Quit bashing my national dish

I'm tired of everyone bashing the haggis. Often when I Google the recipe, I come up with snarky sarcastic websites that give you the directions and then usually say something like "serve with a glass of whiskey so that you can actually eat the stuff!". Even Alton Brown, Food Network Chef and new darling of Concord Grape Juice, ends his recipe with "Serve with mashed turnips and potatoes, if you serve it at all!"

Well excuuuuuuuuse me!

What is haggis you may ask? In basic terms, a sausage. Albeit a large, football sized sausage, but a sausage none the less. However it gets a bad rap because the contents are a sheep's pluck (heart, liver, lungs, and tongue) and is cooked in the sheep's stomach. Sure, organ meat isn't everyone's cup of tea, but sausage is traditionally made from various "bits" of animals. Want to know what makes the casing of a sausage crisp when you cook it? That would be the small intestine that the filling is pressed into.

Haggis and other types of sausage were a great way to use up the nutritious organs of animals before they went bad (the pluck got it's name this way, because these organs were the first to be "plucked" from the carcass). They were a cheap way to make sure that  you were using all of the animal while getting a hearty meal.

I am determined that some day I will make haggis. In fact, I hope it will happen this year. There is a man at the farmer's market who sells sheep, lamb, and goat meat and I think sometime I'll ask if he could hold the pluck and stomach for me. There is a lot of prep time involved, because you have to soak the stomach overnight, cook the organs, and then boil the mixture in the stomach for three hours. However, apart from butchering the various organs (which I have minimal experience with), it's pretty much just waiting for it to be done. Plus, I think I can just use ground beef instead of suet, because for some reason suet seems to be extremely hard to come by in these modern times. I am so becoming a butcher's best friend in the future.

And if I decide to go all out Burns Supper, I am so reciting "Address to a Haggis" and ceremonially stabbing the haggis. It's hard to memorize poems with a Scottish accent, though.

(image from here)