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Food|Crafting a Haggis for American Tastes (and Import Restrictions)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/dining/scotland-haggis-macsween-burns-night.html
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Macsween, a popular maker of the distinctive Scottish dish, has developed a recipe for the U.S. market that swaps sheep lung for lamb heart as a main ingredient.
Jan. 25, 2025, 9:43 a.m. ET
When Scottish Americans and Scottish expats sit down on Saturday night to celebrate the birthday of the 18th-century poet Robert Burns, the traditional haggis will probably not be up to purist standards.
Haggis, the savory Scottish dish of boiled sheep innards, oatmeal and spices, can be a real haggis, many argue, only if it includes a key ingredient: sheep lung, which is used in the stuffing. In the United States, which bans imports of haggis with sheep lung, some Americans of Scottish heritage have turned to the black market to get their hands on the real thing.
Now Macsween, one of the more popular makers of haggis in Scotland, has developed a recipe that would meet U.S. import guidelines by replacing sheep lung with lamb heart. It’s not the first modification that Macsween, which was founded in Edinburgh in 1953, has made to its haggis. In a nod to modern tastes, it has swapped the sheep stomach that has traditionally been used as a haggis casing for a beef casing, like those used in some sausages.
“Do I think there’s something to be said for textural difference that the lung adds to it? Yes,” said Greg Brockman, a butcher in Brooklyn who has made his own version of haggis for years. “Do I think the average consumer is going to notice? Probably not.”
The new take on the delicacy is slated to arrive in the United States by this time next year, in time to be the centerpiece at Burns Night celebrations.
Burns helped turn haggis, which was traditionally consumed by peasants, into Scotland’s national dish with lines like “Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face / Great chieftain o’ the pudding-race!” in his poem “Address to a Haggis,” which is read as part of the celebrations.
