Haggis, neeps, and tatties is a Scottish national dish featuring haggis, an iconic spiced sausage with a long tradition in Scotland. Today, we’ll tell you all about how to make and eat this buttery, spiced concoction.
Not a gastronomic haiku, “haggis, neeps and tatties” is a dish, a triad of colours, based on mashed turnips, mashed potatoes, and with an undisputed star, haggis, a traditional Scottish sausage made with sheep’s and other animals’ offal.
In the pure style of Botillo del Bierzo, the haggis in its most common format has a robust, thick, slightly buttery appearance and is very compressed in the intestinal layer that surrounds it. The cut is premonitory, once the surface tension is overcome, the granular texture of a creamy and spicy bite is revealed.
What is Scottish haggis?
Haggis is a Scottish meat dish that has its roots in the utilitarian cuisine of rural Scotland. Eating the whole sheep was the mission, so the liver, heart, and lungs were ground up together with suet, grains, spices, salt, and pepper and simmered using the sheep’s own stomach as a lining.
This culinary formula gave rise and continues to give rise, to a solid-looking, brown-coloured sausage that is an intrinsic part of Scotland’s identity. Technically, the Scots refer to this preparation as pudding or pudding because of its mixture, presentation, and texture, although to the peninsular palate, the appearance clearly corresponds to a sausage and not to the sweet recipe that we refer to under the name of lemon pudding or bread pudding.
Origin and history of haggis
Haggis has no exact birth date, but it does have a date of celebration. Robert Burns, the acclaimed Scottish poet of the 18th century, dedicated an Ode to Haggis to it in 1786: “Great chief of the sausage race! Above them all you take your place, stomach, gut, or intestines.” On the first anniversary of the poet’s death, his friends gathered to honour his memory, and they did not hesitate for a moment to include haggis in the feast.
Thus, every January 25th, on the festival known as Burns Night, the author’s legacy is commemorated with a feast that includes haggis, toasts, and dessert, among poetry recitals. From time to time, you may also hear the legend about the mythological short-legged animal that ran along the Scottish hillsides and that for centuries many believed to be the true source of haggis meat (and still is today by some children and tourists).
Nutritional values of haggis
The nutritional value of haggis is based on its composition of offal and spices. Although there may be slight differences depending on regional variations, generally, it is a high-fat product, of which a good percentage is saturated fat. Likewise, haggis is high in calories. Below is the nutritional value per 100 g of commercial haggis.
- Energy: 253 kcal
- Fats: 16.1 g
- Of which saturated: 7.3 g
- Carbohydrates: 14.6 g
- Of which sugars: 0.3 g
- Proteins: 10.8 g
- Salt: 1.5 g
Haggis Ingredients
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- What does haggis contain? The ingredients of haggis are minced lamb, beef or pork lung, liver, and heart together with oatmeal, suet, onion, mace, salt, and pepper.
- Mace is derived from the shell of the nutmeg plant and was one of the most widely available condiments in the early days of haggis. Today, mace is not always present and is instead flavoured with rosemary, sage or thyme depending on the region of Scotland where it is made.
- As for the type of meat, although the recipe was born from the use of sheep, today the viscera are chosen according to availability and taste, with a common mix of pork, beef, and lamb in commercial recipes, as well as a combination of lamb lung and beef fat. There is also Venison Haggis, a completely different variety made from the viscera and meat of wild Scottish deer.
- The fact that the use of lungs, from one source or another, is still present in the recipe is the main reason why the importation of haggis into the United States is prohibited due to a regulation from the 1970s that prohibits all types of food in which lungs are involved.
- Onion, oats, salt, and pepper are, however, mainstays of haggis flavour, and have remained an invariably part of the classic, industrial Scottish haggis recipe.
How to make haggis
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- Haggis requires up to three cooking times. First, the innards are cooked for over 2 hours to give the final pudding its softness and fluffiness. Once cooked, they are ground and mixed with onion and salt while the ground oats and spices are mixed separately to achieve the ideal homogenization.
- Spices, oats, meat, salt, and onion are then mixed into a uniform mass and stuffed into the calf’s large intestine, a specially wide section of intestine prepared to hold between 0.5kg and 2kg of filling in a classic haggis pudding.
- Again, the sausage is cooked for at least one hour at 100°C and left to cool for 2 to 4 hours. In the case of commercial haggis, the meat is then vacuum-packed and distributed.
- When we buy packaged haggis, it is necessary to heat it at home for about 10 minutes in a pan or microwave to restore the juiciness of freshly made haggis. Nowadays in Scotland, it is possible to find more or less traditional haggis, with the classic presentation of 0.5 kg to 1 kg or already prepared in slices to eat for breakfast.
How to eat haggis
- The essential and undisputed way to eat haggis is to gently open our portion to reveal the graininess and aroma of the haggis and accompany it with mashed turnips and mashed potatoes. This is how we enjoy “ haggis, neeps and tatties ” considered a Scottish national dish.
- However, starting from the basic fundamental structure, gastronomy allows us to enjoy hundreds of varieties. Substitute the mashed turnips with some pickled turnips, accompany the slices of haggis with beans with tomato, fried eggs, and toast instead of mashed potatoes or, for the most daring, make some kofta balls with the haggis, a little flour, and aromatic herbs, fried and dipped in yogurt sauce.
- And yes, if anyone is wondering, we can also find vegetarian versions of haggis made with spiced mushrooms that will allow us to recreate a Scottish breakfast with all our guests.