IT BURNS, IT BURNS

 Well, it’s been over six months since Burns Night and a spare haggis has been lurking in the freezer since then, so it seemed time to eat it.

 

PICS MOSTLY BY CAROLINE GANNON

We couldn’t be doing with the whole neeps and tatties business (Google just autocorrected that as “neeps and tattoos”) so we thought we’d make a pie.  But the local supermarket didn’t have any ready-made pastry and we weren’t in the mood to make it from scratch, so we made a haggis shepherds pie instead.  

 

I mean it’s assemblage rather than cooking - you heat up the haggis, and yes I admit a microwave oven was involved, and then you boil and mash some perfectly ordinary potatoes, put it together and place it in a non-microwave oven for a spell, and there you have it.

 

I thought it looked all right in the pan, if a bit unnecessarily deconstructed on the plate.

 

But it tasted absolutely fine, exactly the way you’d imagine a haggis shepherds pie would.  And there were leftovers the next day.  A summer treat and no mistake.

THE HAGGIS RACE

  

Pic by Caroline Gannon, as are most of the others.

Race is a difficult matter when it comes to food, but I think we’re reasonably safe with haggis.  It may be, as Rabbi Burns, puts it ‘great chieftain of the pudding race; but it isn’t repressing any other race, and you know, maybe it’s a metaphor anyway. 

 

Ours was a Ramsay award winning 'Ball Haggis' - it said so on the label.

The great thing about haggis is that it keeps on giving.  Get yourself a big haggis and you can have it the usual way with neeps and tatties (we mashed ours together into together to make life easier), and that is Caroline's whisky sauce in the gravy boat.

Then a couple of days later you have enough left over to make a haggis shepherd's pie, and yes, we slightly over did it with the smoked paprika.

 

And then there’s still enough to make an actual pie with shortcrust pastry.

 

Yes, that is a flamingo on top.  I’m not sure that anybody has ever made flamingo haggis but if anybody did it would surely have been the ancient Romans. Apicius tells us they ate flamingo tongues and he has a recipe for something that’s a haggis in everything but name - a boiled stomach, stuffed with brains, pine nuts, rue, and much more besides.   Surely somebody must have had the idea of slipping some flamingo meat in there.  Surely.

 

Of course one thing about eating 3 haggis meals in close succession is that by the end you start thinking you’ve had enough haggis to last a lifetime.  Although as dear Stephen Sondheim says, ‘Well maybe next year.’

 

SOME THINGS I PUT IN MY MOUTH - 2023 EDITION

AWAY FROM HOME:

 

A Negroni at Iberica, Victoria.

*

A sausage roll at Delice, Lloyd Park – beef sausage for some (in fact I suppose fairly obvious) reason. 

*

A pasty on an appealing plate, at the caff at the East Ruston Old Vicarage Garden.

*

Toasted sandwiches served on slate at the Copr Bar, Swansea, though I actually forget what was in them:

*

Zestily presented sausage bap and chips at the Sun, Dedham:

*

It’s a wrap at the Welcome Institute.

*

Anchovies, at the Orford Saloon in Walthamstow.

*

Crispy squid, chips and salad, at the Rising Sun, Twickenham, eaten in the unexpected company of pre-game rugby fans who were consuming vast quantities of pizza.

*

Seared Ahi tuna with ‘resort grown avocado pickled shallots, shaved Fresno pepper, gochujang bbq drizzle,’ at Edna’s Eaterie, Tucson Botanic Gardens. No, I’d never heard of gochujang either but it’s a kind of chili paste apparently.

*

Spoiled for choice at the caff at the Horniman Museum.

Photo by Caroline Gannon, as are quite a lot of the others.

**

AND AT HOME

In fact it’s a venison fillet but I know it looks like a sausage:

*

Cheese straws, made by following (not very closely) a recipe for ‘Dishoon’s cheese and masala sticks’ 

*

Devilled kidneys – my butcher is a good butcher but you have to ask him to order in kidneys specially:

*

Another steak tartare in a universe of steak tartares:

*

Taco night – not so much deconstructed as self-destructed:

*

White Lake Cheese Somerset Dairy Tor, from Teddington Cheese in Richmond.

*

Comparatively sophisticated - smoked mackerel. asparagus, Hollandaise sauce:

*

Cheese on toast and beans (less sophisticated)

*

A haggis pie with what looks like a fox’s face, though it was supposed to be a heart:

*

Shepherd’s pie, post-Xmas – made with leftover duck (I read that Giles Coren was having the same.)

**

 

 

 

THE PLUCK THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

In the run up to Burns Night I overbought haggis.  At first I couldn’t find a big one so I bought two small ones and then I did find a big one so I bought that as well, and that was the one I cooked.  

The packaging said it served ten, and since there were only four of us at my humble Burns Night shindgig, I had some leftover.   As with so many things, not least Christmas turkey, and quite a few roasts, the leftovers sometimes seem better than the thing itself.

