[Sca-cooks] haggis on a stick

[Stefan li Rous]

Cassie moaned:
>   There goes another illusion. I thought Haggis had Barley in 
> it.Watched
> Highlander too many times i guess.lol.
It can have either barley or oats, but oats seems to be more common. 
See my haggis-msg file for some discussion on this.

Another tidbit from this file:
> I've dug out "Scottish Cookery" by Catherine Brown (its a cookbook, 
> not a
> history book -- I do have some!), though, and she says of haggis:
> "15th-century recipes use the liver and the blood of the sheep, while 
> later
> recipes in the 17th century, referring to making a 'Haggas Pudding in 
> the
> Sheep's Paunch' use a wider variety of ingredients -- parsley, savoury,
> thyme, onions, beef, suet, oatmeal, cloves, mace, pepper and salt, 
> sewn up
> and boiled; seved with a hole cut in the top and filled with butter 
> melted
> with two or three eggs. Another recipe uses a calve's paunch and the
> entrails minced together with grated bread, yoks of eggs, cream, spice,
> dried fruits and herbs, seved as a sweet with sugar and almonds: while 
> yet
> another recipe uses oatmeal steeped and boiled, mixed with spices, 
> raisins,
> onions and herbs." Elsewhere she says modern butchers keep secret their
> permutations, but her basic recipe that includes sheep pluck, pinhead
> oatmeal, suet, onion, salt, pepper, and mixed herbs is "a traditional
> recipe which most butchers will tell you is basically what they work 
> from,
> though no two of them will produce the same haggis." She doesn't say
> anything about barley, maybe its a South-West thing -- it does sound 
> like
> there is more room for variation that we thought! But I still say -- 
> not
> for beef! (Brown does say people get very picky about how they like 
> their
> haggis, so it seems there is reason for the butchers to shun 
> uniformity!
> Mark me down under the "no beef in the haggis" column)

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****