Ever since starting Tasting History there is one
dish I have really wanted to make and it has eluded me until now.
The much maligned often mythologized haggis
the national dish of Scotland.
So thank you to Wondrium for sponsoring this video as I travel to Scotland to make medieval haggis
this time on Tasting History.
So I've wanted to do an episode on haggis for so long because it is just- it's iconic, it's haggis,
but I have put it off not because I am afraid of what it is essentially a boiled sausage of
oatmeal and sheep organs, but because one of the ingredients, one of those organs sheep lung is
actually illegal here in the United States. So I figured what better excuse is there
for traveling all the way to Scotland with the sole purpose of making a 15th century haggis.
The recipe comes from the 'Liber Cure Cocorum 'or 'The Book of Cookery' written around 1430.
"For haggis. The heart of sheep, the kidney thou take,
the bowel not thou shall forsake, on the large pot made, and boiled well,
hack all together with good parsley, hyssop, savory, thou shall take then,
and suet of sheep take in I teach, with powder of pepper and eggs good one,
and seethe it well and serve it then. Look it be salted
for good men. In wintertime when herbs been good
take powder of whom I wot indeed, as savory, mint and thyme, full good,
hyssop, and sage I walked by the road."
So it's actually very similar to the modern version which is a bunch of
sheep organs boiled in its own bowel, one big difference though is a modern
haggis usually has a lot of spices to add flavor whereas the onlys spice in this
recipe is pepper and it really relies on herbs to do most of the flavoring.
As the poetic recipe says "As savory, mint,
and thyme full good, hyssop and sage I wot by the rode."
'By the rode' meaning by the cross and it was used often at the time as an oath of truth.
I don't quite know who's going to question the veracity of a haggis recipe but
somebody's going to or else he wouldn't have put it, or he just needed it to rhyme,
but oaths were taken very, very seriously in Medieval Europe I mean it was the breaking of
an oath that ostensibly led to the invasion of England by the Normans
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Now the Normans were essentially Norse vikings just a couple
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and now back to the haggis.
So I was so excited to make this haggis
I was going to go to Scotland get all the ingredients, and then
make the haggis in the kitchen of some unassuming bed and breakfast
BUT it turns out haggis is is not easy to make.
So I am grateful that Ewan Paterson of Allan's Butcher in Auchterarder Scotland
was willing to assist me on my quest for Medieval haggis
though really I'm the one doing all the assisting.
So he started off with the lamb offal, specifically the heart, liver, and lungs.
Then he cut those up and put theminto a pot to boil overnight.
The next morning Ewan put the boiled meat and some stock into a bowl then
he added a bit more lamb fat to help with flavor,
and to help bind the meat together as it goes through the mincer,
and then he minced the meat,
and as they always say you don't want to know how the sausage is made...
well it turns out the same goes for for haggis.
Luckily once it is all minced and put into a bowl it doesn't look that bad. Then he added in
just a bit of oatmeal to help make the meat bind together and then it was time to add the herbs,
and my plan had been to use all fresh herbs and many of the herbs were very easy to find fresh,
mint, parsley you know but hyssop and savory not so easy to find fresh,
but I actually found someone Bridget Webster in England who grew both of
these herbs in her Tudor style garden,
and she shipped some to me up in Scotland.
Unfortunately the Royal Post really let us down and so they
didn't get there until after I had already left,
so I had dried herbs on standby and we ended up using some of those
but even the original 1430 recipe says you can use
dried herbs during winter so let's just say it was winter.
So he added the herbs, cracked a few eggs into it, and I tossed in the salt and pepper.
I'm helping!
And it was pretty much the only helping that I did from then on because the next step
was the filling of the haggis and it really takes expertise and
that's something I don't have,
but luckily Ewan did and he made quick work of stuffing a number of haggises,
and he used intestine which is what the recipe says and is what
is very often used today. It makes about you know from here to here,
but you can use the stomach if you want to make literally like a haggis that big,
we didn't do that because one that's not what the recipe said and two it's just too much haggis.
Then Ewan tied off the haggises and drop them in a pot of boiling water for about 45 minutes,
and this is the part where you will know if you stuffed your
haggis and tied it off correctly because
if you didn't it can split and open up, and then you really just get haggis soup
or as some stories go they will explode and you'll get haggis in the eye.
