It was revealed last week that haggis, Scotland's national dish, was actually invented in England.
Food historian Catherine Brown (who is Scottish, so it wasn't an English person making these claims) has found a reference to haggis in an English cooking guide from 1615.
The earliest mention she finds in a Scottish publication is in 1747, which apparently proves that the English ate haggis, a dish made from sheep's heart, liver and lung, stuffed into a stomach, before the Scots.
It's one thing for the Scots to discover that haggis is not of Scottish origin, but quite another for it to have been invented by the evil, devil-like English, the people who, not so long ago, the Scots thought had tails and ate their babies.
And, of course, as a sporting nation Scotland is completely useless except when it comes to indoor bowls and all-terrain moaning. Take a look at the recent results of Scottish football teams such as Motherwell, Aberdeen and Celtic in the Champions League and Europa League qualifiers.
In this article, Jan Moir, who is Scottish, asks the question: "Apart from the Glasgow kiss (which is actually British slang for a headbutt, referring to Scotland's reputation for violence), are the Scots good at anything?"
McDuffers: Bagpipes from Greece, tartan from China, and haggis from England. Apart from the Glasgow kiss, are we Scots good for anything?
By Jan Moir
04th August 2009
Daily Mail
Dark time to be Scottish: He's not just got a caber on his shoulder. He's also got a chip.
Great Scot! Aren't we just? Well, not any more, apparently. For these are dark, dark times for those, like me, of the Scottish persuasion. Over the past few years we have had to cope with some serious identity issues. First we discovered that bagpipes were invented by the Greeks, not us. That was a terrible, bad blow - but enough about the sound they make.
The Loch Ness Monster is an obese imposter at best, an illegal immigrant at worse. Tartan, it seems, was originated by the Chinese. Irn-Bru is not actually made from girders, it only tastes like it does.
Most of Braveheart was shot in Ireland. Susan Boyle has shaved off her groaning eyebrows, which is a bit like the Monarch of the Glen cutting off his 12-point antlers.
Bagpipes were invented by the Greeks
As a sporting nation, we hardly ever win at anything, except indoor bowls and all-terrain moaning. Has it escaped anyone's attention that Fred the Shred, modern folklore's answer to the Sheriff of Nottingham, is 100 per cent Scottish! Oh the black, burning shame of it all.
And just when you think there is no further corner of Scottish nationhood or culture that can be insulted, abused or appropriated by someone else, it turns out that haggis was invented by the English.
Haggis? Our haggis? The Scottish national dish of sheep's heart, liver and lungs, chopped up and cooked in an animal stomach with oatmeal and onions? Prudence and pluck in one ingenious, hand-sewn bag of skin; full of steaming, peppery guts and fat, served with lashings of sentiment and double chips (one on each shoulder)?
That is us. That is so us. No other nation could distill 300 years of hurt into one supper dish fashioned from scrapings off the abattoir floor, and then build a tourist industry around it.
Haggis: The famous Scottish delicacy actually originates from England
So put this all, along with appropriate seasonings, into the big mincer and ask yourself this; how could haggis possibly be an invention of the milksop, faggot-loving English? Surely it has always been an intrinsically Scottish preparation. For a start, who else would eat such a thing?
Yet food historian Catherine Brown (yes, and she's Scottish, too) has found a reference to haggis in an English cooking guide from 1615.
The earliest mention she finds in a Scottish publication is in 1747, which apparently proves that haggis was being eaten south of the border some 132 years before it appeared in print in any Scottish text.
Yet 40 short years later, Robert Burns hailed it as the national dish in his famous poem, Address To A Haggis.
Greedy Fred "The Shred" Goodwin, former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, is Scottish and is the most hated man in Britain after Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is also Scottish
It just doesn't make any sense. The poem, I mean. Its opening lines seem to suggest that the haggis - with its 'honest, sonsie face' and 'pores' that drip juice - has human features.
How ridiculous. Readers, can you think of any useless, big sweaty Scottish puddings with a face? I mean once you have mentally crossed off the Prime Minister, James Naughtie, Lorraine Kelly, Speaker Martin and me?
So what if the haggis was first mentioned in an English book. Maybe, back in the swirling mists of history, the Scots were just too busy eating, letting in goals and throwing tins of lager at each other to get around to writing about the succulent deliciousness of this brutal old sausage. And even if - and that's a big if - the English did invent haggis, at least the Scots were the first to think of deep-frying it.
Yet the one good thing about all this haggis hoo-ha is that this comes at a time of maximum embarrassment for Scotland's First Minister, Alex Salmond.
