of my rental car. Some men travel alone, but I went nowhere in Scotland without a carload of haggis-canned haggis, shrink-wrapped haggis, plastic-wrapped haggis, and, whenever possible, haggis enclosed in the genuine stomach of a sheep. (One good thing about haggis: It doesn’t express it’s bouquet until after it’s cooked.)
My mission was to taste every haggis I could find, or at least until the haggis hangover I was developing compelled me to stop. I started in Edinburgh and traveled as far south as the Borders- the region just above England-and as far north as Pitlochry, a town known to have a butcher keen on haggis lasagna.
Haggis is heaven to a Scotsman. It is a foodstuff that resonates with the glory of days gone by, even if to outsiders it is nothing but a sack of oatmeal and innards. The primary ingredients is offal (known as pluck in the local vernacular), which consists of the liver, the heart, and the lungs of the chosen animal, usually a sheep. Add oatmeal, fat, and spices, wrap it in a casing made from the stomach and you have the authentic national dish. A friend of mine calls haggis the first meal in a bag.
That this food is a treasure rather than a peculiarity is almost certainly the responsibility of Robert Burns, who called it the “Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race!” in his famous ode, “Address to a Haggis” To be fair to Burns, the Scots might well have overestimated his passion for haggis inasmuch as he also wrote “To a Louse” (“Ha! Whaur ya gaun, ye crowlin’ ferlie!” Regardless, Burns’s birthday-January 25-is a major holiday, and on that night a lumpish haggis is piped into banquet halls with all the ceremony of a medieval banquet.
Testaments to the magnificence of this dish abound, yet nowhere could I find a single utterance about the flavor-or more materially, the smell. There are penty of plaudits, but no tasting notes. That job, I realized, had been left to me.
Haggis isn’t everywhere. It’s not like it’s stacked up in every petrol station, clothing store, and souvenir shop. That would be shortbread cookies. Traditionally, haggis is prepared and precooked in butcher shops, then brought home and warmed up. I set out to pick up some samples, figuring I could bring them to B&B’s where the proprietors would be happy to work up an evening meal. That last part was a bit difficult to arrange-after all, B&B doesn’t stand for Bed and Dinner.
My first stop was the Melville Guest House in Edinburgh, operated by Julie and Mel Jerome, who serve evening meals in their dinning room. The Crock and Spurtle. Before dinner, I went shopping at a local supermarket for what was rumored to be the best canned haggis, Grant’s Traditional Recipe. At Marks & Spencer, I discovered a variation of haggis made entirely of pork products. Pig lungs, indeed! And I also bought a haggis from Crombie’s of Edinburgh, a stylish downtown butcher shop where it was a bit pricier than the usual $3 to $4 a pound.
Then there was Macsween of Edinburgh, perhaps the most famous haggis-maker in all the rugged land. I drove out to the suburbs, where the plant was located, to pick up the traditional and the vegetarian versions. While there I tried to impress Jo Macsween with the magnitude of my quest to eat more haggis in a shorter period of time than any man alive. “When my brother and I worked on the production side,” she responded, “we ate some of each batch. We had haggis five times a day.”
Back at the B&B, I learned my first lesson: Haggis isn’t pretty. Once the packaging is cut open the contents spill out, looking like crumbly meat loaf. The odor, however, is complex and distinctive, with the mustiness of an old bookstore, the tang of a Turkish spice market, and the animality of a butcher shop’s back room. At different times, with different haggis, I would note allspice, sage, cinnamon, and even ginger. They all had a perfume I’d call eau d’abattoir, the not-entirely-unpleasant smell of the inside of an animal.
Macsween’s was a haggis-eater’s haggis, pungent and impressive. Crombie’s was much more subdued, almost to a fault. Grant’s suffered from what I call the Dinty Morre effect, tasting like the can it came from. The vegetarian haggis could well have been vegan fare; it reminded me of a life-sustaining lentil-barley mash. The all-pork haggis was unapproachable; it brought to mind a decaying animal lying in a meadow of wildflowers. The Jeromes served tatties and neeps- mashed potatoes and mashed turnips- with the haggis. So would everybody else. As the week wore on, I became less and less appreciative of such kindly efforts. Haggis comes with no other accompaniments, even if you beg.
