Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Travel

Travel Advisor
Giant lap children
Our travel expert puts freeloading airplane toddlers in their place, and offers the scoop on bungee jumping and fishing and steamer trips in Norway.
By Donald D. Groff
[01/13/00]

Fear and loving in Sri Lanka
Serendipity is the traveler's best friend.
By David Fox
[01/12/00]

Out of the Blue
Fly boy faux pas
Sometimes even high-flying airline pilots turn out to have feet of clay.
By Elliott Neal Hester
[01/11/00]

Column
Naked ambition
You cannot imagine the position I've been in since I started writing about sex.
By Virginia Vitzthum
[01/11/00]

Finding gold in Turkey
A stay among remote mountain villagers unearths life-changing riches.
By Maxine Rose Schur
[01/08/00]

Complete archives for Travel

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

A couple of weeks ago, on New Year's Eve, millions of people all over the world greeted the new millennium singing a Burns all-time big hit:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o'auld lang syne?

"Auld lang syne" is Scots dialect for "long ago." And Burns is reminding us to honor the past and remember the importance of old friendships, and that's precisely what all of Scotland does every year on the anniversary of Burns' birth. If you can get yourself to Scotland for a long weekend leading up to Tuesday, Jan. 25, you're in for a hell of a party.

What to eat

Scotland is not rich in farmland, and its climate can be less than ideal for growing things. As a result, the history of its cooking demonstrates the Scots' skill at making a lot from a little. The Scots are devoted to recipes that are based on root vegetables like potatoes and turnips. Because of the intensity of the winters, Scots created a cuisine designed to produce a sense of inner warmth -- lots of porridge, thick soups, endless rounds of scones, oatcakes and Dundee cake.

Hundreds of miles of seashore, loch-front and riverside, however, give Scotland access to an ideal source of seafood. Scotch salmon is world famous, and there is a generous supply of trout and haddock. Aberdeen Angus beef produces excellent steaks, and the hunting season brings in venison, pheasant, hare and grouse.

Very often the most important dish at a Scottish gathering is based on an ancient recipe that stuffs meat, vegetables and grain into the stomach of an animal and then cooks it over a steaming liquid. Christmas pudding was originally a meat sausage of this kind. In the late 1600s, dried fruit was added and the wrapping shifted to a pudding cloth. Eventually, the fruit replaced meat entirely.

Burns wrote a poem entitled "To a Haggis," in which he calls the dish the "great chieftain of the pudding race." Accordingly, haggis is the featured dish at a Burns Night party. Alongside the haggis you might have some mashed parsnips and Clapshot, a turnip and potato puree. The menu could open with Cock-a-Leekie soup made from chicken and leeks, and close with Cranachan, a raspberry cream, presented with petticoat tail shortbread cookies.

The word "haggis" comes from the verb "to hack" or mince, as in mince pie. The same root gave us the word "hash," and haggis has much in common with our modern recipes for hash. Traditionally, haggis is made from assorted animal parts that have been finely chopped, then seasoned and cooked in a sheep's stomach, though today the container in which it is cooked is usually a cloth bag. The use of an animal's paunch as the receptacle for the ingredients adds that touch of romantic barbarism that is so dear to the Scottish heart. Haggis goes with howling bagpipes and leaping over swords. The less you know about the preparation of the dish the better. Be content with the knowledge that it looks like a round meatloaf and tastes great.

Next page | What to drink: The wonders of whisky