Is Haggis Truly Scottish or Can the English Make a Claim?
Haggis traditionally contains sheep's "pluck" (meaning the heart, liver and lungs), minced onion, oatmeal, suet, salt & spices, added stock and simmered within the sheep's stomach or intestine for around three hours. Today, commercially prepared haggis is cooked in a substitute casing instead of an actual stomach. Haggis appears rather like a very plump sausage or pudding. While, it may not sound very appealing for some people, a well prepared haggis actually possesses a pleasant savoury flavour for many others.
Haggis is widely considered a very traditional Scottish dish and many people north and south of the border instinctively claim it as the national dish of Scotland. It was famously written about in 1787 by Robert Burns in his "Address to a Haggis". Traditionally served with "neeps and tatties" - separately mashed swede and potatoes - haggis is often served with a "dram" of Scotch whisky too. It doesn't get much more Scottish than that... does it?
So just how Scottish is haggis really? While, haggis is widely assumed as being of Scottish origin, there is no historical evidence which conclusively proves this. Indeed there is no evidence of where the true origins are. So it is actually possible that haggis was an english dish adopted by the Scots because the first known recipe dating from 1430 comes from Lancashire in north-west England.
The recipe for a dish called "hagese" using offal and herbs as ingredients can be found in the Lancashire cookbook "Liber Cure Cocorum" (dated to about 1430) which offered cooking advice in lyrical verse. The "hagese" recipe reads in verse:
For hagese
Þe hert of schepe, þe nere þou take,
Þo bowel noght þou shalle forsake,
On þe turbilen made, and boyled wele,
Hacke alle togeder with gode persole
It's not until the early sixteenth century and publication of the Scottish poem Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (or Schir Johine the Ros, ane thing thair is compild) that we see "haggeis" documented in writing for the first time north of the border.
In the absence of any other documentary evidence the national claim on the haggis is unclear in my mind but, that said, I'm wise enough to keep my own council on that whenever I travel up north!
28.07.2010. 01:11