Scotland's First Minister, the Fred Flinstone lookalike Alex Salmond
The wily Fred Flintstone lookalike is the architect behind the much hyped Homecoming Scotland 2009, a Government initiative to motivate people of Scottish descent across the globe, as well as those who simply love Scotland, to 'come home and join us in a national celebration of our culture, heritage and the many great contributions Scotland has given the world'.
What a racket. The slogan for the 'initiative' might as well have been: 'Give Us Your Groats, Now Get Your Coats.'
High profile: Scots born Kirsty Young hosts Crimewatch and Desert Island Discs
The year-long Homecoming has some successful events - 40,000 expats attended the Clan Gathering last month - but critics have carped about the hype and the fact that any kind of assembly was promoted as a Homecoming event. Three wee guys in anoraks drinking whisky in a Lochgelly pub? Someone, somewhere was billing it as an event and selling tickets for it.
As the Scottish tourist industry coined it in, with suckers from Tasmania to Saskatchewan queuing up to take part in heritage whisky trails and ersatz Highland gatherings, it underlined the fact that one of Scotland's greatest contributions to the world is relieving them of their savings.
And as for those cultural contributions, what might they be, I wonder? While it is true that you cannot walk across a room or down a street without encountering something brilliant invented by a Scot - the fax machine, Tarmacadam, TV, the telephone, the adhesive postage stamp, penicillin, light bulbs, thermos flasks, the Glasgow kiss - we have much to atone for.
The Scots are proud of their tartan - but where exactly did it originate?
We Scots love our traditional culture deeply, but let's be honest - much of it must be strange and impenetrable to the outside visitor. Sometimes I think that smiling, polite tourists must go back to their overpriced hotel rooms and scream their heads off, rather like the Martians in the Smash potato advert.
Consider the evidence. Men in skirts and vests tossing telegraph poles. Chaps in plus fours hitting balls with sticks in a sand pit. The ancient, skirling, bloodcurling drone of the Kirstys Wark & Young. The Bay City Rollers, Scottish country dancing, mutton pies, wee Jimmy Krankie and Gordon Ramsay? It is hardly a roll call of the great, the good and the admirable - and I haven't even mentioned deepfried Mars Bars.
And while no other country, not even Russia, could produce a national poet who writes paeans in praise of pinhead oatmeal or produce a people who continue to fetishise a meat pudding in his honour centuries after his death, it pains me to say that not everyone loves Robert Burns.
Particularly not Newsnight presenter and arch Scots-baiter Jeremy Paxman. Last year, old Big Breeks complained that Britain is ruled by a kind of 'Scottish Raj' and that Robert Burns writes 'sentimental doggerel'.
Ouch, that was a stab in the heart of our national psyche, particularly coming from a turncoat who happens to be of Scottish descent himself.
So from what some outsiders might describe as the ghastly syrup of Robert Burns to the bagpipe's caterwaul, is there anything that Scots can be proud of? Yes, actually. We never, not once, succumbed to the thought that bowler hats or morris dancing were particularly good ideas. And please note that we have never, ever tried to pretend that we invented them.
READERS' COMMENTS
Many Scots that invented things actually did so away from Scotland... Speaks volumes. Just because you have a Scottish surname, doesn't make you Scottish.
- Paul, North Devon
*************************************
The Scottish are having a bad week. First penicillin and now haggis!
The Scottish have made a habit of claiming what is not theirs.James Watt did not invent the steam engine. As early as 1689, English engineer Thomas Savery created a steam engine to pump water from mines! English blacksmith Thomas Newcomen invented the atmospheric steam engine. Watt merely made improvements to others ideas!
I expect if many of the discoveries/inventions claimed by Scotland were investigated many would be found to have been made by other countries!
- Derek, Southampton, England
******************************************
The Scots did indeed invent many notable things.
However It is their continous habit of telling us English this fact every second of every day that becomes a bit wearying ...
- Phil, Perthshire,
******************************************
Bagpipes were used by the Babylonians at the time of King's Nebuchadnezzar's reign (read the book of Daniel).
In the British Isles - a form of tartan appeared in Northumberland (in England) possibly before the cloth was produced across the border in Scotland. Northumbrian tartan (or Shepherd Plaid) has been re-produced in recent times. The design is composed of a black and white check.
- Andy, UK
*********************************
Though the socialists have claimed Burns he was never a socialist or communist. "A man of independant mind" and a farmer. A liberal/conservative or libertarian if anything. HIs poem "Written By Somebody On The Window Of an Inn at Stirling, on seeing the Royal Palace in ruin." could be seen as deeply conservative. He was a working man. A great soul. We have never seen his like since.
