Haggis
Cut cold beef in pieces and mix with mashed potatoes; fill a baking-dish and season with butter, pepper, and salt. Bake and serve hot.
Despite the title, this is not haggis in the Scottish sense — there is no sheep's pluck, no oatmeal and no stomach bag. It is a baked beef-and-potato hash, and it succeeds or fails on moisture.
- Add liquidCold roast beef has already given up its juices, and potatoes absorb what little is left. Work in about half a cup of beef stock or leftover gravy per pound of meat before baking, or the dish comes out of the oven dry and mealy.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. A workable ratio is roughly equal volumes of chopped beef and mashed potato — about 1 lb cooked beef to 3 cups mash, which fills a 1 1/2-quart baking dish and serves four.
- Cut the beef small"Pieces" is unspecified; a quarter-inch dice or a coarse chop, rather than ground meat, works best here. Larger chunks tend not to bind with the potato.
- OvenNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake at 375F for 30 to 40 minutes, until heated through and the surface has browned in patches.
- Butter"Season with butter" is unspecific; dotting the top as well as mixing some in works well, figure 2 to 3 tablespoons total. Butter on the surface helps the top brown.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper alone is a thin showing for reheated beef. Onion softened in butter, a little thyme, or a spoonful of Worcestershire (widely available by the 1870s) will lift the flavour.
- Food safety on the leftoversThe beef is already cooked, so the point of the bake is to bring it back through to at least 165F at the centre. A shallow, wide dish reheats evenly; a deep one leaves a cool core.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of thrift recipes like this one — a use for the Sunday roast on Monday. The name is borrowed loosely: true haggis is a Scottish pudding of sheep's offal, suet and oatmeal boiled in the animal's stomach, and it is generally traced in print to the fifteenth century, long before Burns made it a national emblem. The result here is closer to what a modern cook would call shepherd's pie or a baked hash, and its presence in the book says less about Scotland than about a household economy in which no cooked beef was ever thrown away.