Skip to main content
Main

Scotch Haggis

A traditional Scottish dish made from sheep's pluck, suet, oatmeal, onions, herbs, and spices, cooked in a sheep's bag.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Scotch Haggis

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bag

  1. Wash the sheep's bag in cold water, scrape, and clean it well. Soak it overnight in cold water with salt.

Make the filling

  1. Wash the pluck and place it in a pot of boiling water with 1 tablespoon of salt. Boil for 2 hours, letting the windpipe hang out of the pot.

  2. Once cooled, cut off the windpipe. Grate half the liver and mince the heart, liver, suet, and onions very small.

  3. Add the toasted oatmeal, pepper, salt, herbs, and 1 cup of the reserved liquor to the mixture. Mix well.

Fill and boil

  1. Fill the bag slightly more than half with the mixture and sew it up.

  2. Place the bag in a pot of boiling water and boil for 3 hours, pricking it occasionally to prevent bursting.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Oatmeal
Absorbs the liquor and fat, giving the filling its crumbly, bound texture.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the filling moist and rich as it cooks.
Onions
Add sweetness and savoury aroma to the filling.
Reserved liquor
Provides moisture that softens the oatmeal and keeps the filling tender.

The step that matters

Pricking the bag during boiling. Steam builds up inside the sealed bag as it cooks, and occasional pricking releases pressure so the bag does not burst.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes