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.’