Haggis is Scotland’s national dish: sheep’s heart, liver and lungs minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, salt and a great deal of black pepper, packed into a casing and simmered for hours. Traditionally the casing is the sheep’s stomach; commercially it is now usually artificial.
What it is actually like
Crumbly, warm, deeply savoury and strongly peppered, with a nutty texture from the oatmeal. It does not taste of liver in any obvious way, and it is much closer to a coarse peppery sausage meat than the description leads anyone to expect.
The reliable trick, as with black pudding, is to feed it to a sceptic without explanation and tell them afterwards.
Neeps and tatties
The traditional accompaniment: mashed swede and mashed potato, served in three separate mounds. Confusingly, Scots call swede “neeps”, short for turnip, though it is not what the English mean by a turnip. A whisky cream sauce is common in restaurants and optional at home.
Burns Night
Haggis is eaten year-round but belongs above all to Burns Night on 25 January, celebrating the birthday of the poet Robert Burns. The supper follows a fixed order:
- Guests are piped in; the host gives the Selkirk Grace.
- The haggis is carried in on a platter behind a piper, and everyone stands.
- Someone recites Burns’s Address to a Haggis, and at the line “an’ cut you up wi’ ready sleight” plunges a knife into it, splitting it open.
- A toast in whisky, then the meal.
- Speeches — the Immortal Memory, the Toast to the Lassies, and the Reply — and more Burns.
The poem opens by calling the haggis “great chieftain o’ the puddin-race”, which is as fine a description of a boiled sheep’s stomach as anyone has managed.
The American ban
Genuine Scottish haggis cannot legally be imported into the United States. American regulations have prohibited sheep lung in food since 1971, and lung is a defining ingredient. The ban has been the subject of repeated Scottish diplomatic lobbying, so far unsuccessful.
American-made haggis exists, using a modified recipe without lung, and Scots are politely unconvinced by it.
Other ways to eat it
- Haggis, neeps and tatties — the standard.
- Deep-fried haggis — from a chip shop, with chips. Excellent, and no defence is offered.
- Haggis pakora — a genuine Glasgow invention and a very good one.
- Balmoral chicken — chicken breast stuffed with haggis and wrapped in bacon, a Scottish restaurant staple.
- On a breakfast, sliced and fried alongside the bacon.
The wild haggis
A long-running joke told to visitors: that the haggis is a small Scottish animal whose legs are shorter on one side so it can run around hillsides, meaning left-legged and right-legged haggis must be hunted in opposite directions. A survey once found that a startling number of American visitors believed it. Scots have not stopped telling it.