As far back as ancient Greece and the Aristophanes play 'The
Clouds' Strepsiades entertain Socrates with a tale
"So I was served with a stuffed sheep's paunch
I broiled... Because... I never thought to give the rascal vent,
bounce goes the bag and covers me all over with filth and offal till my eyes struck fire."
But Ewan was a professional and he assured me
that he would not let hot sheep innards explode into my eyes,
and thankfully he did not otherwise I wouldn't be here to tell you the history of haggis.
It's the age-old question, the question that keeps me and I'm sure you up at night.
Who brought the haggis to Scotland?
Theories abound but nobody really knows.
What we do know is that according to Strepsiades mishap with the unvented sheep stomach
the ancient Greeks would often take the offal of an animal and boil it right after the kill
because it doesn't have a very long shelf life
and by ancient Rome they were taking these meats and stuffing them into sausage casings,
even in one Apicius recipe stuffing it into the womb of a sow and so when
the Romans invaded Britain they may have brought the practice with them.
Though the Norse people of the Viking Age were doing pretty
much the same thing so maybe it didn't show up
until they came in the 8th and 9th centuries
but it could have also been that the hunters of Celtic Britain long before
the Romans or the Vikings arrived realized that the stomach of an
animal made a pretty good boiling bag for all those bits and bobs
that would fall out of an animal after you
killed and gutted it and that tended to spoil very quickly.
So it could have been any of them or it could have been none of them we don't really know.
We don't even really know where the name comes from. It possibly comes from the Old Norse
'haggw' or French 'hacher' having very similar
sounding words that mean to chop and it is where we get the word to hack
so maybe we just follow Samuel Johnson's dictionary that says
"Haggess from hog or hack".
What is known is that by the Medieval Era haggis using many many different
spellings was being enjoyed all over Britain including in Lancashire which
is actually where our recipe today was written, not in Scotland but in England.
Now these early haggisses- haggese? Haggises.
They aren't exactly what we would consider a haggis today. A dictionary from 1440 simply says
it is a pudding, that is a sausage. Not the pudding like we in the United States
have that it comes in a little cup that you have it at lunch but a sausage.
And it wasn't even always sheep early on
as the 1615 recipe from presumptuously titled 'The English House-Wife Containing the Inward
and Outward Virtues Which Ought to be in a Complete Woman' says
"Oatmeal mixed with blood, and the liver of either sheep, calf or swine,
make it the puddin which is called the haggas or haggus."
And other early recipes even call for boar or deer.
Now when the haggis became popular in Scotland we don't really know
but it was definitely a staple by 1520 because it enjoys a passing
reference in 'The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie'.
This was basically a 16th century Scottish rap battle with a lot of profanity. I'll actually
put a link in the description to where you can read the whole thing for yourself,
it's definitely worth it but luckily the part that has the haggis mention
is in one of the tamer insults hurled by Dunbar to Kennedie.
"The gallows gape at your ugly snout, as you would for a haggis, like a ravenous bird."
Now while that may be the first mention of haggis in Scotland in England it actually all
but faded from memory. By the 18th century it was thought of as merely a product only of the Scots.
And in Tobias small at 1771 novel 'The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker'
an Englishman who had grown quite fond of Scotland and its cuisine which he says was
"...savory, and even delicate" had to admit
"I am not yet Scotchman enough to relish their haggis.
A massive minced lights, livers, suet, oatmeal, onions and pepper, enclosed in a sheep's stomach
had a very sudden effect upon mine, and the delicate Mrs. Tabby changed color.
The Scots, in general,
are attached to this composition with a sort of national fondness."
And it's absolutely true. For heaven's sake in 1786 Scotland's national poet Robert Burns
wrote an entire ode called 'Address to a Haggis'
and I don't think I can do proper Justice to Burns's Scots writing
and so I have asked my good friend Bruce Fumi
consummate actor and host of Scotland History
Tours on YouTube to read a few stanzas in his charming brogue.
Give her a haggis!
Today the haggis has become inextricably linked
with Robert Burns and while it is eaten all year round
it is especially popular on Burns Night January 25th.
People all over the world celebrate the life of this literary icon.
