haggis seven ways

So, following on from Thursday’s haggis hunting post, the three lambs’ plucks continued to boil and change in colour and consistency. The lungs kept bobbing to the top of the pan like jostling whales.

Taking it out of the fridge over 24 hours later, it didn’t look so pretty and had a hardened layer of fat on top.

I continued the challenge with Mei on Saturday and was so glad to have her company; this is not a task I’d want to do on my own and Mei made it into a fun, surreal, slightly hysterical afternoon! Still following Tim Hayward’s recipe, we cut the heart and lungs into chunks and then pulsed them in the magimix until finely chopped, but not pate-like.

Cutting up lung was interesting. We decided to remove many of the larger tubes running though it, as they didn’t look particularly appetising. The heart was meaty and I’d like to try cooking it as a separate dish sometime, perhaps gentley sauteing, rather than simmering the hell out of it. The smell of the magimixed offal was really unpleasant and horribly reminiscent of cat food, so we spent a good half an hour not breathing through our noses.

Mei began to grate the liver, and then decided it would easier magimixed too. We mixed the meat with six finely chopped onions and then seasoned it with plenty of salt, white pepper, mace, finely chopped thyme and dried sage. It finally started to smell good.

In went 1.5kg of beef suet…

…and a 1.5kg of Hamlyn’s Scottish pinhead oatmeal, John McCann’s steel cut Irish oatmeal and some plain, rolled oats, all toasted in the oven. I bought the former two at Selfridges, only to discover that you can just buy plain bags of oatmeal at Morrisons, and presumably other supermarkets, for a tenth of the price.

We hand-mixed and tasted and seasoned until happy.

Then we had to find a way of cooking it, as had been unsuccessful in the ox bung/sheep stomach mission. After Weschenfelder failed to deliver my ox bung on Friday or Saturday, I rang Jack O’Shea butchers at Selfridges to see if they had managed to procure a sheep’s stomach. They had! So I jumped on the bus down to Oxford Street, only to find a very apologetic butcher, whose colleague had given it away to someone else. I was so upset that he gave me the biggest haggis I’ve ever seen for half price. It weighs more than my scales will tell me, but I’m guessing it’s about 2.5kg.

So, what with that and the homemade stuff we had a lot of haggis to play with. For dinner we tried haggis five ways, with some neaps and tatties (mashed swede and potato):

1) Wrapped in cling film and foil, placed in a baking tray of water and steamed in the oven.

2) Oven-roasted.

3) Pan-fried.

4) Rolled into balls, dipped in beer batter and deep fried.

5) In a stroke of inspiration that came to us at precisely the same strange moment, we hollowed out an English muffin and stuffed it full of haggis, then deep fried it. It was heavenly: a meaty donut, crisp on the outside and moist on the inside.

I’d like to try making haggis scotch eggs: boiled quails eggs wrapped in haggis and then in breadcrumbs. Mei said she’d like to make haggis dumplings.

Tomorrow night at Rambling we won’t be deep frying the haggis, as I don’t want to give anyone a heart attack, what with the battered Mars bars for pudding as well. But we will all be reading from the book above:

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face
Great chieftan o’ the Puddin’ race!
From them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang’s my arm.

This more or less translates as:

Fair is your honest happy face
Great chieftain of the pudding race!
Above them all you take your place,
Stomach, tripe or guts:
Well are you worthy of a grace
As long as my arm.

Personally, I agree. I’ve always loved haggis and think homemade stuff is particularly delicious.