I have exciting news for gourmet individuals who enjoy -- And who doesn't? -- authentic foreign cuisine that appears to have been barfed up by a diseased Rottweiler.
That's right, America: You may soon be able to legally obtain haggis.
Haggis is an ancient Scottish dish that was invented by ancient Scotspersons who clearly intended it as a prank. According to Wikipedia, haggis is "a savoury pudding containing sheep's pluck (heart, liver, and lungs), minced with chopped onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and cooked while traditionally encased in the animal's stomach."
That's right: They minced up the vital organs of a sheep and then cooked them inside the stomach of a sheep. The ancient Scotspersons probably thought nobody would actually eat this, but it became a beloved traditional dish, because this is Scotland, a place where -- not to indulge in negative stereotypes -- the entire population, including preschool children, is drunk.
Currently you can't get authentic haggis in the United States. It was banned by the federal government in 1971 because it contains sheep lung. I think we can all agree that this is a good thing, that in fact one of the main reasons we even have a federal government -- this is clearly stated in the Constitution -- is to protect American citizens from encountering sheep lung anywhere outside of an actual sheep.
But according to an article in the Guardian brought to my attention by alert readers named "wiredog" and (appropriately enough) "Ralph," this situation may change. The article states that a company called Macsween, one of Scotland's leading haggis manufacturers, plans to modify the recipe so it can sell haggis in the United States. Specifically, the plan is to replace the sheep lung with lamb heart. Really. Apparently the Constitution is silent on the question of lamb heart.
You may be saying to yourself: "OK, but does anybody in the United States actually want haggis?"
Apparently so. The Guardian article states that Americans have been consuming smuggled black-market haggis for years, and quotes a Macsween executive as saying that the ban is costing the Scottish haggis industry two million pounds a year in potential sales. Granted, he was probably drunk, but still: If haggis is legalized, we could be seeing a lot more of it crossing our borders.
And this is what has me concerned. I fear that if we allow haggis in, we may be opening the door to the tip of an iceberg with a slippery slope leading down the primrose path to the legalization of other scary foreign foods. There are two in particular that I'm worried about, because I have personal experience with both of them, and trust me when I tell you that we do not want either one to be unleashed on the U.S. population.
The first is lutefisk. This is a traditional Norwegian dish that I encountered in 1994, when I was in Norway covering the winter Olympics. I organized an expeditionary group of courageous professional journalists on expense accounts willing to go with me to a restaurant in Lillehammer and attempt to eat lutefisk. Here are some excerpts from the column I wrote about that night:
Lutefisk (pronounced "lutefisk") is the semiofficial national dish of Norway. This is somewhat ironic, because most people hate it. Even travel guidebooks, which always put the best possible spin on everything ("Between mortar rounds, Sarajevo offers the enterprising visitor much to...") tend to describe lutefisk with words such as "repugnant."
I asked a number of Norwegians what it was like, and the most complimentary response I got was: "It is very strong."
The recipe for lutefisk basically consists of taking a codfish and soaking it in -- I am not making this up -- lye. I have no idea how this got started. You don't think of lye as a common cooking ingredient ("Honey, could you run down to the 7-Eleven and pick me up quart of lye?").
The restaurant employees brought us our lutefisk almost as soon as we sat down, as though they wanted to get it out of the kitchen. It has a jelly-like texture and is served in quivering white slabs, which contain many bones. It has a distinct aroma. Not quite as distinct as wolf urine, but definitely headed in that direction. It is served with a little gravy boat filled with little pieces of crisp bacon floating in bacon grease. The idea is, you ladle a nice big glob of grease onto your lutefisk, and then, when nobody is looking, you sprint out of the restaurant and find a place that sells pizza.
No, that's what we felt like doing, but instead we tasted the lutefisk, and we were pleasantly surprised. Some of the comments I wrote down were:
-- "This is not totally terrible."
-- "I don't hate this."
-- "It sort of slimes down your throat."
-- "I have eaten worse things."
During the meal our table was visited by the chef, whose name was Alf Johnny Eriksen (In Norway, "Alf Johnny" is the equivalent of "Billy Bob").
"How do you like the lutefisk?" asked Alf Johnny.
