No. 1640

Scotch Haggis

Panse Caillette

In a quart of water boil one pound of calf's liver until throughly done; chop it up finely with one pound of beef suet, free of skin and fibres, one pound of lean beef from the rump, one pound of onions and add an ounce of salt, an ounce of ground pepper, one pound of oatmeal and the water the liver was boiled in. With this preparation fill a well-cleaned sheep's paunch, sew it up with strong thread and wrap it in a buttered cloth; plunge it into boiling water and let cook gently for four hours; prick it several times while cooking with a trussing needle; drain, unwrap a few moments later and turn it over on a hot dish. Serve at the same time cakes made with three pounds of oatmeal, one pound of wheat flour, an ounce of lard and salt. These cakes are eight inches in diameter and one-eighth of an inch thick; bake them in a slow oven.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's haggis is a French chef's reading of a Scottish dish, and it behaves like a sausage: the oatmeal swells enormously, so the single most important thing is not to overfill the bag.

Fill only two-thirdsA pound of dry oatmeal plus the quart of liver broth will roughly double in volume during the four hours of simmering. Pack the paunch loosely, sew it shut with unwaxed butcher's twine, and prick it repeatedly through the cooking as instructed — an unpricked bag splits and empties itself into the pot.
The paunchA cleaned sheep's stomach is an order item from a halal or Scottish butcher, not a supermarket product. Where it is unavailable, cooks use a large beef bung or a doubled sheet of caul fat in a pudding basin; the texture of the casing is not what carries the dish.
Salt and pepperAn ounce of salt (about 2 tablespoons) is defensible for roughly five pounds of filling. An ounce of ground black pepper — some 4 to 5 tablespoons — is very aggressive by current taste; a tablespoon or two is closer to modern haggis, and Ranhofer omits the mace, nutmeg and coriander that some Scottish versions include.
Oatmeal"Oatmeal" here means pinhead or coarse steel-cut oats, ideally toasted dry in a pan first. Rolled oats will collapse into paste and instant oats are useless; the grain should stay distinct and slightly nutty.
The liverA quart of water for a pound of liver, boiled until fully done, gives you both the cooked liver and the cooking liquid that moistens the whole mixture. Do not discard it — the broth is the only liquid in the recipe.
ChoppingChop by hand or pulse briefly in a food processor. Liver, suet and rump beef ground to a smooth paste give a pâté-like result rather than the crumbly texture the dish wants.
The oatcakesA slow oven is roughly 275-325F. Three pounds of oatmeal to one pound of flour makes a very large batch of eight-inch cakes; scale to a quarter unless you are feeding a crowd. Bake until dry and pale, turning once, and cool on a rack so they crisp.
Yield and servingThe five pounds of solids plus the quart of liver broth give a substantial filling, enough for ten to twelve. Slit the bag at the table and spoon it out; mashed potatoes and mashed swede are the usual accompaniment, with a dram if you keep the tradition.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, filed haggis under Mutton in The Epicurean (1894) and gave it the French title panse caillette — panse being the paunch, caillette in butchery French the fourth stomach of a ruminant (from cailler, to curdle), though the word is also used, secondarily, for the caul-wrapped forcemeat of southern France. That double naming is characteristic of the book, which catalogued the dishes of every nation a Gilded Age hotel guest might request and translated them into professional French kitchen terms. Haggis itself is far older than any Scottish claim on it: puddings of chopped offal and grain cooked inside an animal's own stomach appear in English cookery manuscripts from the fifteenth century, and the word's origin is generally traced to a Middle English verb meaning to hack or chop. Its national status owes much to Robert Burns, whose "Address to a Haggis" of 1786 fixed the dish as a Scottish emblem, which is why a Manhattan chef in the 1890s felt obliged to include it. Ranhofer's oatcakes alongside are the correct Scottish partner — bannocks baked hard and dry, which kept for weeks in a household without refrigeration.