Haggis

• 1. Introduction

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  Haggis, the Scottish savoury pudding, has a reputation that confuses some of the people who come to eat it. In one poll, 33 percent of American visitors to Scotland believed haggis was an animal. The joke behind that belief describes a small creature of the Highlands with longer legs on one side. Those legs, the story goes, let it run around steep hillsides without falling over. The truth is a pudding made from sheep offal, and its past is stranger than the joke. Who first cooked it, and who first wrote its name down? How did one poem make it a national dish? And why is the Scottish original barred from the United States?

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• 2. Inside the Pudding

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  The 2001 English edition of the Larousse Gastronomique concedes that haggis has a problem of presentation. It then gives its verdict: "Although its description is not immediately appealing, haggis has an excellent nutty texture and delicious savoury flavour".

  The heart of the dish is the pluck of a sheep, which means its heart, liver, and lungs. These are minced with chopped onion, oatmeal, and suet, then seasoned with salt and mixed with stock. Tradition encases the mixture in the animal's own stomach. An artificial casing is now often used instead.

  A traditional home recipe lists one sheep stomach, plus the heart and lungs of a single lamb. It adds onions, oatmeal, salt, pepper, stock, and water. Dried coriander, cinnamon, and nutmeg are optional extras. The finished pudding can be boiled, baked, or deep fried.

  All that offal spoils quickly, and that fact lies behind the oldest guess about where the dish began.

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• 3. First Written Traces

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  A verse cookbook called Liber Cure Cocorum, dated to around 1430 in Lancashire in north west England, holds the earliest known recipe under this name. It spells the dish "hagese" and makes it with offal and herbs. A separate English cookbook of about 1430 gives a recipe titled "hagws of a schepe". Together they supply the first records of the name in England.

  An earlier book, The Forme of Cury, dates from 1390 and comes from the master cooks of Richard II of England. It describes grated meat cooked in a pig's caul, but it never uses the word haggis.

  The name reaches Scottish writing in a poem called the "Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy". The poem is dated before 1520, the year generally accepted as coming before the death of William Dunbar, one of its two composers. It mentions "haggeis".

  In 1615, Gervase Markham printed a recipe in The English Huswife, under a section headed "Skill in Oate meale". He describes oatmeal mixed with blood and with the liver of a sheep, a calf, or a pig. The result, he says, is the pudding called the "Haggas or Haggus". He adds that boasting of its goodness is pointless, since hardly any man fails to like it.

  None of these writers says who invented the dish, and later authors have filled that gap with three competing theories.

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• 4. Three Theories of Origin

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  The food writer Clarissa Dickson Wright, in her book The Haggis: A Little History, proposes a hunting camp as the birthplace. After a hunt, the liver and kidneys could be grilled directly over a fire. The stomach, intestines, and lungs could not. Chopping the lungs, stuffing them into the stomach with whatever fillers were at hand, and boiling the bundle saved them from waste. The boiling was probably done in a vessel made from the animal's hide, so no extra pot had to be carried.

  Alan Davidson, another food writer, points much further back. He suggests the ancient Romans were the first known makers of products of the haggis type. In his words, haggis was "born of necessity, as a way to utilize the least expensive cuts of meat and the innards as well".

  Dickson Wright also offers a Scandinavian route, saying the dish arrived in Scotland in a longship, even before Scotland was a single nation. She cites the etymologist Walter William Skeat. He claimed the hag- part of the name comes from haggw, or the Old Icelandic hoggva, meaning to hew, chop, or hack. Modern Scots has the word hag, meaning to hew or strike with a sharp weapon. Related Nordic dishes are called "hew" or "chop" foods, with names such as hakkemad, hakkemat, and hackmat. In modern Swedish the dish was renamed pölsa.

  Many countries have produced similar dishes under other names, yet the recipe known today is distinctly Scottish.

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• 5. Drovers and Lairds

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  One popular story belongs to the old cattle drovers of the Highlands. When the men set out to drive their herds to market in Edinburgh, the women prepared food for the long walk down through the glens. They used whatever ingredients their homes had in greatest supply. They packed them in a sheep's stomach, which made the food easy to carry.

  Another notion comes from Scottish slaughtering practice. When a chieftain or laird ordered a sheep or a bullock slaughtered for meat, the workmen were allowed to keep the offal as their share.

  Neither tale rests on hard facts, and folklore fills the space where the evidence is missing. A poem written in 1786 would do far more for the pudding's fame than any of these stories.

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• 6. Burns and the Supper

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  In 1786, the poet Robert Burns published "Address to a Haggis". It opens with a salute: "Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!" That poem is the reason haggis is regarded as Scotland's national dish.

  In Burns's own lifetime, haggis was a common dish of the poor. It was nourishing and very cheap, because it was made from the leftover parts of sheep that would otherwise have been thrown away.

  Today the poem has its own annual ritual, the Burns supper. It is held on or near the 25th of January, the birthday of Scotland's national poet. Haggis is the main course. It is traditionally served with "neeps and tatties", which are turnips and potatoes boiled and mashed separately. A dram, a glass of Scotch whisky, completes the plate.

  In the north-east of Scotland, from Aberdeen northwards, the plate gains a third companion, because haggis there is also commonly served with mince.

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• 7. Haggis Today

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  Supermarkets across Scotland stock haggis all year, and the cheaper brands normally use artificial casings in place of stomachs. Some is sold in tins, or in containers made for a microwave or a conventional oven. Some commercial haggis is made largely from pig offal instead of sheep. A kosher version also exists, free of pork and fully conforming to Jewish dietary laws.

  Scottish fast-food shops shape haggis into a large sausage and deep fry it in batter. Served with chips, that makes a "haggis supper". A "haggis burger" is a fried patty on a bun. Some Indian restaurants in Scotland sell a deep-fried "haggis pakora". Haggis even turns up as an ingredient on pizza.

  In 1984, vegetarian haggis went on sale commercially for the first time. It now accounts for between 25 and 40 percent of haggis sales. Pulses, nuts, and vegetables replace the meat. Makers may use oats, barley, lentils, split peas, adzuki beans, kidney beans, borlotti beans, peanuts, mushrooms, onions, and carrots.

  Scottish immigrants keep the dish alive in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, especially for Burns suppers. It can be made in any country, though it is sometimes imported from Scotland.

  Imports are exactly where the trouble starts, at least in the United States.

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• 8. The American Ban

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  In 1971, importing haggis from the United Kingdom into the United States became illegal. The cause was a ban on food containing sheep lung, which makes up 10-15 percent of the traditional recipe. The rule covers all lungs, since fluids such as stomach acid and phlegm may enter the lung during slaughter.

  The situation grew more tangled in 1989, when the United States banned all UK beef and lamb after the outbreak of BSE in the United Kingdom. That restriction on British lamb was lifted in 2022. The ban on food containing sheep lung stayed in force, so haggis still could not cross the Atlantic.

  The answer has been to make haggis inside the United States, sometimes through Scottish companies. One such maker leaves out the sheep lung and uses an artificial casing in place of the stomach. Its makers say the recipe is otherwise the same 150-year-old one used in Scotland, with the same ingredients.

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