Chop a sheep's tongue, liver and heart and 1 pound of bacon. Add 2 large chopped onions; season with ¼ teaspoonful of red pepper and 1 teaspoonful of mixed herbs and salt to taste. Mix with 1 pint of toasted oatmeal, 2 beaten eggs and the grated rind and juice of a lemon. Then clean the pouch of the sheep and fill with the mixture. Lay in boiling water and let boil three hours. Serve with apple-sauce.
A compact haggis, unusual in using bacon rather than suet and in leaning on lemon and apple sauce. Most of the work is in the casing and the oatmeal, and both have a knack to them.
- Do not fill the bag fullThe oatmeal swells considerably as it absorbs stock and fat, so the paunch should be no more than two-thirds full and loosely sewn or tied. The original does not say so, and overfilling is a common cause of a burst bag.
- The pouchA sheep's paunch (stomach), which a halal or Middle Eastern butcher will often supply with notice; it must be scraped, turned, and soaked in salted water. If you cannot get one, a wide beef ox-bung casing, a scalded pudding cloth, or a foil-lined pudding basin all work, the last steamed rather than boiled.
- Toasted oatmealPinhead (steel-cut) oatmeal, spread on a tray and toasted at 350F for 10-15 minutes until it smells nutty. A pint means a pint by volume, about 2 cups; rolled oats turn pasty and are not a substitute.
- Simmer, do not boilDespite the wording, hold the water at a bare simmer around 190F. A rolling three-hour boil batters the bag and splits the seam. Prick the casing once or twice in the first half hour as it swells, and keep it covered with water throughout.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika or crushed chilli flakes. A quarter teaspoon in this quantity is mild by modern haggis standards; a full teaspoon of black pepper alongside it is closer to what a Scottish butcher would use.
- Mixed herbsA period dried blend, usually thyme, marjoram, sage and parsley. Thyme and sage carry offal best.
- The offalTongue, liver and heart from one sheep or lamb, about 2 to 2 1/2 lb together. Heart and tongue benefit from being simmered an hour first and chopped after; raw liver is chopped or coarsely minced as it is.
- Yield and servingOne sheep's paunch of this mixture feeds six to eight. The apple sauce is unusual for a haggis; mashed potato and swede (tatties and neeps) is the traditional pairing, and a spoonful of the cooking liquor loosens the mixture at the table.
Haggis is the best-known survivor of a very old European habit: cooking the perishable parts of a slaughtered animal quickly, inside the animal's own stomach, before they spoiled. Scots recipes for it appear in print by the eighteenth century, and Burns's 1786 address to the "great chieftain o' the puddin'-race" fixed it as a national emblem rather than simply a farmhouse economy dish. What is telling here is the version on the page: the traditional suet is replaced by a pound of bacon, lemon rind and juice appear where no Scottish butcher would put them, and apple sauce arrives from the pork side of the kitchen. Note too the absence of lungs, which the classic pluck includes; lungs have been barred from commercial sale in the United States since 1971, well after this book, so the rule is context rather than an explanation for the omission here.