[Sca-cooks] 'Tis the season.

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Fri Jan 1 06:41:54 PST 2010


On Jan 1, 2010, at 2:35 AM, Antonia di Benedetto Calvo wrote:

> Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:
>> Seriously? Lungs are lungs. It's really the fat that makes the difference. I've made perfectly decent haggis using veal livers and hearts, pork spleens in lieu of lungs (basically you need some fairly vascular tissue, lots of blood and strong, gamy flavors). Not indistinguishable from the same thing made from sheep parts, but very similar, and for the many, many people who haven't tried the real thing, and many who have, it comes pretty close.
>> 
>> I wouldn't say it's exactly the same, but it's close enough to quash the "the best is the enemy of the good" crowd.
>>  
> 
> It's not that I don't think you can make haggis with other ingredients.  It's just that I *like* the old-fashioned kind made with sheep's pluck,

Me, too! It's just that I'm not able to raise and slaughter my own sheep, and at the moment it seems to be almost the only way to acquire a sheep's pluck. Not to mention paunch.

> and it drives me nuts that the authorities feel the need to save us from something that people have been eating for milennia.

Imagine how I feel about laws being passed concerning various saturated fats, rare meats, and less-than-fully-cooked eggs. At least the policies about lungs have a vague, if misapplied, justification (which I'm not saying makes them just, mind you) that doesn't quite ring to the same extent of that classic Windows-95 level of intelligence-insulting as the others.

>  I also think lungs + the right oats are what make a really nice texture. 

They do. I have pretty severe issues with rolled oats in most applications, except maybe brewing. If you do ever do have occasion to make a haggis without lungs, a roughly equivalent amount of spleen (we get pork ones around here) work pretty well as a better option than simply omitting the ultra-rich, flavorful, gamy, slightly spongy meat. When it's ground the texture issues are largely irrelevant anyway.

I guess one could argue that making a haggis without having access to freshly slaughtered sheep parts is sort of like putting the cart before the sheep anyway, so by extension, a lot of what might have been seen as sacrosanct could be... well... reexamined.

Adamantius






"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls, when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter




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