"Best we've ever had!" we said. "Do many people order this?"
"No," he said. "You are the first."
I should clarify something: As far as I know, lutefisk is legal in the United States. But currently it's confined to areas of the country with high concentrations of people of Norwegian descent, by which I mean North Dakota (population: eight). I worry that if we let the haggis industry gain a toehold, the lutefisk industry will make a move. Then we'll be dealing with sheep organs and lye.
But lutefisk is not the scary foreign food I fear most. That would be fugu. This is a Japanese fish dish that is considered a great delicacy despite the fact that -- or maybe because of the fact that -- it can kill you.
In 1998 I went to Nagano, Japan, to cover the Winter Olympics, and while there, in the tradition of the Lillehammer lutefisk dinner, I organized an expedition of journalists willing to eat fugu. Here's an excerpt from what I wrote about that meal:
Fugu is a type of blowfish that is considered a delicacy despite the fact that its liver and ovaries contain a deadly nerve poison. These organs are supposed to be removed before the fish is served, but every year a few people eat improperly prepared fugu and go to that Big Karaoke Bar in the Sky.
No restaurant in the United States would think of serving such a dish without first requiring the customers to sign 56 pages of legal waivers, but here in Japan, where no food is too scary, where people eat sea urchins the way we eat M&Ms, it is no big deal to chow down on the Blowfish of Doom.
In fact, here in Nagano there is a restaurant, called Isshin, that serves nothing BUT fugu (suggested motto: "All Fugu, All the Time"). So a group of us journalists -- and this is still more evidence of why you should not trust our judgment about anything -- decided to go there and try it out.
They started us off with a glass of sake with (Why not?) a fried blowfish fin in it. There was also a little plate with various mystery-food items, including a snail the size of a cocker spaniel. I passed on the snail, but I did eat some of the other mystery items, one of which was a little slippery glob of whitish stuff cut into a cube. Our Japanese interpreter, Emiko Doi, would not tell us what it was until we had all eaten it. Then she announced, in a cheerful voice: "This is fish sperm!"
This announcement was greeted with a hearty round of gagging and some very tasteless jokes about a major world leader whose name I will not mention here except to say that it rhymes with "Fresident Flinton."
After the sperm course, the waitress brought in the actual blowfish that we were going to eat. The fugu is not a looker. It is a slimy lump with eyeballs. It is definitely going to be the last one invited to the Senior Fish Prom.
But we didn't want to be rude, so we admired the lump as though it were a fine oriental vase. We also asked the waitress, through Emiko, if there was any chance that we were going to die. She laughed, and, through Emiko, replied: "They take all the poison part away. No person have been injured here in 20 years." (That would be a good way to advertise a fugu restaurant. You could have a McDonald's-style sign, only instead of saying "Over 40 Billion Served," it would say "Nobody Dead Yet!").
So anyway, they served the fugu, and we ate it, and nobody died that I noticed. I cannot honestly say that the meal tasted good, but we were so happy to be alive that we didn't care.
At this point, you probably have a couple of questions. “Dave,” you’re wondering, “are you saying that your newspaper chain paid a lot of money to send you all the way to Norway and Japan to cover the Winter Olympics, and instead of writing about sports, you wrote about going to dinner?”
Not exclusively! I also wrote a lot about wolf urine, which (I am not making this up) the Norwegians spray on their railroad tracks to keep the moose away, because the moose keep getting hit by trains. Sometimes I even wrote about the Winter Olympics, but to be honest if you’ve seen one skier go down a mountain, you’ve got the basic idea.
Your other question is, “Dave, what can I, as a concerned American, do about the imminent Haggis Invasion, which as you point out could open the door to lutefisk, and even God Forbid fugu?”
I frankly don’t know. Maybe, as a precaution, we should deport the eight North Dakotans. I’m just spitballing here. But somebody needs to do something. I urge you to write to your congressperson and tell him or her or them how you feel about the threat of minced foreign lamb hearts surging unhindered across our borders. You might also mention that “Minced Foreign Lamb Hearts” would be a good name for a rock band. That way he or she or they will know you’re serious.
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Some of us actually like scrapple. We just don’t want to know what it is.
I’m so glad you’re back, Dave!