Acorn Haggis
By Jed Wheeler
But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed, The trembling earth resounds his tread…
From Address to a Haggis by Robert Burns
Haggis is the most iconic dish in Scottish cuisine, and one of the least understood by Americans! Which is odd, considering that around a third of Americans claim at least some Scottish ancestry! While my family has been in California a very long time, I grew up singing the songs, learning the history, and attending the Highland Games every year. For more than a decade now, I’ve hosted a Burns Night every January to celebrate food, family, poems, and our culture. For those not familiar, Burns night is held every January 25th on the birthday of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet. The celebration involves traditional food, with Haggis at the center, followed by participants taking turns reading their favorite poems. It’s one of our family’s favorite traditions.
The problem is that Haggis is illegal in America! So, I’ve had to adapt.
Traditionally, Haggis is the lungs, liver, and heart of a sheep ground together with oats, suet (raw hard fat from sheep or beef that’s found around the organs), and seasoning; and then sewn up in the stomach and boiled. The problem is that the USDA bans the consumption of lung. Recipes that omit lung end up with a much denser sausage - the main contribution of the lung is that it’s very light and gives the finished haggis an almost fluffy texture. That texture is the key difference between Haggis that I’ve eaten in Scotland and American versions.
To mimic that mouth feel, I’ve tried a number of different ingredients over the years. Out of all of them, acorn meal is far and away the best - and may even surpass the original for flavor. I like to blend it wth finely diced mushrooms to accentuate that lightness. You can use store bought Cremini mushrooms, but local wild chanterelle’s are my personal favorite.
The use of Acorn (Dearcan in both Irish and Scots Gaidhlig) in a traditional Scottish recipe is not nearly as unusual as you might suppose. In fact, Acorn was eaten in all of the Celtic nations for countless thousands of years. Roman historians commented on how much the Gauls loved acorn, and the archaeological evidence shows continuous consumption of Acorn in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales up until the 1700’s when the British clearcut most of the ancient Oak forests across the UK and Ireland to build the British navy. Along with laws designed to transform Scotland into pasture for sheep to supply the textile mills of the early industrial revolution with wool, this transformed Scotland’s landscape, ecosystem, and food systems. So this is not my grandmother’s recipe, but if you go back far enough I’d be surprised if something similar to it wasn’t on the table.
The second big hurdle is finding the meat- sheep pluck (organs) are probably not on sale at your local butcher shop. If you’re fortunate, you may be able to source them from a local farmer. For everyone else, beef heart and liver are often much easier to get and and an ox bung (cow appendix) can make an acceptable substitute for the stomach. If all else fails, a doubled-up cheesecloth that is lined with fat can stand in for the stomach or bung as well.
With all of the modifications, we end up with something almost, but not entirely, unlike haggis as you might experience it in Scotland (to adapt a phrase from the late great Douglass Adams). That’s ok. Immigrant recipes always change and morph as they are adapted to the new country. Culture is not a static thing to be kept in a museum!
For my family, this recipe feels like home - a uniquely Celtifornian version of the traditional dish, adapted to the place we live. It’s is as modern as it is ancient. Depending on where you live in the world, you may need to modify it further. Feel free to make it your own.
Ingredients for Acorn Haggis:
1 lb of lamb or beef heart
1 lb of lamb or beef liver
1 lb of lamb or beef rib meet
1 lb of suet or other hard beef or lamb fat. If you’re unable to get Suet (it can be hard to get in the US) you can use a different fat. A fatty beef cut like Brisket will have fat you can harvest. You may also be able to buy the beef fat trimmings from your local butcher for cheap - but you’ll probably need to request these trimmings in advance or they’ll go directly into the garbage. Duck and goose fat are sublime, but expensive. Some pork fats (for instance from a pork shoulder) can work in a pinch, but bacon fat is too salty and smoky unless that’s the flavor profile you’re going for. Do you.
1 sheep stomach or ox bung to use as a casing (if you can get them). Failing that, regular sausage casings or even cheesecloth can work.
1 lb of rolled oats (not steel cut, and yes this matters for the final texture)
1 lb of mushrooms, diced
1 lb of rough-ground acorn meal
2 tsp finely ground salt
Other seasonings to taste. Black pepper is traditional, so is a dash of allspice. Coriander and clove sometimes make appearances as well. I don’t much like allspice or black pepper so I don’t use them. Instead, I often use a blend of roughly equal parts chipotle, ancho chile, horseradish, smoked paprika, garlic powder, and onion powder. I originally developed this blend as a rub for tri tip and often have some amount of it already mixed and on stand by. I use a heaping tablespoon of that blend in a batch of haggis this size and find it fits my palate as a Californian much better. Again, do you.
Ingredients for whisky sauce:
2 tablespoons of acorn flour
2 tablespoons of butter
1 pint of heavy cream or half and half, at your preference
1 pint of stock (beef, lamb, or vegetarian)
4 ounces of whiskey or bourbon
1/4lb of mushrooms, diced
Salt to taste
1tbsp brewer’s yeast for umami and b vitamins
Process for the Haggis:
If you’re lucky enough to have sheep stomach or ox bung, wash it thoroughly and set it aside. If you can’t get one, use a knife to spread a thin layer of the rendered fat onto your cheesecloth to form a barrier.
Grind the meat and fat together. If you buy from a butcher shop, they can probably grind it for you , in which case you can mix the ground meats together with a spoon.
Using a knife (or your food processor if you’re in a hurry) finely chop the mushrooms.
Mix mushroom, acorn, and oats together, add seasoning to this mix, and then mix all of that with the meat with a large wooden spoon until it is evenly mixed. The resulting mass should be crumbly and tacky but not overly sticky.
Pack everything into your chosen casing and sew it up or tie it off. You want to make sure that the filling is packed loosely because oats expand when they cook and you don’t want your haggis to burst when you cook it.
Bring a large pot of water to boil. Salting the water is optional. If you have a steamer pot, steam some potatoes and parsnips above the haggis for the last 15-25 minutes (depending on size). These aren’t part of the recipe, but are traditional sides.
Boil the haggis for 1 hour before removing it from the water and letting it cool. You’ll want to keep the sewn up side toward the top and leaving a long trailing string that you can bring out of the pot and wrap around a handle is a good way to stabilize the haggis as it cooks. Boiling mellows the strong flavors of the organ meat, in particular the iodine flavor that often accompanies liver in particular. If you love those flavors, you can also roast haggis.
While the haggis cooks, make the sauce.
Haggis, ready to cook
Process for the Sauce:
Melt the butter in a small saucepan on low heat.
Whisk in the acorn flour and brewer’s yeast to make a roux.. cook until it browns and begins sticking together, whisking constantly to prevent lumps
Add whiskery to the roux. Cook until this mixture browns and thickens. This will also cook off the alcohol.
Whisk in the stock, blend smoothly.
Add mushrooms
Whisk in the cream
Bring almost to a boil, whisking as you go to prevent lumps. Add salt to taste at this point.
Let it cool and thicken. Serve slightly warm.
Once the haggis is done, remove from water, slice open the haggis and spoon it into a serving dish. Garnish with sauce generously and serve alongside mashed potatoes, parsnips, and Beautiful Water (Uisge Beatha in Gaidhlig) - better known in English as Whiskey!
Slainte!
