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‘GREAT CHIEFTAIN O’ THE PUDDING-RACE’ The Secret History of the Haggis
There aren’t many dishes for which it’s perhaps sensible to conclude that the deeper your love for it, the less you want to know about it.
If your culinary infatuation is for eggs royale, it’s probably safe to assume that you wouldn’t be overly concerned about being in close proximity to a freshly caught salmon. Yet increased ardour for the mighty haggis is rarely concomitant with an enthusiasm to be intimately acquainted with the raw elements of the offal based ingredients that go into that famed sheep’s stomach bag (although these days it’s almost always mere plastic casing).
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Come Burns Night, and the spectacle of massed ranks of slightly worse for wear kilt-donners bringing a haggis into the room to the sound of bagpipes, before reciting Robert Burns Address to a Haggis on banqueting tables from San Francisco to Shetland to Sydney, might insight a slight nagging sensation in the hearts of some.
As the ‘warm, reekin’ rich’ rugby ball of sheep lungs, heart, liver, onions, oatmeal, peppers and spices is ceremonially sliced apart at knife point, some may feel a slight discomfort; one not necessarily caused by the four drams imbibed before the starter, but by the whiff of heretic knowledge.
Whisper it under the smothered darkness of a starless Highland night, but the haggis might not actually be Scottish at all.
The oldest known cookery book in the English language, The Form of Cury (meaning cookery), written in 1390 by one of the cooks to King Richard II contains a recipe for a dish called Afronchemoyle. If you follow the instructions, then you’re going to end up with what is, in all but name, a haggis.
Just 40 years later, a manuscript of recipes, written in verse, called Liber Cure Cocorum, mentions a dish called “hagese”. The tome was published not north of Hadrian’s wall but in Lancashire. Yet despite these suspiciously foreign origins, Scotland truly took to the haggis, though not until the early 19 th century. Despite having penned the famed Address to a Haggis poem, Burns himself never attended an evening of offal based celebration in his honour, chiefly because he’d already been dead for five years when the first Burns Supper took place in his former cottage home in Alloway, South Ayrshire in 1801.
The idea was to start a tradition to honour his memory every 25 January, the date of Burns’s birthday. It would be hard to argue with the success of the mission. Boisdale restaurant, with four branches in London, sold more than five tonnes of haggis last January in the run up to Burns Night.
“Bear in mind that each portion is about 150 grams on each serving. That’s a lot of people ordering haggis from the menu,” says Andy Rose, group executive chef at the restaurant group, set up in 1986 by Ranald Macdonald, the eldest son of the 24 th Chief of Clanranald.
“We use an absolutely tiny artisanal company in Dumfries and Galloway called the Blackface Meat Company, which supplies all of our haggis to our four restaurants in London,” Andy reveals.
“We created a recipe together with them which we all love. They can only ever mix 100 kilos at a time which is tiny by factory production levels, but it does mean amazing consistency. The meat to fat ratio, the spices, the pepper, it’s all fantastic. These days the cheaper, mainstream haggis makers will use pork in their haggis which is absolutely incorrect. Up until the turn of the 1900s pork would have been considered quite evil in Scotland – the pig just wasn’t eaten.”
But, I ask, how about the first timer, for whom the possession of the base knowledge of what goes into a haggis is the very thing that is putting them off every sampling it?
“We don’t really need to persuade people to try haggis for the first time,” Andy replies. “We’re a British restaurant with a very strong nod to Scotland. Just by stepping through the door the temptation is there with the whiskies we have, it’s hard to refuse such a true, authentic dish in this kind of environment.”
Perhaps it’s the honesty of the haggis, despite its blurry origins, that makes it a dish that inspires the kind of 50/50 passion to revulsion ratio that makes Marmite seem positively insipid by comparison.
If ignorance is bliss when it comes to what passes your plate, then perhaps it’s salient that the less you know about the haggis the better. But its probity does seem to equal enduring haggis fandom among its devotees. There’s no smoke and mirrors with the ingredients, no cheap-sausage-roll attempts to hide what goes into it. The haggis doesn’t want to intimidate you. But it won’t lie about its makeup either.
Burns’ words continue to ring true, 233 years after he penned them:
