Haggis Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Haggis is a pudding of sheep's offal (the heart, liver, lungs and so on), minced and mixed with oatmeal (oats ground coarse), suet, onion and spices, packed into a sheep's stomach and boiled in the bag. Today it is known as the national dish of Scotland.

Sheep's offal, oats and suet were all ingredients long at hand in Britain. Using a sheep's stomach as a bag, filling it and boiling it also appears in English cookery writing before the name haggis turns up in the record. An English cookery manuscript with a colophon dated 1381 includes a pudding called Afronchemoyle, made by filling a sheep's stomach with eggs, bread and suet and boiling it. It is not called haggis and uses no offal, so it is a different dish, but the technique of filling a stomach and boiling it was already in use in England in the late fourteenth century.

By the end of the Middle Ages the name haggis was on record in both the south and the north of Britain. In the south it survives in fifteenth-century recipes; in the north the word appears in an early sixteenth-century poem. Among the oldest records that give both the name haggis and a way of making it are two English manuscripts from around 1430. In one, a sheep's heart, kidneys and guts are chopped with herbs and boiled; in the other, a sheep's guts and fat are chopped, mixed with bread, egg yolks and milk, packed into the sheep's stomach and boiled. Neither contains oats, and which of the two came first cannot be settled. English print first calls a pudding of oatmeal, blood and liver a haggis in 1623, in the second edition of Gervase Markham's household book, and even there it is a single sentence naming the dish, with no method given. In the north the record goes no further than that one word, and the sources do not allow the birthplace to be fixed on one side or the other.

Haggis became a symbol of Scotland later, and that is a separate story from how the dish came about. In 1786 the poet Robert Burns wrote Address to a Haggis, and from then on haggis took shape as a dish of national pride. The age of the dish and the relative newness of the national symbol are best kept apart.

Two popular stories give haggis an ancient pedigree. One says the ancient Romans, or the Norse Vikings, brought it. The other says it has been Scotland's own national dish since time immemorial.

The first draws on how widespread the method is. Dishes of offal and grain boiled in a stomach turn up in the ancient foodways of many peoples, which makes them easy to pin on some incoming group. But no independent source has been found that connects haggis, the particular dish, to ancient Rome or to Scandinavia, and the story remains an origin legend.

The second fares no better. The name haggis is on record on both sides of Britain by the end of the Middle Ages, but what survives in the south is recipes, while in the north it is a single word in a poem. Among the oldest of those recipes are the two in English manuscripts from around 1430. Those manuscripts are also among the earliest records of the word itself. In 1623 an English household book, Markham's, likewise calls a pudding of oatmeal, blood and liver a haggis, and remarks that hardly a man can be found who does not like it. The picture of an ancient dish belonging to Scotland alone finds no footing in the sources. Its standing as a national dish is comparatively recent, built up after Burns's poem of 1786.

So who invented it? In 2009 the food historian Catherine Brown argued that haggis was English in origin and set off a controversy. But the fact that the word and the recipe surface first on the English side does not in itself mean the dish was born there. The Scottish side has the word too, in an early sixteenth-century poem, and the sources do not decide which side produced it. All that can be said is that by the end of the Middle Ages the name haggis had been written down in recipes in the south and in a poem in the north; who invented the dish cannot be identified.