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Haggis ‘was invented by the English’
Haggis, Scotland’s most iconic dish, was an English invention that was hijacked by Scottish nationalists, a leading food historian has claimed.
Catherine Brown has discovered references to haggis in an English recipe book dated 1615, which prove that the “great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race!” was a popular delicacy south of the border at least 171 years before Robert Burns penned his poem Address to a Haggis.
According to the Scots author of Broths to Bannocks, a history of Scottish food, the earliest reference to the pudding is in The English Hus-wife, written by Gervase Markham.
Markham’s book states: “This small oatmeal mixed with the blood, and the liver, of either sheep, calfe, or swine, maketh that pudding which is called the Haggas, or Haggus, of whose goodnesse it is vain to boast, because there is hardly to be found a man that doth not affect (like) them.”
Brown, who will discuss her findings in an STV documentary this week, said that the first mention she could find of Scottish haggis was in 1747 and that it is inevitable that the recipe was copied from English books.
“It was originally an English dish. In 1615, Gervase Markham says that it is very popular among all people in England,” she said.
Brown added: “By the middle of the 18th century another English cookery writer, Hannah Glasse, has a recipe that she calls Scotch haggis, the haggis that we know today.
“Proof that by the late 18th century haggis was no longer seen as an English dish is the mention by Tobias Smollett in his novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), where the hero (an Englishman) says, ‘I am not yet Scotchman enough to relish their singed sheep’s head and haggis.’”
Brown believes that nationalists may have appropriated haggis as a symbol of Scottish nationhood in the 18th century after the country lost its own monarchy and parliament following the treaty of union.
“It seems to be that there’s an identity thing there. We’d lost our monarchy, we’d lost our parliament and we gained our haggis,” she said.
“You had the whole thing going on with Sir Walter Scott, who was very pro-active in keeping the Scottish identity alive, with tartan and so on. There was a latching onto everything that was distinctive about Scotland, and Burns had identified the dish in such an evocative way.”
Brown, who claims that the word haggis is also of English origin, believes Burns claimed the pudding as Scottish with his poem in 1786 because it was a thrifty counterbalance to the elaborate and pretentious French cuisine popular in Edinburgh at the time.
But Ian Scott, a member of the Saltire Society, said that he believed that haggis was a Scottish invention that had been introduced south of the border by a Scot.
“I can just imagine a backpacker on his way down south maybe having a picnic and leaving a bit behind, and someone saying we’ve discovered something fantastically new,” he said.
“I love haggis and every January I eat it about 11 times. These claims won’t make me feel any different. I’d tuck into it with even greater gusto if I thought that it had been invented by the English. I mean, they are bound to have invented something worthwhile.”
James Macsween, director of Macsween’s, the award-winning Edinburgh haggis-maker, said that whatever its origin, the pudding would remain a Scottish icon.
“This is certainly a revelation to me, but haggis is now renowned as Scotland’s dish largely due to Robert Burns, who made it famous.
“That’s not to say that prior to Burns that haggis wasn’t eaten in England, but Scotland has done a better job of looking after it. I didn’t hear [of] Shakespeare writing a poem about haggis.”
Haggis, which is made from a mixture of oatmeal, liver, heart and lungs, is similar to many other offal-based pudding popular around the world, including Norwegian lungemos and Mexican montalayo. Other food writers have variously suggested that the dish was invented by the ancient Romans and the Vikings.Source
Well, it's about time the English stopped having our cultural and historical past suppressed by the British and reawakened to her fullest.
Haggis is English? Too bloody right it is.
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Or wait ... they still have Andy Murray! 
Originally Posted by Dalriada
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