Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

fine, fat haggis out of the display case at the shop where he works and pointed to the list of ingredients.

“Nowadays,” he added, “it all has to be labeled. An old butcher I worked for who started back in the thirties taught me how to make haggis. He said, ‘The more crap you put in, the better it is.’ In the old days anything left over at the end of the week we took out of the freezer and flung in the haggis. Making haggis then, it was a good laugh.” I had come upon Marsh at the well-regarded Lindsay Grieve Family Butchers, located on the main street of Hawick, one of those Scottish towns with a name impossible to pronounce, no matter how simple it looks. I had driven there to purchase a haggis, which I added to the growing pile on the backseat of my rental car. Some men travel alone, but I went nowhere in Scotland without a carload of haggis—canned haggis, shrink-wrapped haggis, plastic-wrapped haggis, and, whenever possible, haggis enclosed in the genuine stomach of a sheep. (One good thing about haggis: it doesn’t express its unique bouquet until after it’s cooked.)

My mission was to taste every haggis I could find, or at least keep trying until the haggis hangover I was developing compelled me to stop.

I started in Edinburgh and made my way in an ever-widening circle around the city, traveling as far south as the Borders—the region just 2 5 4

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above England—and as far north as Pitlochry, a town known to have a butcher keen on haggis lasagna.

Haggis is heaven to a Scotsman. It is a foodstuff that resonates with the glories of days gone by, even if to outsiders it is nothing but a sack of oatmeal and innards. The primary ingredient is offal, known as “pluck” in the local vernacular, which consists of the liver, the heart, and the lungs of the chosen animal, usually a sheep. Add oatmeal, fat, and spices, wrap it in a casing made from the stomach, and you have the authentic national dish, as delectable to Scotsmen as sweetmeats served with afternoon tea. A friend of mine calls haggis the first meal in a bag.

That this food is a treasure rather than a peculiarity is almost certainly the responsibility of Robert Burns, who called it the “Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race!” in his famous ode, “To a Haggis.” To be fair to Burns, the Scots might well have overestimated his passion for haggis, inasmuch as he also wrote “To a Mouse” (“Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie”) and “To a Louse” (“Ha! where ya gaun, ye crowlin’

ferlie!”). Regardless, the January 25 birthday of Burns is a major holiday, and on that night a lumpish haggis is piped into banquet halls with all the pomp and ceremony of a medieval banquet.

Testaments to the magnificence of this dish abound, yet nowhere in my research was I able to uncover a single utterance about the flavor—or, more materially, the smell. There are plenty of plaudits, but no tasting notes. That job, I realized, had been left to me.

Haggis isn’t everywhere. It’s not like it’s stacked up in every petrol station, clothing store, and souvenir shop. That would be shortbread cookies. Traditionally, haggis is prepared and precooked in butcher shops, then brought home and warmed up. (These days it’s mostly microwaved.) I set out to pick up samples of the most renowned, figuring I could bring them to B&Bs, where the proprietors would be happy to work up an evening meal. That last piece of business was a bit difficult to arrange—after all, B&B doesn’t stand for Bed & Dinner.

My first stop was the Melville Guest House in Edinburgh, operated by Juli and Mel Jerome, who serve evening meals in their dining room, The Crock and Spurtle. (The Scots tend to name everything, not just F O R K I T O V E R

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pets.) Before dinner, I went shopping at a local supermarket for what the Jeromes assured me was the best canned haggis, Grant’s Traditional Recipe. I located it in the “ready meals” section, not far from the canned pork tongue. At Marks & Spencer, the famous specialty store, I discovered a variation of haggis made entirely with pork products. Pig lungs, indeed! And I also bought a haggis from Crombie’s, a stylish downtown butcher shop where it was a bit pricier than the usual $3 to $4 a pound.

Then there was Macsween, perhaps the most famous haggis-maker in all the rugged land. I drove out to the suburbs, where the plant is located, to pick up both the traditional and vegetarian versions. While there, I tried to impress Jo Macsween with the magnitude of my quest to eat more haggis in a shorter period of time than any man alive. I can’t say she was impressed. “When my brother and I worked on the production side,” she responded, “we ate some of each batch. We had haggis five times a day.”

Back at the B&B, I learned my first lesson: haggis isn’t pretty. Once the packaging is cut open, the contents spill out, looking like crumbly meat loaf. The odor, however, is complex and distinctive, with the musti-ness of an old bookstore, the tang of a Turkish spice market, and the animality of a butcher shop’s back room. At different times, with different haggis, I would note allspice, sage, cinnamon, and even ginger.

They all had a perfume I’d call eau d’abattoir, the not-entirely-unpleasant smell of the inside of an animal.

Macsween’s is a haggis-eater’s haggis, pungent and impressive.

Crombie’s was much more subdued, almost to a fault. Grant’s suffered from what I call the Dinty Moore effect, tasting like the can it came from. The vegetarian haggis could well have been vegan fare; it reminded me of a life-sustaining lentil-barley mash. The all-pork haggis was unapproachable; it brought to mind the body of a