Haggling over Haggis

Ask someone you know if he or she wants haggis for dinner. You’re more likely to get a blank stare and a “what’s haggis?” than a “yes” or “no.”

You wouldn’t be alone. Even in Scotland, the home of this dish, the policy on haggis seems to be to eat it without thinking much about its contents.

Unfortunately, my self-imposed job is to ask the tough questions like “what is haggis?” After spending a research-filled day in Edinburgh, I can safely report back that haggis is made of … well … it depends.

That’s right, haggis is a lot like a hot dog in that pinning down a set of ingredients can be both difficult and stomach-churning. Canned haggis in the grocery store informed me it contained beef-filler. “Haggis” statues in a souvenir shop look like bloated sausage links, and might represent a stomach or lung. Grill a few Scots, and they’ll likely give you different opinions. The only definitive answer is to say that haggis is minced.

I think the waiter in the pub where I eventually sampled the flagship Scottish food put it best after I asked him whether it contained beef.

“No,” he answered. “It’s lamb.”

He paused a minute and bit his lip in concentration.

Then, to reassure himself, he repeated: “Haggis is lamb.”

Don’t press any further. Accept that it is pieces of lamb you don’t want to know about – probably containing large portions of lung meat. Bear it, grin and dig in.

Of course, if your haggis is traditional you’ll be eating it with tatties and neeps, also known as potatoes and turnips. Yum, turnips. Not the most appetizing of ideas, but it’s another tradition you must indulge.

Surprisingly, tradition knows what’s cooking. Haggis, tatties and neeps is a great combination. My haggis had a sweetness to it that I couldn’t quite place and certainly wasn’t expecting. Maybe (mostly) lamb lung is naturally sweet. Maybe it was soaked in brown sugar to cover up the flavor of something like ground aorta. Maybe turnip juice ran into the meat. Whatever the case, it worked.

The tatties and neeps were good, too. They were each mashed up a bit, but not to the point that there were no solid particles. Tatties are always good, whether they are called tatties, taters, potatoes, fires, spuds or chips. But the turnips were unexpectedly good, with a taste not unlike sweet potatoes. The whole collection was smothered in a slightly peppery gravy that contrasted nicely with the meal’s sweetness.

My meal didn’t just surprise my tongue, it surprised my eyes. I was expecting lumps of meat and starch on a plate. I got a layered cylinder that resembled the candle I made in elementary school by melting crayons and pouring a layer of hot wax on top of a layer of cool wax from a different color crayon. Throw in the garnish and fancy square plate, and it was like the cook was trying out for Iron Chef: Scotland.

Though it was a point of curiosity, the presentation certainly didn’t hurt the meal. If anything, the layered design allowed me to scoop up haggis, tatties, neeps and gravy in one forkful, letting the different tastes compliment each other.

The only drawback here is the same drawback that all traditional foods seem to have in pubs: price. The cheapest haggis I could find was £7.95 – a little pricey for a meal of mystery meat.

But, really, there are foods that are worth shelling out a few extra quid. And if paying extra means you are getting the best of the leftovers of what is probably lamb meat, you should be willing to crack the wallet in no time.

Get me a set of bagpipes and a kilt. I’m a believer in Scottish cuisine. Aside from the price and the minor fact that you really have no idea what you’re eating, there is no downside. Four tartan-patterned sporks out of five!

Of Money and Meatballs

“Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch.”

That was me paying for food in Stockholm. You would think that traveling from London, where the dollar-to-pound ratio is roughly 2/1 to Sweden, where the dollar to Kronor ratio is 1/6, would be a little cheaper.

You’d be wrong. If you want to sit down in Stockholm and enjoy some native Swedish meatballs, expect to shell out close to 200 Kronor – 30 bucks.

Fortunately for the meatballs, they are simply scrumptious. I never knew a meatball could be so good until I stepped into a bar and restaurant just north of Gamla stan and ordered the Swedish meatballs. Imagine, if you can, a perfectly seasoned meatball that is neither overcooked nor undercooked. That means they’re moist on the inside without being hard on the outside. From what I understand, the meatballs actually contain mashed potatoes, which might explain their propensity for perfection.

But the thing that makes these orbs of meat most desirable is their sauce. They’re doused in a cream sauce that is somewhere between brown and yellow and carries the flavor that makes the meatballs so distinctive. You’ll probably like this stuff even if you’re foolish enough to not like gravy like substances, so make sure your meatballs are thoroughly covered.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this dish is that the cream sauce is not used to cover up for inconsistent cooking. Often, when I eat at restaurants, I think the food is doused in gravy or sauces to cover for the fact that it’s only the chef’s second day on the job. But with Swedish meatballs, the gravy adds more than a little moisture, it adds its own distinct flavor. The meatballs would be plenty moist on their own anyway, so you know the gravy has to be there for another reason.

Any self-respecting restaurant will serve you your meatballs with boiled potatoes and Lingon berries. My potatoes were the only potatoes of their type that I’ve ever eaten that were boiled to perfection. It’s quite difficult to get them just right so that they are fully cooked but don’t fall apart. I can now say that getting them just right is quite the reward.

Lingon berries would probably deserve their own post if I had eaten more of them. Those that were served with Swedish meatballs were mashed and had one of the best sweet flavors I’ve tried. It was sweet enough that it should have been sickening, but somehow it wasn’t. I chalk that up to the fact that they had a natural sugar, rather than the processed sugar that usually creates such a strong sweetness.

The only real regret I had after finishing my meatballs was that they were so expensive. If you judge the meal against other sit-down meals in Stockholm, the price was actually good. If you judge it against meals in other countries, it will make your skin crawl.

But if you judge it on flavor alone, you’ll want to crawl back to the restaurant and order another plate.

Thank goodness I’m not spending the semester in Stockholm. I might be broke.

Tarting to like English Bakeries

Friday we made a trip to Salisbury, which is a little less hectic than London. In Salisbury, we made a trip to a bakery, which smells much better than London. In the bakery, my mouth made a visit to heaven while it enjoyed a delectable apple tart.

Not that the tart was necessarily better than London food – it was just cheaper and, for the most part, fresher. It was also the first time I’ve really “popped in” to a traditional English bakery, and I can now say it probably won’t be the last.

For 85 pence I got a miniature apple pie. Don’t think apple pie like American apple pie, think apple pie with a richer, more buttery crust that makes your mouth drip with passion. It was just about perfect.

In fact, the only real problem with the whole bakery experience was choosing what I wanted. It was one of those problems that you like to have: having too many cheap and yummy looking options.

All of the pastries were on display in a giant window that wrapped around half of the bakery, and the list of goodies reads like a Harry Potter book. Treacle tarts, cheese and leak pasties, chocolate buns, you name it, you could buy it. For a single treat, you could pay between 50p and 85p, making it very tempting to get more than one thing.

I knew I wanted a tart. I’m not sure why, mind you, but I was sure I wanted a tart. I guess they just seem English to me. Even eliminating eccles and cookies didn’t help much, because I still had lots of choices ahead of me. In the end, I narrowed it down to a lemon tart, a custard tart, an apple tart and a treacle tart.

The treacle tart was my first choice, but they only had those in larger form. It actually was a great deal, because the amount of treacle tart they were selling for £1.65 would have lasted me a week. Still, I didn’t want to gain too many extra chins, so I stayed true to my intention of buying one portion, and one portion only.

Next I eliminated the lemon tart on the simple basis that I wasn’t in the mood for lemon. That left me with apple and custard.

In the end, I wimped out. There was a lot of custard in the custard tart, and I was afraid I might not like it. In a move that was a little reprehensible, I decided that my immediate enjoyment was a little more important than my duties sampling different foods for this blog, which I should consider of paramount importance.

I would apologize, but that apple tart was so good that my apology wouldn’t be anywhere near heartfelt. Why risk my now-fond feelings toward English bakeries by trying something semi-new and slightly dangerous when I could solidify my love for them?

That means I have to give the whole bakery experience a full five sporks. Good smells, good selection, good taste… There isn’t much to say on the “bad” side of things.

Well, there isn’t much bad to say unless you want to talk about health. I already want to go back to the bakery. I want to try everything they had, because I bet I’ll enjoy almost all of it. But things that taste that good don’t come without a price, and that price is surely cholesterol.

Well, cholesterol and the insane amount of time I spent trying to decide what to buy. When you’re standing in front of one of these bakeries, healthy eating isn’t an option, it’s a fallacy.

Fish free-for-all

Now that I’ve had some time to sample a few kinds of fish & chips here in London, it’s time to report on the true state of the meal in England and compare it to my experience at Arthur Treacher’s last spring.

First, it’s important to lay down my sampling of fish & chips both in the UK and in the states. In the states, I’ve eaten the meal from Arthur Treacher’s of course, and from a delicious Irish pub in Syracuse called Kitty Hoynes. Here in London, I’ve had it on three occasions: once sitting down at a restaurant that advertised it and cooked it to order, once as take-away from a walk-in restaurant that scooped up a piece of fried fish and some chips from under a heat lamp, and once from a stand beside the Tower of London.

You probably know the prices to expect to pay in the US: About four or 5 bucks at Arthur Treacher’s or $8-9 at a pub. Here in London, you might as well replace the dollar sign with a pound symbol. That would all be fair and well, except for the fact that the dollar is currently worth a little less than half a pound. For those of you who aren’t too good with money (and judging from the current credit-crisis in the US, there are a lot of you) that can mean paying close to 18 bucks for one meal!

In fact, that’s almost what I paid in the sit-down restaurant. Fish, chips and mushy peas were something like £8.95. In the first shop I ate them at, my fish & chips came rolled in a piece of brown paper and cost about £5. In a strange twist, the stand next to the tourist trap Tower of London was a bargain of £2.50. That is the lowest I have seen fish & chips, and is actually cheaper than eating out nearly anywhere I’ve found in London. Even stranger, that price included a can of soda! Go figure.

Here in London, the presentation of your fish & chips will vary depending on where you eat. That’s a little disappointing, given the traditional image of a fried piece of cod and greasy fries nestled in a roll of newsprint is unfulfilled. In fact, you really can’t get fish & chips in newspaper anymore. The closest I came was a brownish paper that was probably a lot cleaner than newsprint, but definitely lacked in character. But if your chips aren’t rolled in paper, which happens more often than it should, they will be on a plate if you order in a pub or sit-down restaurant, or can be in a Styrofoam container, as were mine from beside the Tower of London.

The actual quality of the food will obviously also vary. When I ate sitting down, the fish was very good but could not have been eaten while walking. It simply would have fallen apart because it was too flakey. The other two times I ate the meal, I got a nice solid piece of fish that was fried together in a very solid way. Those suckers weren’t going to fall apart if I dropped it back into the ocean.

Oddly enough, the best overall fish & chips I had were the cheapest, and not just because of their bargain price. The fish, while it wasn’t as good as at the sit-down restaurant, was still very good, and the chips were piping hot. That price didn’t hurt, either. That basically goes to show that getting food fish & chips here is hit-or-miss. The second place I got them from, which is also the middle price range, was not of high quality. It couldn’t beat Arthur Treacher’s.

So the conclusion is that depending on where you go, you can get either great fish & chips or you can get mediocre fish & chips here in London – just like you can get either great fish & chips or mediocre fish & chips in the states, depending on where you go.

The real difference lies in the price, and in the condiments, which I have previously not mentioned. The British eat a lot of mayonnaise and vinegar. That isn’t a stereotype, and it isn’t over exaggerated in American’s minds. They eat the stuff on everything. It is also delicious on fish & chips. I’ve even found a new love for fries with mayonnaise on them.

In the end, your actual food will probably be more expensive than it would be in the US, and it might not even be as good. Despite all the evidence that shows fish & chips in London isn’t significantly better than fish & chips in the US, I have to say I enjoy fish & chips here a little more. There is some feeling to eating the meal while walking down a windy street in central London that you just don’t get from eating it in the United States.

It really doesn’t boil down to price, and it really doesn’t boil down to quality. I suppose it just fries down to tradition. Just like a cheese steak at a Phillies game seems better because it is renowned in the region, fish & chips in London just seem better.

Next post, I’ll try to address the strange issue of mushy peas. We won’t talk history or anything like that – even I’m not crazy enough to look up the history of mushy peas. Still, there’s something to be said about this odd British companion to fish & chips. As soon as I figure out what it is, I’ll type it up and let you know.