By CINDA CHAVICH

EDINBURGH - With the annual Robert Burns Night dinners looming, there may be no better time to explore the topic of haggis, so I took my appetite off to the Scottish Highlands.

HOW TO MAKE A HAGGIS

For those who don’t know – or don’t want to know - the traditional haggis is classic Scottish peasant food, a sort of sausage, made with leftover bits of lamb innards mixed with oatmeal and onions, seasoned with lots of black pepper and stuffed into a sheep’s stomach. Since the Scottish bard penned an ode to this odd local delicacy, every January 25, the Burns birthday celebration includes an address to the haggis, after said stodgy ball of mystery meat is piped ceremoniously into the dining room, and a dagger is plunged into the heart of it.

While one chef graphically explained to me that the haggis is traditionally made with the lamb “pluck” – “all of the entrails that come out of a sheep when you pull out the windpipe” – most admitted that the best haggis includes better quality ground lamb and organ meats like liver or kidney, with a lot less of the awful offal included.

When my Urban Angel haggis arrived – the specialty of Findlay’s, a local artisan butcher – it was a rich, meaty version, freed from it’s casing and piled in a bowl, in a puddle of creamy leek sauce, with “clapshot mash” (potatoes and turnips) alongside. Because I couldn’t make up my mind, the hearty portion delivered included both this true meaty haggis and MacSween’s veggie facsimile.

The latter was a healthy combination of beans, lentils, carrots, mushrooms, chopped mixed nuts and the obligatory oats – sort of a deconstructed veggie burger – and delicious enough for me to think about creating my own vegetarian haggis at home.

ASIAN HAGGIS? HAGGIS IN A CAN? HAGGIS SAMOSAS?

In Edinburgh, everyone, from cab drivers to beauticians, offered me advice on where to find the best haggis and I learned that it fills spicy haggis samosas and pakoras, is rolled into haggis “bon bons” for finger food, stuffed into chicken breasts and baked into phyllo pastry haggis spring rolls. You can even buy haggis in a can and “1 minute haggis” – two slices of vegetarian haggis in a convenient, microwavable package – or “Asian haggis” spiced with cumin, coriander and garam masala.

As I made my way north from Edinburgh, through Perthshire and up to Loch Ness and into the spectacular Trossachs, it was the more traditional meaty haggis that appeared on menus, and I indulged at breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Haggis, like fish and chips, is typical pub food, and I had a warm slice of it topped with a big quenelle of potato/turnip mash at the The Ship Inn pub in Elie, a beachside town across the Firth of Forth. After a chilly late fall walk on the broad sandy beach, it was the perfect way to warm up, with a drink of Scottish ginger wine.

At the Mains of Taymouth, a luxury self-catering condo set-up near Aberfeldy, the gourmet food store had Ramsay’s and McSween’s regular and vegetarian haggis in the cooler - in baseball and golf ball sizes for small dinners and appetizers along with other Scottish specialties.

At the resort’s Courtyard restaurant the haggis was more refined. They served a “haggis tower” appetizer – a round of haggis perched artfully atop a layered stack of mashed potato and golden mashed rutabaga, in a pool of local Aberfeldy whisky sauce.

In North Ballachulish, at a quirky old hotel overlooking Loch Leven, we stopped for lunch, where the chef Dieter Hoffmann-Rollauer baked individual-sized haggis balls in a puff pastry crust and served them with a savoury sauce. The presentation was his own but the haggis was from a local village butcher, a story I heard at almost every stop.

Most places that serve a full Scottish breakfast include a slice of haggis alongside the blood pudding, back bacon, sautéed mushrooms, grilled tomato and fried egg, but it’s rarely made in-house.

Even at the upscale Monachyle Mhor, where chef Tom Lewis uses his own farm eggs, foraged wild mushrooms, Highland beef and black-faced lamb on the menu, and makes all of the bread and desserts from scratch, the haggis comes from the award-winning Aberfoyle Butcher.

And like many of the presentations I found, it arrives like a large salami, stuffed into a synthetic casing, and is sliced and broiled or fried for service.

Only at the Lovat Arms Hotel, at the base of Loch Ness in St. Augustus, did I find a whole traditional ball haggis on the menu - served for two and dubbed Chieftan o’ thae Puddin’ Race, as Burns did in his famous poem.

BUTCHERS MAKE IT BETTER

Back in Edinburgh, Mark Smith, the butcher and owner at George Bower in Stockbridge, specializes in wild game and traditional “puddings” – black, white and lumpy balls of haggis, stuffed into sheep stomachs. They’re hanging in the window of the historic shop, alongside freshly-killed pheasants, their iridescent feathers glinting in the low afternoon light.

“There’s more meat in a good haggis these days,” he says, pulling out a £4 specimen and holding it up before a portrait of the bard, as the original butcher did here for a decades-old photo that still hangs behind the meat counter.

“It’s lamb and beef, fully cooked, in a natural casing – rich and meaty with a peppery edge.”

Simply add a piper and pour a dram.

http://eatscotland.visitscotland.com/

A photo essay - based on this story - appeared in the Globe and Mail

©Cinda Chavich 2011

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