Haggis

I poke my head into Richards the butchers on the off-chance that they have any haggis. They do! There are five or six frozen McSweens in the window. I get one. I’m delighted. Haggis is my favourite food. On the way home from work I have it nestled in my pocket, and I show it to the considerable number of people I meet, often making the lame joke that it’s so fresh ‘it was running on the glens this morning’ and showing them imaginary buckshot wounds in its flesh. Haggis is, I guess I don’t need to tell you, in fact the dodgy bits of a sheep (lungs, liver, heart) mixed with oatmeal, suet, onion and spices, and packed into its stomach.

At home I’m quick to work. I wrap the haggis in tin foil and simmer it for forty-five minutes, in the meantime boiling and mashing potatoes and swede (which the Scots call ‘tatties’ and ‘neeps’). Then I arrange the three elements of the meal into a dish in a a tricolour, as I’ve seen it done in Scotland, having cut the meat mixture out of its rubbery casement. Plenty of butter and salt and pepper on the vegetables, which have come from our veggie box. And then out on a plate, much to the concern of my girlfriend Suzie, who doesn’t like the idea. She soon changes her mind. It’s a nourishing, tasty, winter-warmer of a meal. The haggis, of course, is the star of the show, its heavy, slightly sludgy taste offset by its spices and the sweetness of the neeps. This year we’ve made the deal that we’re not going to cook the same thing twice for dinner, a fine resolution, but one already in danger. Unless Richards run out of haggises in the Burns’ Night rush, that is. AL