- B.Thomson, Dunoon, Scotland
dailymail.co.uk
Food historian Catherine Brown (who is Scottish, so it wasn't an English person making these claims) has found a reference to haggis in an English cooking guide from 1615.
The earliest mention she finds in a Scottish publication is in 1747, which apparently proves that the English ate haggis, a dish made from sheep's heart, liver and lung, stuffed into a stomach, before the Scots.
It's one thing for the Scots to discover that haggis is not of Scottish origin, but quite another for it to have been invented by the evil, devil-like English, the people who, not so long ago, the Scots thought had tails and ate their babies.
And, of course, as a sporting nation Scotland is completely useless except when it comes to indoor bowls and all-terrain moaning. Take a look at the recent results of Scottish football teams such as Motherwell, Aberdeen and Celtic in the Champions League and Europa League qualifiers.
In this article, Jan Moir, who is Scottish, asks the question: "Apart from the Glasgow kiss (which is actually British slang for a headbutt, referring to Scotland's reputation for violence), are the Scots good at anything?"
McDuffers: Bagpipes from Greece, tartan from China, and haggis from England. Apart from the Glasgow kiss, are we Scots good for anything?
By Jan Moir
04th August 2009
Daily Mail
Dark time to be Scottish: He's not just got a caber on his shoulder. He's also got a chip.
Great Scot! Aren't we just? Well, not any more, apparently. For these are dark, dark times for those, like me, of the Scottish persuasion. Over the past few years we have had to cope with some serious identity issues. First we discovered that bagpipes were invented by the Greeks, not us. That was a terrible, bad blow - but enough about the sound they make.
The Loch Ness Monster is an obese imposter at best, an illegal immigrant at worse. Tartan, it seems, was originated by the Chinese. Irn-Bru is not actually made from girders, it only tastes like it does.
Most of Braveheart was shot in Ireland. Susan Boyle has shaved off her groaning eyebrows, which is a bit like the Monarch of the Glen cutting off his 12-point antlers.
Bagpipes were invented by the Greeks
As a sporting nation, we hardly ever win at anything, except indoor bowls and all-terrain moaning. Has it escaped anyone's attention that Fred the Shred, modern folklore's answer to the Sheriff of Nottingham, is 100 per cent Scottish! Oh the black, burning shame of it all.
And just when you think there is no further corner of Scottish nationhood or culture that can be insulted, abused or appropriated by someone else, it turns out that haggis was invented by the English.
Haggis? Our haggis? The Scottish national dish of sheep's heart, liver and lungs, chopped up and cooked in an animal stomach with oatmeal and onions? Prudence and pluck in one ingenious, hand-sewn bag of skin; full of steaming, peppery guts and fat, served with lashings of sentiment and double chips (one on each shoulder)?
That is us. That is so us. No other nation could distill 300 years of hurt into one supper dish fashioned from scrapings off the abattoir floor, and then build a tourist industry around it.
Haggis: The famous Scottish delicacy actually originates from England
So put this all, along with appropriate seasonings, into the big mincer and ask yourself this; how could haggis possibly be an invention of the milksop, faggot-loving English? Surely it has always been an intrinsically Scottish preparation. For a start, who else would eat such a thing?
Yet food historian Catherine Brown (yes, and she's Scottish, too) has found a reference to haggis in an English cooking guide from 1615.
The earliest mention she finds in a Scottish publication is in 1747, which apparently proves that haggis was being eaten south of the border some 132 years before it appeared in print in any Scottish text.
Yet 40 short years later, Robert Burns hailed it as the national dish in his famous poem, Address To A Haggis.
Greedy Fred "The Shred" Goodwin, former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, is Scottish and is the most hated man in Britain after Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is also Scottish
It just doesn't make any sense. The poem, I mean. Its opening lines seem to suggest that the haggis - with its 'honest, sonsie face' and 'pores' that drip juice - has human features.
How ridiculous. Readers, can you think of any useless, big sweaty Scottish puddings with a face? I mean once you have mentally crossed off the Prime Minister, James Naughtie, Lorraine Kelly, Speaker Martin and me?
So what if the haggis was first mentioned in an English book. Maybe, back in the swirling mists of history, the Scots were just too busy eating, letting in goals and throwing tins of lager at each other to get around to writing about the succulent deliciousness of this brutal old sausage. And even if - and that's a big if - the English did invent haggis, at least the Scots were the first to think of deep-frying it.
Yet the one good thing about all this haggis hoo-ha is that this comes at a time of maximum embarrassment for Scotland's First Minister, Alex Salmond.
