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Imitation Haggis
(1). Mix mashed potatoes with an equal quantity of cold cooked beef, cut up small, place this in a baking dish with a little butter on the top, sprinkle over pepper and salt and bake in a brisk oven until done. (2). Mince any beef or mutton, being sure to have plenty of fat, and then mix with it half the quantity of coarse oatmeal well browned before a clear fire; add a few minced onions and a small quantity of pepper and salt, put the mixture into a pie dish, place it in the oven, bake half an hour, and serve.
Two separate methods sit under one heading here, and neither is haggis in any strict sense: the first is a potato-and-beef hash browned in the oven, the second an oatmeal-bound meat pudding baked in a dish rather than a stomach. Both are workable, but the original leaves out most of the numbers.
- The hinge: brown the oatmeal properlyIn version two the toasted oatmeal is the whole character of the dish. "Well browned before a clear fire" means spread on a tray in front of an open flame; a dry skillet over medium heat, stirred until the grains smell nutty and turn the colour of light toast, does the same in about eight minutes. Untoasted oatmeal gives a pasty, porridge-like result.
- "Coarse oatmeal" is not rolled oatsIt means a coarsely ground or pinhead (steel-cut) oatmeal of the traditional Scottish kind. Rolled oats will collapse into mush. Keep to half the quantity of the minced meat, as written; the recipe calls for no liquid, but about a cup of stock or water per pound of meat helps, since dry oatmeal in the oven will otherwise draw moisture out of the mixture.
- A brisk ovenThe recipe's term for version one; read it as a hot oven, roughly 400 to 450F. Version one is essentially a shepherd's-pie top without the pie: thirty to forty minutes at that heat, until the surface is crusted and brown. Version two is given no oven description at all; at the half hour specified, a moderate oven around 375F is the safer guess so the inside cooks through before the top hardens.
- Raw mince in version twoVersion two's meat -- the recipe says only "mince any beef or mutton" and does not say whether it is raw or already cooked; alongside a first method built on cold cooked beef, either reading is possible. If you start from raw mince, the mixture needs to reach 160F at the centre, and in a deep pie dish half an hour may not do it; check with a thermometer rather than trusting the clock.
- Plenty of fatThe instruction is not casual. Real haggis carries a large proportion of suet, and lean modern mince will bake dry and grainy against the oatmeal. Use 20 percent fat beef or lamb, or grate in two to three ounces of beef suet per pound of meat.
- Seasoning"A small quantity of pepper and salt" undersells it. Haggis flavour is built on aggressive black pepper, and a good pinch of ground coriander, mace or allspice brings the imitation much closer to the original. A teaspoon of coarsely ground pepper per pound is not too much.
- YieldNeither version is quantified. A pound of meat with its matching potato or oatmeal fills a medium pie dish and serves four as a main course with greens or mashed turnip.
Haggis proper is a pudding of sheep's pluck — heart, liver and lights — minced with suet, onion and oatmeal and boiled in the animal's stomach, and by the nineteenth century it had become so bound up with Robert Burns and his 1786 address to it that it was a fixture of the Scottish supper table. "Imitation" or "mock" versions like these appear all through Victorian and Edwardian household cookery, aimed at cooks who wanted the taste of toasted oatmeal, fat and pepper without sourcing a pluck or wrestling with a stomach bag; the same impulse produced mock turtle, mock duck and mock cream. That Oscar Tschirky included it in a Waldorf collection says less about the hotel's menu than about the omnivorous scope of these big turn-of-the-century compendia, which swept up thrift dishes and grand ones alike. Both versions here are also, plainly, ways of using cold roast meat — a leftovers problem every kitchen of the period had daily and no refrigeration to postpone.