Pre-Mad Cow I was able to have real haggis at a Burn’s Night Dinner here in VA. It wasn’t as bad as one might suspect from the ingredients, but then again maybe the 27 toasts of single malt Scotch that preceeded dinner may have changed my perceptions a little.
Now, the pseudo-haggis that we had after the import ban took effect…that was…well, the word to describe how bad hasn’t been invented yet.
My brother once brought home canned haggis from his trip to Scotland. To this day I still think there must have been a labelling error at a dog food factory somewhere.
Oddly enough, I know there is (or was) a company in Chicago that cans and sells its own haggis. My google-fu has turned up references to said company, but no names or whether they still make the stuff or not.
While eyeballs and tongue aren’t my favored cuisine, the pictures of sheep’s heads on a plate are just making me hungry. You could get plenty of meat off that skull.
Dude, you can’t judge haggis by a canned version any more than you would chili or beef stew. You could make the dog food comment just as easily about Dinty Moore, after all. If you’re really interested, there are probably places local to you that make haggis. (For example, I know of two off-hand in this area.) Check with local butchers for starters. And keep in mind not every freshly prepared version is the same, either. Some are quite peppery, some are much more livery… These I do not like so much.
This whole thread and nobody mentions “purist chitlins”? (There are people in the south and I’m sure other parts of the country who eat chitlins [hog intestines] that have not been cleaned out, which means the semidigested food of the hog’s last meal [or as it’s known in the vernacular, hogshit in formation] is cooked along with the rest.)
I accidentally had fried chitlins once, thinking they were fried sausage (it does exist). The scary thing was- they weren’t bad. (These weren’t the “purist” variety, though.)
The film version of Angela’s Ashes has a great scene involving the family’s sheep head Christmas dinner; the father pops the eyeball into his mouth.
I don’t know what it is called, but the Innus of the lower north shore of the St-Lawrence river and Labrador consider it a delicacy : take a dead caribou, open its belly and drink/eat the content of its stomach. I know it is green and the smell is… special. I just wrote my brother who spent more time than me in that area for the name. Hopefully, he will provide it shortly.
Cripes, I knew sentencing guidelines were getting harsh in California, but sausage? Or is that how he got rid of Laci?
Tasteless humor aside, I’ve done the cobra-wine thing in Vietnam as my disgusting food pinnacle, and for anyone who’s read Tony Bourdain’s take on this, he has it right on. The heart wasn’t bad, but the mixed bile and maotai (rice alcohol) was nasty.
Does fish sauce count as a food? It doesn’t have quite the visual punch of, say, a sheep’s head, but it smells eerily like cat piss and ends up in most of what my roommate cooks.
All this yummy food ought to be washed down with a nice refreshing cup of luak coffee. It’s just like any other coffee, except that the beans have been preprocessed through the digestive tract of a kind of civet cat before being roasted and ground.
Sorry to quote myself, but my brother replied with the name : “touk-ouskash-ken”. My preparation seemed to be off (since I had been working from memory) : you take a freshly killed caribou, remove its stomach with its content (usually partially digested lichen), tie a knot at the esophagus or the duodenum, fill it with the blood of the animal then hang it for three days behind the wood stove and then serve the content on caribou steak. Apparently, it is an acquired taste.