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By Root 694 0

and ales, a few middle-aged geezers drinking pints and chatting with the bartender. In a back room, there are a few tables and an electric fire in the hearth, some fading football posters on the walls. It is a place of perfect stillness and calm, the first sip of ale inspiring feelings of near-transcendental serenity. This was it, the perfect refuge from the modern world, and all its worries. Within moments of hanging my coat on a well-worn hook and sitting down, I turned to my friend and said, ‘I’m never leaving.’ I know it’s terribly unfair of me to be so coy about the place. But don’t worry, Scotland is loaded with great pubs – and I’m sure I’m overromanticizing. I do that a lot.

For Simon, it’s love/hate with Edinburgh. He was not happy that I’d be having my first real haggis experience there. But he’d found us a very decent place on Edinburgh’s High Street, just down from the castle, and he assured me that even though we were in (to his mind) the second-best city, the chef here knew what he was doing.

What is haggis, anyway? For one thing, it’s the punch line to a thousand jokes in America. The Thing Never to Be Eaten Under Any Circumstances . . . What Groundskeeper Willie eats . . . It does sound terrifying to the uninitiated: a hot gooey mix of sheep’s ‘pluck’ (the whole esophagus, lungs, liver, and heart, yanked out in one go, then finely ground), oatmeal, onions, and black pepper. This filling is cooked inside a sheep’s stomach (which you don’t eat) and then steamed slowly, covered in the oven, then served with ‘neeps and tatties’ – mashed turnip and potato. As with so many dishes, it originated with the leftovers of the rich landowners – turned into a proud classic by an enterprising and desperate peasantry.

A kilted bagpiper’s performance preceded the arrival of dinner. (With his graying handlebar mustache, he looked suspiciously like the original ‘Leather Guy’ in the Village People.) Another few seconds of screeching pipes and I’d be reaching into my pocket for a hundred-pound note – just to make him go away. I may love Scotland, but the sound of bagpipes is as alluring as a dentist’s drill hitting nerve. Fortunately, our haggis soon arrived, a big plump flesh-colored steaming balloon, tied at both ends and rupturing slightly in the middle, ground meat and oat mixture spilling out like a slowly erupting volcano. As I quietly struggled for words to describe its somehow violent-looking appearance, the fully costumed piper did me one better, yanking a sharp, menacing-looking dirk out of his scabbard, approaching the near-to-bursting membrane, and swinging right in to Robert Burns’s ‘Address to the Haggis.’ I couldn’t follow too many of the words, though I did catch the phrases ‘gushing entrails’ and ‘a wondrous, glorious sack,’ and then the piper slit the stomach fully open with his blade and retreated, leaving us to enjoy our guts.

After one mouthful, I couldn’t disagree with Scotland’s greatest poet. It was glorious. Haggis rules! Peppery, hot, meaty – it didn’t taste of anything you might expect in a dish cooked in stomach. Not really tasting organlike at all, no bitter livery taste, no chewy mysterious bits, no wet-dog taste of tripe. It was in no way offensive to even the most pedestrian American tastes, but subtle and rich in a boudin noir sort of a way. If you can handle boudin noir or black pudding, or even sautéed calf’s liver, you will love haggis. The mashed tatties and neeps provided a perfect counter to the hearty, peppery, oniony, oat flavor. The shepherd’s pie in your old high school cafeteria was far more challenging to the palate. If haggis, right out of the oven, didn’t look the way it did, we might all be eating it in America. They’d be serving it from street stands in New York, fried and battered with curry sauce. High-end restaurants would be making ‘haggis sauce’ and ‘feuilleté of baby bok choy, Yukon Gold potato, and haggis with a whiskey sauce,’ and stuffing it into metal rings, decorating it with squeeze-bottle designs.

Scotland has far more to offer hungry pilgrims than grease and