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A historian has claimed that haggis, the national dish of Scotland, is an English invention. What tosh!
Catherine Brown bases her findings on a reference to haggis in an English cookery book published in 1615, whereas the first written reference to it in Scotland was by Robert Burns in 1747.
So what? Who is to say that the Sassenach author didn’t just take the recipe from a Scottish book that no longer survives or that it was a recipe handed down from his Scottish forebears? You may as well say that the Isle of Skye was English because Johnson and Boswell published details of their visit there in 1773!
James McSween, the premier haggis maker in Edinburgh has got it right when he says, ‘I didn't hear of Shakespeare writing a poem about it!
.
A historian has claimed that haggis, the national dish of Scotland, is an English invention. What tosh!
Catherine Brown bases her findings on a reference to haggis in an English cookery book published in 1615, whereas the first written reference to it in Scotland was by Robert Burns in 1747.
So what? Who is to say that the Sassenach author didn’t just take the recipe from a Scottish book that no longer survives or that it was a recipe handed down from his Scottish forebears? You may as well say that the Isle of Skye was English because Johnson and Boswell published details of their visit there in 1773!
James McSween, the premier haggis maker in Edinburgh has got it right when he says, ‘I didn't hear of Shakespeare writing a poem about it!
.
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