Burns Supper - The Main Event: Haggis and Clapshot

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!

-Address to a Haggis, Robert Burns

Haggis: unquestionably the king of the Scots kitchen. Rarely eaten, much maligned, completely misunderstood.

Haggis is made of a sheep's pluck, which is a tidy term for the lungs, heart, and liver. Traditionally these parts would be boiled, ground, mixed with oats and onions, then stuffed into a cleansed sheep's stomach, making what is essentially a large, round sausage.

Sheep are rarely brought to maturity in North America, so all the offal I used was from a lamb. Lamb bits are smaller and milder in flavour than sheep bits.

Most of the ingredients were easier to obtain than you might expect. Four Whistle Farm routinely brings offal of all sorts to the Strathcona market, so I just sent a quick e-mail to Marius to confirm that the required organs would be there on the required Saturday. (The lungs, discouragingly, were not held in the "Lamb" section of the display, but the "Dog Food" section...)

The only real trouble was the stomach. I approached a few vendors. Most gave excuses, citing, for instance, "regulations" or some such nonsense. Others said plainly that the abattoir doesn't like to do weird things like that. Eventually I found that Jim from Trowlesworthy Farms was able to procure a lamb's stomach, but unfortunately not in time for Burns night.

I ended up using a beef bung instead of a sheep's stomach. A beef bung is a long, dead-end portion of the cow's intestinal tract. Once stuffed it is about five inches across and a few feet long. It is the traditional casing for mortadella and cappicola. I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the images of haggis I came across during my research were actually made with beef bung.

The details of the preparation follow.


Haggis
Adapted from The Scots Kitchen

Ingredients

• 2 lamb lungs, roughly 300g
• 2 lamb hearts, roughly 300g
• 2 lamb livers, roughly 400g
• 300g chopped onions, gently cooked in butter
• 150g lamb suet
• 150g honeyed, toasted, rolled oats (you can use this recipe for granola)
• 27g salt
• black pepper, nutmeg, and allspice to taste
• 1 beef bung

Usually the raw offal is thrown in a pot of boiling water, but I decided to sear mine in a hot pan first, just for some extra colour and flavour.


Put the seared offal in a large pot. If you are lucky and your lungs are still attached to their windpipe, drape the windpipe over the edge of the pot so that any fluid expelled by the lungs doesn't end up in your water. If you don't have a windpipe, don't worry. Cover the offal with cold water, then bring the pot to a boil. The lungs, as you might expect, want to float, so you'll have to weigh them down. I used a plate and a tin can. Classy.

Simmer for an hour and a half. All kinds of ungodly brown scum will form on the surface, especially if you don't have the windpipe as a purge line. If you are very diligent with the skimming, you may still be able to use some of the flavourful cooking liquid later on.


Chill the cooked offal thoroughly. Mix with the fat, onions, salt, and spices.


Grind the mixture through a 3/16" plate.


Add the toasted oats to the ground offal. Mix on a low speed, slowly incorporating a bit of the boiling liquid. If your boiling liquid was deemed undesirable, use stock. The forcemeat should become somewhat paste-like, though not as tacky as a sausage force.


Soak the beef bung for about an hour. Rinse thoroughly inside and out.


Roll up your sleeves and stuff the forcemeat into the bung. Pack it tightly, ensuring there are no air pockets. Traditionally the sheep's stomach would be sewn shut (hence the line "Your pin wad help to mend a mill / In time o' need" in the Address to a Haggis.) Working with the beef bung, I simply tied the open end in a large knot.


Simmer the haggis until heated through, about two hours. The beef bung, just so you know, is not usually consumed; it's just a vessel.


Clapshot: Neeps and Tatties

Clapshot is mashed turnips ("neeps") and potatoes ("tatties"). I have no idea where the term comes from. The classic recipe uses equal parts of each, but since turnips are so much moister than potatoes, I prefer one part turnip to two parts potato.

Peel the potatoes and turnips and cut them into large chunks. Boil them in separate pots, as they take different lengths of time to cook. Simmer each until very tender, but not falling apart. Pass the vegetables through a food mill while still warm. Combine, then spread on a tray to cool thoroughly. This can be done the night before the meal.

To serve, heat the milled vegetables with a bit of lamb stock. Beat in cubes of butter, and season with salt and pepper.

This really is the perfect accompaniment to the haggis. The sweetness of the turnips compliments the savoury offal. The slightly fluid nature of the mash allows it to mingle with the haggis.

This was my first taste of haggis since I was a little boy visiting a historical village somewhere in Ontario. Frankly it blew my mind. You would expect offal boiled for hours to be tough and dry, but the grinding tenderizes the meat and glands, and the onions and stock-drenched oats give moisture. The final mix looks a lot like ground beef, but it's much lighter and moister than hamburger. I can't wait to try this again.

