Haggis, long outlawed, is soon to be legal again.*
Hope they're busting out the Laphroaig at Livingston Manor's Snowdance Farm, where the Guardian's Ian Williams hied himself last year in search of that supremely unobtainable foodstuff, an authentic American haggis. Williams's account is a marvelous read, though not for the faint of stomach:
The sheep's stomach looked like an alien sex organ, and it had a pervasive cloacal smell, as I everted it and scrubbed it thoroughly, over and over again in cold running water. The lungs were a bit of a trial: the recipe points out that they should be boiled with the rest of the pluck, but with the windpipe over the edge of the cauldron so any mucus would drip out into a bowl.
Many hours of pluck-grinding, oatmeal-toasting, stomach-stuffing and cauldron-steaming improved things considerably, and the evening ended in haggisy jubilation:
And as we thumbed through the collected works of the poet, just after what could have passed as a predictive ode to Washington DC, Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation, we stumbled across his Ode to General Washington:
A tyrant's proudest insults brav'd,
They shout-a People freed! ….But come, ye sons of Liberty,
Columbia's offspring, brave as free,
In danger's hour still flaming in the van,
Ye know, and dare maintain, the Royalty of Man!All agreed as the malt - and indeed some rum and brandy - flowed, that the departure of George Bush, and the successful defiance of the USDA made the ode timely. Next year in the Catskills, was the cry.
Here's to that.
*Update: Alas, it was too good to be true. After a flurry of news reports here and in the UK on the supposedly imminent legalization, the USDA announced that it's not lifting the ban anytime soon.
