Eating the haggis JOHN MAHONEY
January, 1999
What was a nice Irish boyo like hisself doing out on a dreary January Saturday, eating spiced-up offal boiled in a sheep's belly and washing it down with wee plastic cups of Scotch whiskey while the tartaned piper did his thing?
Well, it was free, don't-you-know, and we Celts have to stick together.
What it was, friends, was the Fourth Annual Robbie Burns Day celebration at the Haskell Free Library & Opera House in Derby Line, Vermont, and Rock Island, Quebec.
The U.S./Canadian border goes right through the Reading Room - actually, it slid right under Ms. Pringle's hubby's kilt while he proffered the offal puddin' to the 90-some assembled Celts, real and wanna-be's.
There was pipe music, Scots poetry, a story, a lovely lady who did an inspiring highland fling, and good, rich stuff to eat: Scotch eggs stodged up by a German lassie, buttery cookies, and whiskey for those who do and tea for those who don't, or didn't that afternoon.
The pièce de résistance, of course, was the haggis. Fetched from Montreal for Ms. Pringle's annual. Ms. Pringle is the librarian. That's not her real name. It's Ms. Prangley. But the haggis-fetcher heard Pringle and Pringle is a right proper name for a dreary day on to eat the innards of cloven-hooved animals boiled up in a sheep's stomach.
I confess that when Ms. Pringle's hubby, Philippe, strode into the Kenneth Baldwin Memorial International Reading Room to the haunting strains of the bagpipe and reverently presented the haggis, surrounded by boiled chunks of potatoes and turnips, I was not enthused.
Nor when the haggis-fetcher read Burns' Ode to Haggis, then drove his dirk into the stomach pudding did I leap to my feet and beg for a serving.
No, I held back until my friend Karina of the Scotch eggs brought me a wee taste in a styrofoam cup and I am here to report that it was a fine, spicy delight. I had several bites, each of which was washed down with a wee dram of Gordon's whiskey. It wasn't single malt, mind you, but it did the job nicely.
The taste of the haggis lingered on the back of hisself's tongue, and was still there when the trip home to Fool's Hollow ended. So there was nothing to do but pour several fingers of Irish whisky to make things right.
And while we're discussing making things right, I hope Ms. Pringle will do the right thing on March 17 when we Gaels celebrate St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland. Ms. Pringle, I recommend without qualification John Jameson's 1780 Reserve as the proper potion.
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