I like haggis. There, I’ve said it. I like meat; I like oatmeal. In Scotland, I discovered that haggis is meat-flavored oatmeal. What’s not to like? So when given the chance to eat more at the annual Robert Burns Supper in Glenwood Springs, in the ornate Victorian atmosphere of the Hotel Colorado, I jumped in the car.
All over the world, around the time of Burns’ birthday on Jan. 25, Burns Suppers take place to commemorate the man whose poetry rekindled Scots pride. The fourth annual event at the Hotel Colorado had all the required elements: haggis, turnips and potatoes (“neeps and tatties”), fancy dress, a wee dram and Burns’ poetry.
But haggis somehow becomes the preoccupation. “Some people love it,” master of ceremonies Ron Young said. “Some people think it’s the reason Scotch was invented.”
Some people who gag at haggis will cheerfully eat beef cheeks, the livers of force-fed French geese or green jello. I don’t get it.
Hail “the puddin’ race”
Granted, traditional haggis is oatmeal flavored with parts of the sheep that Americans don’t often eat: the liver, heart and “lights” (lungs), boiled with suet, mixed with oats, onions and seasonings and stuffed into the sheep’s stomach.
One recipe suggests, “Turn the stomach shaggy side out and rinse.” Traditional haggis is not for the timid.
But Macsween’s of Edinburgh, haggis purveyor to the world, moved 510 tons of haggis in 2002. Somebody must be eating it.
Modern-day haggis includes less organ meat and often comes in a sausage casing or plastic bag, ready for boiling, steaming or microwaving. I had it for breakfast at a lovely Georgian guest house in Edinburgh New Town, and at dinner alongside a duck breast. The Macsweens make theirs with lamb and beef, in sizes ranging from canape to ceremonial. The company also offers a vegetarian haggis made of beans, lentils and mushrooms.
Whoever invented haggis took the least attractive parts of the sheep and stretched them into a warm and filling meal. It would have gone the way of eels in aspic had not Robert Burns written a poem about it and turned it into the Scottish national dish.
Like much of Burns’ verse, “Address to a Haggis” elevates the subject by poking fun at it. People who eat “French ragout … or fricassee” grow thin and weak. “But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed/The trembling earth resounds his tread/Clap in his walie nieve (big fist) a blade/He’ll make it whissle/An legs an’ arms and heads will sned.” Don’t mess with us, says Burns.
Before dinner, the haggis was piped around the dining room to “Scotland the Brave,” addressed as “great Chieftain of the puddin’ race” and toasted with whiskey. I had to copy the verses out of the program because Bob Cameron, magnificent in red-and-black plaid, read in an accent so thick I could not make out a word. But he was smiling at the end as he raised his glass.
A diaspora of Scots
After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, the English tried to stamp out Scottishness. Highland dress – kilts and tartans – was forbidden. Bagpipes were banned as instruments of war. (This is not a joke.) Clans were disbanded. Gaelic became an illegal language. Highlanders were forced off the lands they had farmed for centuries. Sound familiar? Just like the American Indians, the Scots had to take their culture underground to save it.
Scots disbursed around the world. In fact, Burns planned to emigrate to Jamaica but was persuaded to stay when his first book of poetry was published. Instead of journeying to the Indies, he went to Edinburgh, where he became instantly famous.
Burns wrote in the rough dialect of a Scots plowman, telling tales of witches and ghosts he had heard as a boy and celebrating the small pleasures of a poor man’s life: pretty girls, meadow flowers, a hearty meal. Although Burns lived only to 37, his body of work revived interest in traditional music, folk tales and history.
But Burns was not just a sentimental favorite of Victorians charmed by postcard images of pipers at sunset. Scotland embraced his words because he was an ordinary man, not one of the generals or kings who had let them down so many times. The Scottish diaspora sent smart people to the United States, Canada and Australia. They invented golf, the telephone, TV and penicillin. And they think, with great longing and frequency, of home.
Forefather Charlemagne
Ken MacDonald, general manager at the Hotel Colorado – and a Canadian Scot – started the Glenwood gathering four years ago. It was a proper Burns supper in nearly all respects, although the crowd seemed excessively well-behaved: no brawling, no weeping, not much of the behavior one would have expected from Burns himself, who was described by Young as “a warmhearted, generous, impulsive, hard-drinking, hardworking, hard-playing man.”
The ornate 1893 hotel, which once boasted a waterfall running through the lobby from which guests caught trout, provided an appropriate setting. There was a long toast to Burns’ “immortal memory,” a Grand March, jigs and airs from a lively band called Fifth Reel and a Highland Fling. A guy in a canvas UtiliKilt wore his baby daughter in a tartan sling.
Oscar McCollum, seated to my left in full dress kilt, silver buttons shining, told the table about the trips to Scotland he and wife Lois Ann have taken, to meet his cousin, who runs a bagpipe factory, and the
MacCollum/Malcolm clan chief, Robin Neill Malcolm.
“We visited him last year at Duntrune Castle,” McCollum said. “It’s a small castle, but it’s been modernized, and he lives in it.”
More genealogy information was exchanged in 60 minutes than I’ve heard all my life. A few minutes later, McCollum and I discovered we’re both descended from Charlemagne, but not through my Nova Scotia- born grandmother, who was an Urquhart.
The dinner by chef Case Bricker was tasty and plentiful for its $27 price tag, featuring roast leg of lamb, haggis, sausage-and-mushroom pie, neeps and tatties, salad, and bread pudding with hard sauce. “Tam O’Shanter” was recited, the “Dashing White Sergeant” was danced, and before dinner, a guy in a kilt proposed marriage to a woman in a long tartan skirt. (She said yes.)
We also learned that ghoulies cannot cross a running stream when on a mission of evil. We kept that in mind as we drove across the Colorado River on the way home.
Lisa Everitt is a freelance writer and editor who lives in Arvada.
The details
Hotel Colorado, 526 Pine St., Glenwood Springs, 800-544-3998, hotelcolorado.com/hc_packages.html. Rooms and suites from $139. Special packages include spa services from La Provence Spa or Yampah Spa and Vapor Caves; lift tickets at Sunlight Mountain Ski Resort; Amtrak tickets from Denver; snowmobiling; or passes to the Fairy Caves or hot springs pool. Packages start at $152 per couple.
For St. Patrick’s Day, Fifth Reel will play, and corned beef and cabbage (but no green beer) will be served at the hotel’s St. Patrick’s Day Dinner and Dance on March 17 from 7-11 p.m. Reservations are required. Call 800-544-3998 or 970-945-6511, ext. 116.