 So I made a haggis shepherds’ pie, and it was a blast

And then last week, stuck for something for dinner, I defrosted one of the small haggis’s which had been lurking in the freezer,  That was fine but again I had some leftovers and made a haggis breakfast scramble, which was ok but not fantastic.

Anyway as I was doing all this kept thinking about the great Calvin Trillin’s fantastically surreal line: “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.” 

Growing up in the Nicholson household we only ever had leftovers on Mondays, which were the remains of the Sunday roast.  My mother wasn’t good at roasting meat - she kind of boiled it in the oven.  She’d probably have done better with a haggis.

SCRANNING IN SHEFFIELD

I have been in Sheffield eating like a lord, and also like a Sheffielder, which in many ways is same thing.

I think I grew up in Sheffield at a very bad time for British food.  A previous generation would happily have eaten rabbit, pigeon, pigs’ trotters, maybe even venison if they were able to get it.  A later generation grew up watching fancy chefs on tv and "experimenting" with kiwi fruit. But I grew up in the days when a mother could think she was doing right by her family when she served frozen fish fillets, and steak and kidney pie out of a tin.

Consequently I don’t often get nostalgic for the food of my youth, but the roast pork sandwiches of Sheffield (and I know they’re found other places too) continue to haunt my taste buds.  This is one I ate at the weekend from Beres Pork Sandwich Shop in the city centre.  

Beres have been in business since 1961, which probably makes them newcomers in the world of the Sheffield pork sandwich – Funk’s of Hillsborough have been around since at least the 1890s.

And you know, I like the roast pork well enough, but I think it’s the extras that really move me: the stuffing, the apple sauce, the crackling, all of them present in the sandwich above.  The crackling is only “recommended for people with strong, healthy teeth” – it says so on the bag.

It surely comes as no surprise that Sheffield is the home of a good meat pie, and so no huge surprise that there’s a restaurant on Division Street called Pieminister – part of a small chain that was actually founded in Bristol.  We tried going there at about 9 o clock on Saturday night, but were told they’d sold out of everything except mashed potato, which was surely a good sign, so we returned the next night.

The two pies you see in the picture above are the Moo – “British Beef Steak and Craft Ale,” and the Deerstalker – “Wild British Venison, Bacon, Red Wine and Green Lentil.”  Gotta say I didn’t notice the green lentil, but you tend not to when there’s venison around.

I don’t suppose hotdogs are especially local to Sheffield.  I occasionally had one as a kid, but it wasn’t a meal, just something you ate when you were at the seaside or at a fun fair, kind of like candy floss.  But after eating hotdogs in Chicago last month it was impossible to resist the “Bulldog” on the menu at the Fox and Duck in Fulwood Road, Broomhill, a pub that calls itself “a lively boozer.”  And no, I have never heard the word scran used in Sheffield or anywhere else.

The Bulldog was pretty decent, and the things on the top that look like wood shavings are in fact “grilled and crispy onions" sitting right on top of the raw onions.

There was also deep fried and breaded haggis with tandoori ketchup (fusion cuisine, we got it!).  It looked like this and was “interesting” though I don’t think it would satisfy many true haggis fans:

Need I say that Japanese food didn’t feature in my family’s cuisine, or anybody else’s at the time I was growing up in Sheffield.   Just a few years back, as my Japanophilia was taking hold, I tried to find a Japanese eatery in Sheffield and could only locate one, which from the reviews sounded very dodgy indeed, so I didn’t eat there.  But now Sheffield has a significant Asian population, not many of them Japanese I’d have thought, but even so these days you can find 15 or more Japanese restaurants in town.

We settled for the Mr Miyagi Revolving Sushi Bar, again on Division Street, just a pie or gyoza’s throw from Pieminister.  Of course like many other restaurants that describe themselves as revolving, the restaurant itself doesn’t rotate, but there’s a circulating conveyor belt that delivers the food.  In this case the empty belt continued to move at eye level, even as the food came via a waitress.  

Above is a Classic Sashimi Set, and two Oyster sashimi – which were as good as you could get most places, and more than you could once possibly have hoped for in Sheffield or within a few thousand miles of it.

BROTHERS UNDER THE SKIN

Look, I’m not saying that all my friends are offal-obsessives, but some of them rather conspicuously are.  These two images have just popped up on my Instagram feed.

The above is from Jonathan Hayes - forensic pathologist, novelist, bon viveur - who posted this image of “the menu at Yardbird, a fantastic beak-to-tail feather yakitori restaurant in Hong Kong” adding, re his day job “It’s like I never left work.”

And then there’s this from Dwight Garner, the book god of the New York Times, who posts the check from the Organ Meat Society dinner at Hunan Bistro in New York.

I gotta say the crispy pork intestine looks a little pricey but I suppose it all depends on how much you get, or how much you want.  

Not wanting to be left out, here's a haggis I ate some of last week in Gloucestershire, served up by friends Del and Alan: