Haggis

The haggis is an ewe’s paunch filled with a mixture of sheep’s offal (heart, liver, lungs), oats, suet, onions, and spices, then sewn up and boiled for a long time. The paunch serves a dual role as both a container and a source of collagen; the oats absorb the fats and juices of the offal during cooking, which gives the haggis its dense, crumbly texture, found in no other preparation in this book.

The first documented recipes date from 1390, in The Forme of Cury, an English cookbook. In 2013, the food historian Peter Brears argued that the exclusive attribution of the haggis to Scotland was a later identity construction. The product disappeared from English cooking, where no continuity of consumption is documented, while it remained a living, everyday dish in the Scottish countryside, attested in the eighteenth century as an ordinary and economical meal. The question of origin remains open in academic circles, but it is Scotland that preserved it, transmitted it and raised it to the rank of a symbol.

Robert Burns devoted to it, in 1786, the poem ‘Address to a Haggis’, published in the Caledonian Mercury (an Edinburgh newspaper, issued three times a week between 1720 and 1867), in which « Great Chieftain o' the puddin-race », in a tone of satire towards the refinements of the French cooking then in vogue among the Scottish aristocracy. The text durably bound the haggis to national identity. The first supper held in the poet’s memory took place on 21 July 1801 at Burns Cottage, in Alloway, Ayrshire. The Burns Club of Greenock held its own on 29 January 1802, believing this to be Burns’s birthday; the error was discovered in 1803, but the club continued to vary the January date over the following years. Burns Night is celebrated today, on 25 January, in Scottish communities across the world according to a codified ritual: entry to the sound of the pipes, declamation of the poem, opening of the haggis with a knife. The Selkirk Grace, the prayer recited before the meal and attributed to Burns, was in fact known from the seventeenth century under the names ‘Galloway Grace’ or ‘Covenanters’ Grace’.

Haggis can be imported into most countries, except the United States, where the presence of sheep’s lungs has been prohibited by the USDA since 1971. Only lung-free versions are permitted on American territory; these are also sold tinned or vacuum-packed in British mass retail.

Haggis hurling, long presented as a traditional Scottish sport, turned out to be an invention of 1977, which the publicist Robin Dunseath had falsely attributed to the seventeenth century. The competition has nonetheless endured; the record stands at 66 metres, set by Lorne Coltart at the Milngavie Highland Games in 2011. Another notable event, the Great Selkirk Haggis Hunt, an annual outing in the Selkirk hills, concludes with a tasting of haggis bought from a local butcher, despite the staging of a fictitious hunt.