Now despite what I've just told you about the haggis, what it is, how it's made,
its importance to the Scottish people and their national heritage all of this "history"
well it turns out I may have got it all wrong...
at least if the January 2nd 1925 edition of the 'Montrose Standard' has anything to say about it,
and who am I to besmirch the Integrity of such an
illustrious newspaper as the Montrose Standard I ask you.
\"Some have suggested that the haggis is
a pudding. Ye gods! The noble untameable haggis a pudding!
The haggis is a wild animal that frequents lonely places in the highlands.
It is ferocious to an extreme- and to everything else- and it is a great fighter. But its flesh is
so great delicacy that it is much sought after... Time and again has the sturdy
Highlander gone out in the dead of night to track the kingly haggis to his native lair...
There is a bounty on haggis tails of tu'pence-ha'penny.
This is how the average Scott has become so wealthy.
The Scott eats haggis for the same reason as the ancient savage
drank the blood of his slain adversary
from a skull to imbue him with the courage of his noble foe."
And I wish to imbue myself with the courage of the noble haggis.
So luckily while I was in Scotland Bruce agreed to take me haggis hunting.
Well you're in luck today Max right because we've come up to the hills here.
This is the environment of the haggis now. If the haggis stood
in the hill it'd roll all the way down to the bottom there. So
evolution has blessed them with two long right legs and two short left legs
so they can run around about the hills and not fall over. You may not know this but Scott's breed
dogs to hunt the haggis. The problem is that dogs don't like the cloudy kind of overcast weather
so we're gonna have to go for Plan B today
although I did have a haggis hunting dog ready to come. Today what we're gonna do
is we're gonna dig a hole and
what we're going to do is we're going to cover over the hole but first
in the hole we cover over the hole so when the haggis comes snuffling out
of hither looking for worms because they like to eat the worms. Tasty,
tasty, tasty. They smell the worms they go they fall down the hole
and we'll have trapped the haggis but the worms will just burrow into the ground.
I'll go and get the dog.
Yeah. Probably best.
So yeah, that ended up being a bust and I kind of
started to think that the wild haggis was actually something
that the Scots just told tourists to sell t-shirts,
but that's okay because wild or not there was a haggis waiting for me back at the
butcher shop. And after 45 minutes of boiling Ewan took them out of the pot
and laid them before me though even then he said that you had to be quite careful with them because
they were delicate and the skins could quite easily burst,
but he is a pro and they didn't and so he was able to slice one open for us to taste.
There you go. You can see the herbs and your bits and pieces in there as well.
Yeah! It's a nice smell, really smell the herbs off of that.
Yeah! Mhm.
It's not the worst thing i've had. Nawuh.
That's pretty good.
So you can actually taste the herbs afterwards.
You're getting the aftertaste of the herb.
Yeah first I was like oh there's no flavor but then it starts to come across.
It comes get you afterwards.
Kind of the opposite of spice which usually hits you right away.
Yeah no. It's the texture that I actually really like.
Maybe it's because of the oatmeal, breaks it up in a way.
Yeah it kind of binds it together but it just breaks up a wee better as well.
Yeah like it's not mush.
Really nice texture and that oatmeal actually you bite into it and it
kind of pops almost.
The min- Yeah, you can really taste that coming through.
I'm gonna say I don't know what hyssop or savory tastes like but
I'm sure they're in there somewhere, I just don't know. Just not sure but
it's the maintenance coming Very good. Yeah I'm good with that it's a winner.
Thank you so much Ewan.
No problem at all. Glad you enjoyed it.
So that was Medieval haggis, definitely different from the modern version.
The modern version is also usually served now with neeps and tatties.
Tatties being potato and neeps being Swedish turnips better known as rutabaga
and there's also usually now a creamy whiskey sauce to pour over the haggis and
anything with a creamy whiskey sauces is an A+ in mybook.
So thank you again to Ewan Paterson of Allan's Butcher for helping me make this-
make this dream come true I really really appreciate it,
and thank you to Bruce Fumi from Scotland History
Tours for helping me put everything together and for appearing in my video,
and you should go check out his wonderful channel for more Scottish history including
some fascinating history about the kilt that you may not know, I'll actually make that video pop up
somewhere down here and I will see you next time on Tasting History.