The Boar's Head

The boar's head in hand bear I,
Bedeck'd with bays and rosemary.
And I pray you my masters, be merry
Quot estis in convivio (As many as are in the feast)

-English Traditional


Has it ever taken you years to understand the lyrics to a certain song?

I grew up listening to a carol that I thought was in a different language. While a few lines are in Latin, the rest is in plain English. Even so, I only deciphered the meaning of the song last year. The carol is The Boar's Head, and it refers to the English custom, dating back to Anglo-Saxon times, of serving a boar's head at Christmastime. The head was placed on a silver platter and marched into the hall with music. When I first read about the custom last year, I resolved that this Christmas I would roast a boar's head, bedeck'd with bays and rosemary.

I rested the head on a bed of onions, celery, apples, bays, rosemary, and thyme, and cooked it in a very low oven for several hours. The jowls release a lot (a lot!) of fat, which is good for frying bread as an accompaniment. The head finishes with very tender flesh and very hard crackling, and the whole mess is liberally salted and peppered. Good food for the longest night of the year, which we usually observe with heavy drinking.

Caput apri defero (The boar's head I offer)

Reddens laudes Domino (Giving praises to the Lord)

Caput apri defero

Reddens laudes Domino

The boar's head I understand

Is the rarest dish in all the land,

And thus bedeck'd with a gay garland

Let us servire cantico (serve with a song).

Our steward hath provided this
In honour of the King of Bliss;
Which on this day to be served is
In Reginensi atrio (the Queen's hall)

A phenomenon that occasionally accompanies heavy drinking:

Buffalo Liver Dumplings

Liver's robust flavour is perfect in dumplings, that humble but satisfying dish that was once made with left-over bread, milk, and eggs.

First I cut the liver into pieces and seared them on high heat. I set the liver aside, sweated onions in the same pan, then deglazed with vinegar and water.

For moisture and body, I added leftover bread heels soaked in milk. I used eggs to bind the mixture, dried bread to tune the consistency, and finsihed with salt, pepper, and thyme.

The ingredients were then forced through the hand-cranked meat grinder above, at left, which used to belong to my grandmother. This was the first time I've used it. It has a plate on it that redefines what I consider a "coarse grind." You can see in the photo that it doesn't even have holes like a typical die, but rather annular slits. It was perfect for the dumplings.

Once ground, I shaped the paste into balls. They can be poached, but I prefer frying them in a pan. I ate them with broth. Buffalo broth, of course.

A Weird Digression on Bison Milk

Working with buffalo liver and milk got me asking questions. What does buffalo milk taste like? My understanding is that bison are related more closely to dairy cows than to the dairy buffalo of Europe, so I would wager that their milk is similar to our household milk in fat, protein, lactose, et c. How difficult would it be to milk a buffalo?

Thanksgiving Leftovers

I finally used the rest of my turkey giblets, as well as some other Thanksgiving leftovers (frozen, of course.)

I simmered the turkey neck, heart, and bones with onion, carrots, celery, thyme, white wine, and water to make stock. The neck gave a lot of body to the stock. A lot. When I chilled some extra stock it solidified to a thick pudding. To the rest of my stock I added mirepoix, corn, and left-over turkey meat. I also threw in some Canada Goose wild rice, which was cooked in a separate pot (cooking rice in the same pot will leach starch which clouds the otherwise clear soup).


A good memory of Thanksgiving on a wintry day.

Turkey Giblets

This was the first year that I had a hand in preparing the Thanksgiving turkey. Subsequently it was also the first time that I came in contact with the infamous giblets: the neck, heart, liver, and gizzard of the turkey, stored together in a bag in the cavity of the bird.

First things first: I needed to know what I was dealing with. I was familiar with the general shape and function of the first three items on that list. The gizzard, however, I embarrassingly thought was the flap of skin hanging between a turkey’s beak and neck. Turns out this is the wattle, “an organ of sexual dimorphism” (Wikipedia), whatever that means. The gizzard is actually a stomach with strong muscles that break down food.

On inspection of my own turkey giblets, and comparison with pictures on the internet, I decided that I was not given a gizzard, and that my turkey’s liver had been broken in two. In the picture at left, clockwise from the top left is the neck (obviously), the heart, and two pieces of liver.

A quick Google search suggested that the giblets are most often simmered with the gravy to add extra offally good (pun) flavour. I also looked for preparations dealing just with the liver. People online were divided as to whether turkey livers make for good eats. You can only read so many blogs and forums that waffle back and forth before just trying it out yourself.

I basically followed Julia Childs' recipe for sautéed chicken livers: salt, pepper, and flour the livers, then sauté them in butter and oil with mushrooms and ham (homemade bacon in my case). I spread the mixture on lightly toasted baguette rounds, then had them as an appetizer to left-over turkey and mashed potatoes.

Texturally, the liver was unlike anything I have had before. In a good way. Not too firm, not too supple, kind of creamy, but still meaty. Weird. Really satisfying.

I froze the neck and heart, and someday they will aid in the making of a killer stock for turkey soup.