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Haggis
Clean a sheep's paunch or stomach, washing it thoroughly in several waters. Soak it in salted water and let it remain for several hours. Turn it inside out and scald it in a basin of boiling water. Scrape it well, taking care not to cut it or make any thin slices in it, as they might burst in cooking, and place it in cold water until wanted for use. Clean a sheep's pluck, and let the blood ooze out of the liver and heart by pricking them all over with a large needle. Put the liver and lights into a saucepan of water, and boil for fifteen minutes, change the water and boil for fifty minutes longer, add the balance of the pluck, and boil for another half-hour, making about an hour and a half in all. Remove any part of the skin that may be discolored, take out the liver, cut it in halves, grate one-half of it, and mince the other half with the remainder of the pluck. Mince one pound of beef suet and two onions and mix them in with one tablespoonful of salt, one breakfast cupful of well dried oatmeal, one-half tablespoonful of pepper, a little grated nutmeg and some cayenne, also a little lemon juice and one breakfast cupful of gravy. When they are thoroughly incorporated put the mixture into the paunch, sew it up, leave room for swelling in cooking, plunge it into a saucepan of boiling water, boil up, place it at the side of the fire and let it simmer gently for about three hours, pricking it a little when first cooking to let the air escape and thus preventing its bursting. As soon as it is taken out of the saucepan it must be placed on a dish and served. Sufficient gravy will be found inside as soon as it is cut without adding any more to it. A little beef may also be used in the mixture, though it is not considered an improvement. If a lamb's paunch is used, as is sometimes the case, great care must be taken to see that all the thin places are well sewed up. A calf's paunch may also be used, but the sheep's is best
A full traditional haggis, written for a kitchen with access to a whole sheep's pluck and a cleaned stomach. Most of the work is in the preparation of the bag; the filling itself is quick once the offal is boiled.
- The hinge: room to swellFill the paunch no more than two-thirds and sew it loosely — the oatmeal absorbs liquid and expands. Prick the bag several times in the first minutes of simmering to release trapped air, and keep the water at a bare simmer. A hard boil is what bursts a haggis.
- Pluck, lights, and what you can buyThe "pluck" is the heart, liver and lungs (lights) attached together. Lungs cannot legally be sold for food in the United States, so an authentic pluck is unavailable there; butchers in the UK and elsewhere will supply one to order. Heart and liver alone, in similar proportion, are the usual workaround.
- The bagA cleaned sheep's stomach must be ordered from a butcher; the ready-scalded ones sold now need only rinsing and soaking rather than the full scraping described here. A large beef ox bung or a wide natural casing holds the mixture if no paunch is available.
- Breakfast cupfulAn imperial breakfast cup runs roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces — treat it as a generous cup. The oatmeal quantity matters more than the gravy; add the stock gradually until the mixture is loose but not sloppy.
- OatmealThis means pinhead or coarse steel-cut oatmeal, toasted dry in a pan until it smells nutty. Rolled oats dissolve into paste and will give you a dense pudding rather than the loose, crumbly texture wanted.
- The gravyUse the second cooking water from the pluck, skimmed. There is no need for anything richer, and the recipe is right that the finished haggis produces its own liquid.
- Boiling the offalThe staged boiling — 15 minutes, fresh water, 50 minutes, then the rest of the pluck for 30 — appears intended to draw off strong flavours and firm the liver enough to grate, though the recipe does not say. The recipe likewise gives no reason for grating half the liver and mincing the other half; the grated portion would bind while the minced adds texture.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; a sheep's paunch filled as described makes a large pudding, probably enough for eight to ten. It is customarily served cut open at the table with mashed potatoes and mashed swede (neeps).
Haggis is a pudding of the oldest European kind: offal that spoils fastest, chopped with fat and grain and cooked in the animal's own stomach, a method recorded in Britain long before it became specifically Scottish. Its association with Scotland was fixed for the reading public by Robert Burns's "Address to a Haggis" of 1786, with its "great chieftain o' the puddin-race," and by the nineteenth century the dish was a national emblem rather than simple thrift. Its appearance in a Waldorf-Astoria book is a sign of how comprehensive Oscar Tschirky meant his collection to be — a New York hotel kitchen would have made this rarely, most likely for a Burns Night supper or a private Scottish dinner, and the careful instructions about scraping and sewing the paunch suggest the cooks could not be assumed to have done it before.