Scottish Haggis understand our traditional Scottish dish
Haggis is our national dish but one which a lot of Scots will not eat. Reason they don’t like the idea of the foods that go to make up its bulk and taste.
Robert Burns our national poet wrote a poem to the haggis referring to it as “the Chieftain o’ the Pudding race”. Many say that if it wasn’t for that Address to the Haggis poem few people outside of Scotland and Scottish culture would even have heard of the dish. Even although Rabbie Burns died in 1796 the toast to the Haggis is still said throughout the world particularly on Burns Night 25th January of each year. The same section of the website includes a template menu for those looking to organise their own Burns Night supper. The template also has the Scottish Grace or Selkirk Grace along with the order of toasts and responses that should be included.
The haggis can also be eaten as a Haggis Supper at local take-away shops. This is simply deep fried haggis with chipped potatoes (French fries outside of Scotland). So what is that makes our Scottish Haggis special?
If you ask a Scot many of them will say that the haggis is a small beaver sized animal that lives wild on the sides of our Scottish highland hills. They have adapted to the steep sided slopes by having shorter legs on one side of its body than the other. Charles Darwin would have been able to point to this survival of the fittest theory and show scientifically that the shorter legs on one side allows them to run faster round the sides of steep hills in order to escape larger animals like man. Some travel agents will still try to sell tourists tickets for haggis hunting tours and then take them to the local butchers shop.
But joking apart this food is traditionally made up of mainly the cheapest parts of a sheep so it was always particularly popular amongst the poorer people of the land.The main ingredients tend to be oats and several different meats usually mutton, offal (i.e. heart, liver and lungs) all minced (or ground) along with onion and suet all heavily spiced according to different traditions. After mixing it will be placed inside a sheep’s stomach as a lining before being boiled and served usually with neeps (turnip) and boiled potato.
Today you will also find the sheep’s stomach has been replaced with an artificial cellulose casing and several vegetarian versions of the haggis are being made available in supermarkets.
Note it will be almost impossible to get the true traditional haggis in some countries for example the USA it is not possible to sell lung for human consumption. If you want to know more about this traditional Scottish dish please come to our Scottish culture website ScottishJerk.com
This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 5:48 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.