The next night, I arrived to a greeting from curious horses at Whitehill Farm B&B, just outside Kelso, with the haggis I’d gathered up from Lindsay Grieve in Hawick, David Palmer Butcher in Jedburgh and J.R. Mitchell & Son in Kelso.
My welcome from Betty Smith, Whitehill’s proprietor, was somewhat restrained , and I soon realized why: I hadn’t brought haggis from her favorite butcher, George Lees of Yetholm. So off I went. The Borders countryside of Scotland is a watercolor painting, and I had no reason to regret a 15-mile drive. Only the roadkill was disturbing.
When I walked into his shop, I informed Lees, a dead ringer for Patrick Stewart, that I had come to buy haggis, and he replied, “Good for you.” He said his recipe was taken from a book printed in the 19th century, but he’d adjusted it. “Our recipe doesn’t include lungs. I don’t fancy eating lungs myself.”
Joining David and Betty Smith and me at the four-haggis hoedown was another guest of the B&B, Susan Flack, who was born in Scotland but lives in England, where she seldom has the opportunity to enjoy haggis. “Not many there will eat it with me,” she complained. I invited her to dinner after hearing this heartbreaking boarding school tale: “At Saint Margaret’s School in Aberdeen, the dinners were unspeakably disgusting. I was 10 and always hungry. Once a year, on Burns night, they served haggis, and the girls under 11 weren’t given it-they got boiled eggs instead. I made them give haggis to me. Maybe it wasn’t made of things I would eat if they were spread out on a plate but I loved the meatiness and the spiciness of it. It was heaven.”
Flack looked joyfully at the long oak table heaped with haggis. The Smiths remained composed. I found myself twitching a bit. The Grieve haggis won our competition handily. Everyone had a different reason for preferring it, but it seemed pleasingly beefy to me. Second was the haggis from Lees, which had, which had a smooth, rich texture.
That left just two oddities on my haggis agenda, the first being venison haggis from Fletchers outside Auchtermuchty. The secret to finding the farm is to turn left after reaching the Tay Valley Cat Welfare Society, not before.
Correctly sensing that I might be tiring of haggis unadorned Barbara Baird, chef-owner of Ninewells-stuffed it into a chicken breast. Although she cooked the dish beautifully, the chicken flavor was crushed by the omnipotent offal. Venison haggis, however was one of my favorites, herbaceous, meaty and rich.
My final meal took place at Landscape, an impeccable Victorian B&B owned by Kathleen and Robbie Scott. It’s located just off the main street of Pitlochry. I was desperately hoping that the haggis lasagna from Macdonald Brothers Butchers & Delicatessen would remind me of Italian food. Regrettably it did not.
I cannot say I was fond of the lasagna-the malodorous meat overwhelmed the innocent cheese and noodles. Haggis is a foodstuff with an indomitable will to win. Even worse, the béchamel had melded with the innards to produce creamed haggis. I fear years may pass before I order lasagna again.
I was done. On the return trip to New York, I put all thoughts of sheep pluck out of my head and dreamed of a nice sandwich made with corned beef, chopped liver, raw onions and chicken fat-what I call sensible food.
Well I hope you enjoyed todays lesson in Haggis now lets all go make some.
I found this in a magazine called Bon Appetit. I have taken the liberty of omitting some things to shorten the length of the article but very little. So for those of you who have ever wanted to know anything about Haggis here it is.
It’s funny. You’ll want to read this to your folks at the dinner table.
PEOPLE AND PLACES
Offal Peculiar
Haggis is as revered (by the Scots) as it is feared (by the rest of us).
Editor-at-large Alan Richman comes to terms with Scotland’s national dish.
Editor-at-large Alan Richman comes to terms with Scotland’s national dish.
“Aye, I liked the old days,” said John Marsh, a Butcher dismayed by how genteel modern haggis-making has become. He picked a fine fat haggis out of the display case and pointed to the list of ingredients.
