A Burns Supper

The long pale of winter sets in all wet and cloudy, leaving us yearning for a feast to distract us from the melancholy hold of too little light and too much cold. Fortunately, we have one made to order: The Burns Supper.

Since the young years of the 19th century, proud Scots and other lovers of poetry have gathered to show respect to and preserve the memory of Robert Burns, the poetic genius and celebrated son of Scotland.

We get few opportunities to celebrate the works of poets. This alone gives a Burns Supper a unique appeal, but there are other reasons to attend. The supper itself is loosely ritualized, thereby dishing out a meal as ceremony. A ceremony, by all accounts, designed for the specific purpose of fun, but a ceremonial meal none-the-less. If you have not had a chance to experience such a night, you may want to give it a shot. From the introduction of the ‘top table’, through the presentation of the haggis, to the final event, the response of the lassies, the night is a whirl of the unusual, the poetic, good food and ample drink.

If you enjoy the idea of an evening of ceremonial song, poetry, fun and eating but cannot find a Burns Supper near by, you may want to consider hosting your own. There are several sites that offer hints and menus. www.worldburnsclub.com/supper/burns_supper_1.htm is a good choice to get familiar with the structure and order of events that make up a Burns Supper. Of course, as pointed out, the structure is loose and open to interpretation, so take your own tack if you want.

The bill o’ fare of the Burns Supper varies from supper to supper. Standards include cockaleekie soup, haggis and tatties (potatoes), and bannocks (oat cakes) and cheese. The meal gets its start with the presentation of the haggis; a small parade complete with piper and the delicious Address to a Haggis, one of the poems of the man himself.

Which brings up the question, just what is a haggis anyway, and is it safe to eat? The traditional haggis is a sausage of sorts, made from lamb or mutton, onions and oatmeal. If you have heard of haggis before, it was probably not in a good light. Haggis jokes abound in much of our media, so the first taste can be an adventure of courageous ingestion. In the end, really, it’s a sausage with oats as a filer. A good haggis is, well, good. A bad haggis is, you guessed it, not so hot.

To get a good haggis, you may consider making your own. If you take this route, you can decide whether to use the traditional parts of lamb or go toward something more agreeable with modern perceptions of diet. Or, you could go all modern and make a vegetarian haggis, an option to be explored in a future post.

copyright 2006 Chromia Poetics