Scotland, EUROPE
I have just written a post on cooking with the stomach linings; this one is cooking in the sheep’s stomach. This is the weirdest delicacy in the European continent. It is Haggis the National dish of Scotland.
Though Haggis resembles the US delicacy scrapple, the latter is comparatively edible. In haggis the sheep offal, consisting of liver, heart, and lungs are blended with oatmeal, suet, seasonings and is boiled in the sheep’s stomach for several hours. Haggis usually served with mashed rutabaga and mashed potatoes. After boling the scrapple mixture in sheep’s stomach it is pressed out of it and filled in beef caps to give them the shape of sausages.
Some versions of Haggis stuffs vegetabls in place of offals and some versions stuff deer’s offals into the casings. Some supermarkets sell haggis in artificil casings rather than in the stomach. Traditionally Haggis is made out of sheep or beef and is eaten on Burn’s day, on January 25th, when Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, is commemorated.
The Scots believe in using all the parts of a sheep which otherwise would have been wasted, and some believe that eating certain parts of an animal would give them the traits of that animal…why papa bear has not become a honey bee? It is stretching the horizons of culinary world to fit in just about everything and that is weird.
Haggis Recipes at:Gumbo pages
