The Dangers of a Half-Remembered Scottish Heritage

It was in the freezer case at an international grocery store in a northern suburb. You can buy anything you want there, and first-generation Americans of all kinds drive for miles to the store to get a taste of home.

On a Saturday without plans, we used to drive up before we had kids and buy ourselves a treat: unusual cheeses, micro-brews you’ve never heard of, odd sodas. The strangest things always seem to be British (tell me, dear English readers – do any of you actually eat pickled cockles?).

We were in the butcher’s section when we found the haggis. For the unenlightened, a haggis is a sheep’s stomach stuffed with oats, cloves and assorted ground sheep parts. It was a taste of the old country, even if it was a taste that our families hadn’t eaten in generations. How could we possibly pass it by?

We took our new find triumphantly home and let it thaw in the fridge for a day. It had no cooking directions, so we discussed our options. Boil it? Wouldn’t that make it too mushy? (Little did we know.) It was obviously too thick to cook on the stove. We settled on baking it in the oven.

We put the haggis in a roasting pan and poked holes in it like a big baking potato to let steam escape. See? We were thinking. We put it in the oven. We guessed at how long it would take to cook. That looks done, doesn’t it? Sure. Let’s take it out.

We did not pipe it into the dining room, but instead set it on the table without ceremony. We read no poetry, merely got out a knife.

I don’t quite have the language to describe what happened next. Az slipped the knife into the haggis and for a count of one second nothing happened.

Then the haggis exploded. To be more exact, a stream of piping hot meat shot to the ceiling, spraying meat blobs on the ceiling fan. The spray continued for a solid ten seconds, and if you think ten seconds is not a long time, then you have never had a jet of hot haggis hit your walls, which it did as the pressure decreased. We still have discolored stains on our china cabinet, which fell victim to the last feeble gush of our dinner.

Yes, I said dinner. After the geiser ceased, we ate what was left. The outside was a little too dry (boiling is the proper way to cook haggis), but really, it wasn’t bad.

I have eaten haggis a few times since then, and sometimes it has been very good. We have played around a bit more with our Scots heritage, and some years attend a Burns Night or host our own. But while I have known tastier, I have never met a haggis that had quite the same flair for drama.