101 Things #52 - Burns Night

I love Scotland and have visited many times. But an admiration for magnificent scenery, whisky, the birthplace of some world class engineers and Edinburgh, does not mean uncritical acceptance of all things tartan. I need to draw the line and in today's 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die, and cunningly posted on the correct date, the finger of rejection points firmly at any proposal to

Eat a Burns Night Dinner.

I can't claim to be much of a fan of Robbie Burns' poetry but then he's probably not too keen on mine. What I really wish to avoid for the rest of my days is the plate of splodge that is a traditional Burns Night dinner, a dish of haggis, neeps and tatties that looks like something dredged up in a old-fashioned works canteen when you're too late for the fish and chips. Something, in fact, like this:

Pic: Telegraph.co.uk

The white stuff is the tatties, or mashed potato. Fine, I have no problem with a decent wodge of this underneath a couple of sausages, or escorting a lamb shank or a fresh fillet of sea bass. Or almost anything, actually. The orange stuff is mashed swede or turnips, vegetables I will not eat, no matter how much they are boiled and beaten into submission and covered with lashings of brown sauce. And parsnips can get knotted as well. So don't think you can get round me by subtly changing the recipe for neeps.

The haggis, of course, was immortalised by Burns. I believe his first draft went on these lines:

They were burning a witch in Clackmannan
Just for a wee bit o' fun
When she started to smoulder
Said a nearby beholder
"It smells like that hagg is done"

But this never got printed. Anyway, what actually goes into a haggis?

Historically, when hunters made their kill, they would use up the offal, which went off first, using the cleaned animal’s stomach as a cooking bag. Minced heart, liver and lungs are bulked out with oatmeal, onions, suet, seasoning and spices before cooking

source: BBC Good Food

So the bits of the animal that nobody really wanted to eat are cooked inside another bit nobody wants to eat and then, in order to get it into your mouth without you gagging, are concealed under perfectly good oatmeal and onions so as to produce a brown sludge that takes me right back to the school dinners served in my primary school, when the main course was either "hash" or "mince". 

Presumably the good bits, you know, the actual real meat that didn't go off the moment you ripped it out of the stricken animal, were presented to the Laird. Well, I'm one with the Laird here. You may keep your haggis and neeps and pipe them in and salute them to your heart's content. I'll be the bloke in the other room tucking into a decent steak-and-ale pie. With mash.