“nowadays,” he added, “it all has to be labeled. An old butcher I worked for, who started back in the ‘30s, taught me how to make haggis. He said, ‘The more crap you put in, the better it is.’ Anything left over at the end of the week you took out of the freezer and flung in the haggis. Making haggis then, it was a good laugh.”
I had come upon Marsh at the well regarded butcher shop Lindsay Grieve Family Butchers, located on the main street of Hawick, one of the Scottish towns with a name impossible to pronounce, no matter how simple it looks. I had driven there to purchase a haggis, which I added to the growing pile on the back seat of my rental car. Some men travel alone, but I went nowhere in Scotland without a carload of haggis-canned haggis, shrink-wrapped haggis, plastic-wrapped haggis, and, whenever possible, haggis enclosed in the genuine stomach of a sheep. (One good thing about haggis: It doesn’t express it’s bouquet until after it’s cooked.)
My mission was to taste every haggis I could find, or at least until the haggis hangover I was developing compelled me to stop. I started in Edinburgh and traveled as far south as the Borders- the region just above England-and as far north as Pitlochry, a town known to have a butcher keen on haggis lasagna.
Haggis is heaven to a Scotsman. It is a foodstuff that resonates with the glory of days gone by, even if to outsiders it is nothing but a sack of oatmeal and innards. The primary ingredients is offal (known as pluck in the local vernacular), which consists of the liver, the heart, and the lungs of the chosen animal, usually a sheep. Add oatmeal, fat, and spices, wrap it in a casing made from the stomach and you have the authentic national dish. A friend of mine calls haggis the first meal in a bag.
That this food is a treasure rather than a peculiarity is almost certainly the responsibility of Robert Burns, who called it the “Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race!” in his famous ode, “Address to a Haggis” To be fair to Burns, the Scots might well have overestimated his passion for haggis inasmuch as he also wrote “To a Louse” (“Ha! Whaur ya gaun, ye crowlin’ ferlie!” Regardless, Burns’s birthday-January 25-is a major holiday, and on that night a lumpish haggis is piped into banquet halls with all the ceremony of a medieval banquet.
Testaments to the magnificence of this dish abound, yet nowhere could I find a single utterance about the flavor-or more materially, the smell. There are penty of plaudits, but no tasting notes. That job, I realized, had been left to me.
Haggis isn’t everywhere. It’s not like it’s stacked up in every petrol station, clothing store, and souvenir shop. That would be shortbread cookies. Traditionally, haggis is prepared and precooked in butcher shops, then brought home and warmed up. I set out to pick up some samples, figuring I could bring them to B&B’s where the proprietors would be happy to work up an evening meal. That last part was a bit difficult to arrange-after all, B&B doesn’t stand for Bed and Dinner.
My first stop was the Melville Guest House in Edinburgh, operated by Julie and Mel Jerome, who serve evening meals in their dinning room. The Crock and Spurtle. Before dinner, I went shopping at a local supermarket for what was rumored to be the best canned haggis, Grant’s Traditional Recipe. At Marks & Spencer, I discovered a variation of haggis made entirely of pork products. Pig lungs, indeed! And I also bought a haggis from Crombie’s of Edinburgh, a stylish downtown butcher shop where it was a bit pricier than the usual $3 to $4 a pound.
Then there was Macsween of Edinburgh, perhaps the most famous haggis-maker in all the rugged land. I drove out to the suburbs, where the plant was located, to pick up the traditional and the vegetarian versions. While there I tried to impress Jo Macsween with the magnitude of my quest to eat more haggis in a shorter period of time than any man alive. “When my brother and I worked on the production side,” she responded, “we ate some of each batch. We had haggis five times a day.”
Back at the B&B, I learned my first lesson: Haggis isn’t pretty. Once the packaging is cut open the contents spill out, looking like crumbly meat loaf. The odor, however, is complex and distinctive, with the mustiness of an old bookstore, the tang of a Turkish spice market, and the animality of a butcher shop’s back room. At different times, with different haggis, I would note allspice, sage, cinnamon, and even ginger. They all had a perfume I’d call eau d’abattoir, the not-entirely-unpleasant smell of the inside of an animal.
