Home › The Principles of Cookery › Haggis, Lamb's
Haggis, Lamb's
Take a lamb's paunch, thoroughly cleansed and white, and see that it is quite whole; sew up any thin places there may be in it, and press it in a soft cloth, to dry it thoroughly. Boil the pluck in water till it is sufficiently cooked, then mince it finely, and mix with it a pound of finely-shredded beef suet, a pound of oat-meal, six or eight young onions chopped small, a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, a quarter of a nutmeg grated, two eggs well beaten, and half a pint of milk. When these are thoroughly mixed, put them into the paunch, and be careful to leave room for swelling. It would be safer if the haggis were tied in a cloth as well as in the bag. Boil gently for three hours, turn out on a hot dish, and serve as hot as possible. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for six persons.
A workable haggis, scaled for six, with the usual Victorian assumption that the cook has a butcher who will hand over a whole stomach and an intact pluck. Two things decide the outcome: the bag must be filled loosely, and the water must never do more than shiver.
- Paunch and pluckThe paunch is the stomach lining of the lamb; the pluck is the heart, liver and lungs, still joined at the windpipe. Both are special orders from a butcher now. In the United States lung may not be sold for food, so an authentic pluck is unobtainable there.
- If no paunchA large beef bung or a synthetic sausage casing takes the mixture, or pack it into a buttered pudding basin, cover with pleated foil and steam for the same time. The flavour is little changed; mainly the theatre of turning it out is lost.
- Room for swellingThis is the hinge. Oatmeal roughly doubles, and a tightly packed bag splits. Fill it no more than two-thirds, sew or tie loosely, and prick the skin two or three times with a needle in the first half hour as it tightens.
- OatmealPinhead (steel-cut) oatmeal, ideally toasted dry in a pan until it smells nutty. Rolled oats collapse into paste. A pound is roughly two and a half to three cups, and it is the bulk of the pudding, not a thickener.
- Gentle boilA bare simmer at around 180-190F for the full three hours. A rolling boil bursts the bag. Keep the water topped up so the haggis stays submerged, and turn it once or twice.
- SuetA pound of beef suet is a great deal by modern taste; shredded packet suet works, and halving the quantity does no structural harm.
- SeasoningA teaspoonful of salt for four pounds or so of filling is light. Traditional Scottish practice leans much harder on black pepper than the half-teaspoon here; taste a spoonful of the raw mix fried flat in a pan before you fill the bag.
- ServingTurn out whole, split the skin at the table, and serve with mashed swede and potatoes. It reheats well: slices fry in butter, and leftovers keep three days refrigerated.
Haggis belongs to the old logic of the slaughter, in which the offal spoiled first and so was eaten first, cooked inside the animal's own stomach because that was the vessel to hand. Versions of the pudding appear in English cookery manuscripts well before it became a Scottish emblem, and the word itself is of uncertain origin, often traced to a Middle English verb meaning to hack or chop. Its national standing owes most to Burns's "Address to a Haggis" of 1786. Cassell's gives the lamb's version alongside the more usual sheep's, and costs it at 2s 6d for six -- the pluck and paunch were the leavings, and the oatmeal and suet did the rest.