This is the first edition of the first book by Clarissa Dickson Wright, published in 1996 when she was thirty-nine.
Recently, no doubt because of Burns Night towards the end of last month, there has been much correspondence in the letters page of The Times about haggis. You’d do better to read The Haggis: A Little History. It nails the subject from ox bung to oatmeal via lambs’ pluck (heart, lungs and liver). Of course haggis need not be made from the offal of a lamb. Clarissa has found versions made from venison, pork, camel meat and chicken. The camel version is made with the stomach of a camel stuffed with couscous and dried dates. A Swedish version is called pölsa made in a casing of beef intestines from smoked beef pluck and tripes with barley and lingon berries.
While there are famous haggis eaters from Robert Burns and Queen Victoria to the Princess Royal, PG Wodehouse had reservations.
“There is no doubt that Shakespeare has rather put us off the stuff…. You remember the passage to which I refer? Macbeth happens upon the three witches while they are preparing the evening meal. They are dropping things into the cauldron and chanting “Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog,” and so on, and he immediately recognises the recipe. “How now, you secret, black and midnight haggis,” he cries shuddering.” In my edition it reads ‘hags’ not ‘haggis’ but Plum has the correct version no doubt.
In Right Ho, Jeeves Bertie is curious about the contents of haggis:
‘”I’m Scotch.”
“Really?” I said. “I never knew that before. Rummy how you don’t suspect a man of being Scotch unless he’s Mac-something and says ‘Och, aye’ and things like that. I wonder,” I went on, feeling that an academic discussion on some neutral topic might ease the tension, “if you can tell me something that has puzzled me a good deal. What exactly is it that they put into haggis? I’ve often wondered about that.”
From the fact that his only response to the question was to leap over the bench and make a grab at me, I gathered that his mind was not on haggis.’ (Right Ho, Jeeves)
Back in the days when he was Chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board, the main regulator for corporate disclosure, my old friend Sir David Tweedie used to refer to one of the standards under which unscrupulous finance directors used to shovel all the stuff they didn’t want regulators or investors to spot as being ‘a bit like a haggis’. ‘If you knew what was in it you wouldn’t touch it’.