Macsween’s was a haggis-eater’s haggis, pungent and impressive. Crombie’s was much more subdued, almost to a fault. Grant’s suffered from what I call the Dinty Morre effect, tasting like the can it came from. The vegetarian haggis could well have been vegan fare; it reminded me of a life-sustaining lentil-barley mash. The all-pork haggis was unapproachable; it brought to mind a decaying animal lying in a meadow of wildflowers. The Jeromes served tatties and neeps- mashed potatoes and mashed turnips- with the haggis. So would everybody else. As the week wore on, I became less and less appreciative of such kindly efforts. Haggis comes with no other accompaniments, even if you beg.
The next night, I arrived to a greeting from curious horses at Whitehill Farm B&B, just outside Kelso, with the haggis I’d gathered up from Lindsay Grieve in Hawick, David Palmer Butcher in Jedburgh and J.R. Mitchell & Son in Kelso.
My welcome from Betty Smith, Whitehill’s proprietor, was somewhat restrained , and I soon realized why: I hadn’t brought haggis from her favorite butcher, George Lees of Yetholm. So off I went. The Borders countryside of Scotland is a watercolor painting, and I had no reason to regret a 15-mile drive. Only the roadkill was disturbing.
When I walked into his shop, I informed Lees, a dead ringer for Patrick Stewart, that I had come to buy haggis, and he replied, “Good for you.” He said his recipe was taken from a book printed in the 19th century, but he’d adjusted it. “Our recipe doesn’t include lungs. I don’t fancy eating lungs myself.”
Joining David and Betty Smith and me at the four-haggis hoedown was another guest of the B&B, Susan Flack, who was born in Scotland but lives in England, where she seldom has the opportunity to enjoy haggis. “Not many there will eat it with me,” she complained. I invited her to dinner after hearing this heartbreaking boarding school tale: “At Saint Margaret’s School in Aberdeen, the dinners were unspeakably disgusting. I was 10 and always hungry. Once a year, on Burns night, they served haggis, and the girls under 11 weren’t given it-they got boiled eggs instead. I made them give haggis to me. Maybe it wasn’t made of things I would eat if they were spread out on a plate but I loved the meatiness and the spiciness of it. It was heaven.”
Flack looked joyfully at the long oak table heaped with haggis. The Smiths remained composed. I found myself twitching a bit. The Grieve haggis won our competition handily. Everyone had a different reason for preferring it, but it seemed pleasingly beefy to me. Second was the haggis from Lees, which had, which had a smooth, rich texture.
That left just two oddities on my haggis agenda, the first being venison haggis from Fletchers outside Auchtermuchty. The secret to finding the farm is to turn left after reaching the Tay Valley Cat Welfare Society, not before.
Correctly sensing that I might be tiring of haggis unadorned Barbara Baird, chef-owner of Ninewells-stuffed it into a chicken breast. Although she cooked the dish beautifully, the chicken flavor was crushed by the omnipotent offal. Venison haggis, however was one of my favorites, herbaceous, meaty and rich.
My final meal took place at Landscape, an impeccable Victorian B&B owned by Kathleen and Robbie Scott. It’s located just off the main street of Pitlochry. I was desperately hoping that the haggis lasagna from Macdonald Brothers Butchers & Delicatessen would remind me of Italian food. Regrettably it did not.
I cannot say I was fond of the lasagna-the malodorous meat overwhelmed the innocent cheese and noodles. Haggis is a foodstuff with an indomitable will to win. Even worse, the béchamel had melded with the innards to produce creamed haggis. I fear years may pass before I order lasagna again.
I was done. On the return trip to New York, I put all thoughts of sheep pluck out of my head and dreamed of a nice sandwich made with corned beef, chopped liver, raw onions and chicken fat-what I call sensible food.
Well I hope you enjoyed todays lesson in Haggis now lets all go make some.
