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

The Jeromes served tatties and neeps—mashed potatoes and mashed turnips—with the haggis. So would everybody else. For many Scots, tatties and neeps is the first solid food they eat as a child, which might account for the unshakable bond they have with it. As the week 2 5 6

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wore on, I became less and less appreciative of all the mashing that took place for my benefit. Haggis appears to come with no other accompaniments, even if you beg.

The next night I arrived to a greeting from curious horses at Whitehill Farm B&B, just outside Kelso, with the haggis I’d gathered up from Lindsay Grieve in Hawick, David Palmer Butcher in Jedburgh, and J.R.

Mitchell & Son in Kelso, shops located just north of the border with England. I’d asked the manager of Palmer’s, Allan Learmonth, if he had encountered any competition from nearby English butchers, and he said they’d indeed had the temerity to enter haggis competitions. “We wiped the floor with them,” he bragged.

My welcome from Betty Smith, the proprietor of Whitehill, was somewhat restrained, and I soon realized why: I hadn’t brought haggis from her favorite butcher, George Lees of Yetholm. So off I went. The Borders countryside of Scotland is a watercolor painting, and I had no reason to regret a fifteen-mile drive. My outing took me past ancient crumbling stone walls, sculpted hedges, rolling fields, and tumbling hills.

Only the roadkill is disturbing, beautiful ring-necked pheasants no match for breakneck Scottish drivers.

When I walked into the shop, located in a town of six hundred, I informed Lees (a dead ringer for Patrick Stewart) that I had come to buy a haggis. He replied, “Good for you.” He said his recipe was taken from a book printed in the nineteenth century, but he’d adjusted it.

“Our recipe doesn’t include lungs. I don’t fancy eating lungs myself.” Joining David and Betty Smith and me at the four-haggis hoedown was another guest of the B&B, Susan Flack, who was born in Scotland but lives in England, where she seldom has the opportunity to enjoy haggis. “Not many there will eat it with me,” she complained. I invited her to dinner after hearing this heartbreaking boarding school tale: “At St. Margaret’s School in Aberdeen the dinners were unspeakably disgusting and they forced me to eat everything I didn’t like. I was ten and always hungry. Once a year, on Burns Night, they served haggis, and the girls under eleven weren’t given it—they got boiled eggs instead. I got desperate, wouldn’t eat the eggs, and they gave haggis to me. Maybe it F O R K I T O V E R

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was made of things I wouldn’t eat if they were spread out on a plate, but I loved the meatiness and the spiciness. It was heaven.” Flack looked joyfully at the long oak dining room table heaped with haggis. The Smiths remained composed. I found myself twitching a bit.

The Grieve haggis won our competition handily. Everyone had a different reason for preferring it, but it seemed pleasingly beefy to me. Second was the haggis from Lees, which had an appealing liver flavor and a smooth, rich texture. For dessert Betty Smith served lemon flummery, a lemon-chiffon pudding so light I couldn’t stop expressing my gratitude.

That left just two oddities on my haggis agenda, the first being venison haggis from Fletchers outside Auchtermuchty. The secret to finding the farm is to turn left after reaching the Tay Valley Cat Welfare Society, not before. When I drove up, a herd of farm-raised deer perked up at my approach, then fled across a pasture, moving as gracefully as a school of fish. I paid for my haggis in the honesty box, then brought it to Ninewells Farmhouse in Newburgh, located high on a bluff over the Tay River. The view from the porch of this B&B encompasses river, fields, hills, deer, sheep, cattle, and a tiny train that occasionally chugs past, rattling like a toy. Sir Walter Scott, it is said, looked out from this very spot and declared the view the best in Christendom.

Correctly sensing that I might be tiring of haggis unadorned, Barbara Baird stuffed it into a chicken breast. Although she cooked the dish beautifully, the chicken flavor was crushed by the omnipotent offal.

The venison haggis, however, was one of my favorites—herbaceous, meaty, and rich. For dessert she prepared crannachan, a pudding that appears almost without fail at the annual Robert Burns dinners. It’s prepared with cream, oatmeal, honey, raspberries, and whiskey, and is as rich as butter.

My final meal took place at Landscape, an impeccable Victorian B&B owned by Kathleen and Robbie Scott. It’s located just off the main street of Pitlochry, a town that no tourist bus bypasses. I was desperately hoping that the haggis lasagna from Macdonald Brothers Butchers & Delicatessen would remind me of Italian food. Regrettably, it did not.

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Kathleen Scott served clapshot, an Orkney Islands specialty of turnips and potatoes mashed together, as an accompaniment. The clapshot was worthy of applause, but I was not fond of the lasagna—the mal-odorous meat overwhelmed the innocent cheese and noodles. Haggis is a foodstuff with an indomitable will to win. Even worse, the béchamel had melded with the innards to produce creamed haggis. I fear years may pass before I order lasagna again.

I was done. On the return trip to New York, I put all thoughts of sheep pluck out of my head and dreamed of a nice sandwich of corned beef, chopped liver, raw onions, and chicken fat on rye bread, what I call sensible food.

Bon Appétit, may 2004

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