Scotland's First Minister, the Fred Flinstone lookalike Alex Salmond
The wily Fred Flintstone lookalike is the architect behind the much hyped Homecoming Scotland 2009, a Government initiative to motivate people of Scottish descent across the globe, as well as those who simply love Scotland, to 'come home and join us in a national celebration of our culture, heritage and the many great contributions Scotland has given the world'.
What a racket. The slogan for the 'initiative' might as well have been: 'Give Us Your Groats, Now Get Your Coats.'
High profile: Scots born Kirsty Young hosts Crimewatch and Desert Island Discs
The year-long Homecoming has some successful events - 40,000 expats attended the Clan Gathering last month - but critics have carped about the hype and the fact that any kind of assembly was promoted as a Homecoming event. Three wee guys in anoraks drinking whisky in a Lochgelly pub? Someone, somewhere was billing it as an event and selling tickets for it.
As the Scottish tourist industry coined it in, with suckers from Tasmania to Saskatchewan queuing up to take part in heritage whisky trails and ersatz Highland gatherings, it underlined the fact that one of Scotland's greatest contributions to the world is relieving them of their savings.
And as for those cultural contributions, what might they be, I wonder? While it is true that you cannot walk across a room or down a street without encountering something brilliant invented by a Scot - the fax machine, Tarmacadam, TV, the telephone, the adhesive postage stamp, penicillin, light bulbs, thermos flasks, the Glasgow kiss - we have much to atone for.
The Scots are proud of their tartan - but where exactly did it originate?
We Scots love our traditional culture deeply, but let's be honest - much of it must be strange and impenetrable to the outside visitor. Sometimes I think that smiling, polite tourists must go back to their overpriced hotel rooms and scream their heads off, rather like the Martians in the Smash potato advert.
Consider the evidence. Men in skirts and vests tossing telegraph poles. Chaps in plus fours hitting balls with sticks in a sand pit. The ancient, skirling, bloodcurling drone of the Kirstys Wark & Young. The Bay City Rollers, Scottish country dancing, mutton pies, wee Jimmy Krankie and Gordon Ramsay? It is hardly a roll call of the great, the good and the admirable - and I haven't even mentioned deepfried Mars Bars.
And while no other country, not even Russia, could produce a national poet who writes paeans in praise of pinhead oatmeal or produce a people who continue to fetishise a meat pudding in his honour centuries after his death, it pains me to say that not everyone loves Robert Burns.
Particularly not Newsnight presenter and arch Scots-baiter Jeremy Paxman. Last year, old Big Breeks complained that Britain is ruled by a kind of 'Scottish Raj' and that Robert Burns writes 'sentimental doggerel'.
Ouch, that was a stab in the heart of our national psyche, particularly coming from a turncoat who happens to be of Scottish descent himself.
So from what some outsiders might describe as the ghastly syrup of Robert Burns to the bagpipe's caterwaul, is there anything that Scots can be proud of? Yes, actually. We never, not once, succumbed to the thought that bowler hats or morris dancing were particularly good ideas. And please note that we have never, ever tried to pretend that we invented them.
READERS' COMMENTS
Many Scots that invented things actually did so away from Scotland... Speaks volumes. Just because you have a Scottish surname, doesn't make you Scottish.
- Paul, North Devon
*************************************
The Scottish are having a bad week. First penicillin and now haggis!
The Scottish have made a habit of claiming what is not theirs.James Watt did not invent the steam engine. As early as 1689, English engineer Thomas Savery created a steam engine to pump water from mines! English blacksmith Thomas Newcomen invented the atmospheric steam engine. Watt merely made improvements to others ideas!
I expect if many of the discoveries/inventions claimed by Scotland were investigated many would be found to have been made by other countries!
- Derek, Southampton, England
******************************************
The Scots did indeed invent many notable things.
However It is their continous habit of telling us English this fact every second of every day that becomes a bit wearying ...
- Phil, Perthshire,
******************************************
Bagpipes were used by the Babylonians at the time of King's Nebuchadnezzar's reign (read the book of Daniel).
In the British Isles - a form of tartan appeared in Northumberland (in England) possibly before the cloth was produced across the border in Scotland. Northumbrian tartan (or Shepherd Plaid) has been re-produced in recent times. The design is composed of a black and white check.
- Andy, UK
*********************************
Though the socialists have claimed Burns he was never a socialist or communist. "A man of independant mind" and a farmer. A liberal/conservative or libertarian if anything. HIs poem "Written By Somebody On The Window Of an Inn at Stirling, on seeing the Royal Palace in ruin." could be seen as deeply conservative. He was a working man. A great soul. We have never seen his like since.
- B.Thomson, Dunoon, Scotland
dailymail.co.uk
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