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So I was reading the Haggis Wikipedia article, which happens to be amazing.  First let's establish what Haggis is:

Now for more fun facts:

This one is just wrong:


Sports:

My favorite:

What isn't sufficiently conveyed in the article is the texture and taste of Haggis, has anyone here had it?  What's it like?

Yes.  It's nice.

Haggis is where I draw the line between me and my Scot roots. Daddy don't dig on no innards, y0.

I had haggis while I was in Scotland.  I concur that it is nice.  IIRC it tasted like ground beef with a bit of peppery seasoning and gravy and served over mashed potatoes.  (Mutton and beef aren't all that dissimilar, and with the possible exception of lungs, all the organs in a haggis can probably be found in the average American hamburger as well.)

If I had to sum it up in three words: Scottish meat loaf.

I'd probably eat dog or casu marzu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casu_marzu) before haggis.

Ookii - Fixed yer linkage

Haggis is gorgeous: it should be spicy and with a fairly firm pinhead oatmeal for texture.  It's delicious served with fruit-based sauces, but even better with ones based on spirits: glayva or whisky are particularly nice bases.  It is also the only food I have ever tasted that is actually pleasant when eaten with whisky.  And no, that's not to kill the taste.

It's really nice. Very good food.

Consider this subject like you might consider traditional Asian cuisine. It may contain some things you are not used to eating in your country, but given people have been eating it for centuries, the problem is your prejudice not the food.

Another very Scottish example is black pudding (blood sausage) which is also perfectly good to eat. It's just ignorant to give an American-style "ew" about any of this. Look at the production process for a fast food hamburger, and you encounter a much more frightening food.

The other cool thing about haggis is that it's representative of a small, stoic culture's resistance to a large, dominant culture next-door. Scotland has 6 million people to England's 60 million. It's a Scottish national sport to tell the English (and other tourists) that haggis is a wild animal in the highlands and explain how to hunt it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Haggis

German/Polish.  Head cheese, blood soup, and sausages galore attest to the fact that we'll eat anything.  I'd have no problem trying haggis.

The only part of Haggis I'll eat is oatmeal, with fruit, in the morning.  Boiling nasty sheep bits in it's own stomach lining is just unhealthy and icky.  And gross.  I won't eat it and I won't cook it.  Poor Righ.   :|  He likes it.

For a long time I've had 'haggis' alongside 'lutefisk' in my head. How wrong I was.

That whole "Wild Haggis Hunting" bit was great fun as in the Appalachian (populated by Scot/ Irish for the most part) there are rumors of a breed of cows who's right legs are shorter than their Left legs. for grazing on the mountains. It is also reminiscent of snipe hunting. Great to see and understand the origions of myths.

Well that's disappointing, I was expecting it to be one of those local acquired dish taste type things, but it really just sounds like it's kickass meatloaf (no ketchup for this stuff though).

I did a quick search for Haggis in AZ, but so far have come up with nothing.  Apparently it's illegal to sell the lungs of animals so it won't be "true" haggis anyway, but it would be cool to have a favorite local haggis haunt.

Oh, and in terms of that Casu marzu cheese, I don't even know where to start.

Yeah, I'd concur that it's actually pretty good.  Like a more tender ground beef as I recall.  I mean, honestly the ingredients aren't THAT gross, and indeed I'm sure we eat most of that in hamburgers/hot dogs.  The stomach-cooking is the weirdest part, imho.

The only thing that gets me is the liver bit.  Maybe mixed up I couldn't taste it.  It doesn't matter though since oatmeal is on the no-eat list.

Oh.  My.  God.

Hell I think Braunschweiger is the cat's pajamas (on rye bread with lettuce and a little horseradish and mayo), so I'd prolly like haggis alright.

Never eaten chicken livers?

You know how they sell mixed chicken hearts/gizzards/livers in the poultry section of the supermarket?  Ever wondered who ate those?  That'd be sick bastards like me.

Oh, and whoever also mentioned liverwurst is correct.  With a hard, dark roll of bread and some spicy mustard it's delicious.

I wouldn't eat either (haggis or a fast food hamburger).

It's not the liver that bothers me... I put a thin coat of pâté de foie gras on the pastry when I make Wellington (shh.  I haven't made it in absolute ages. It's hard) although I'm not nuts about any sort of liver on it's own.  It's the sheep's lung (I don't think you can even get lung in the US), heart and stomach that bother me.  Eww.  Better sheep though than beef, at least in Britain, I guess.  I can't even stand the way organ meat smells when it's cooking.  I come from a family who would make tripe, veal tongue and, yes, even the dreaded lutefisk.  I know what I hate and there's a lot of it!  Haggis fits in nicely. 

Natural sausage casings are made of intestine.  Using the stomach isn't any weirder IMO.

Scrapie is the sheep version of Mad Cow's Disease and is very likely to have been the source of the infectious agent that started the spread of Mad Cow's Disease in England. So no, sheep is not better than beef if you are worried about that sort of thing.

And my dad.  I'm a picky eater, which I'll freely admit (not that there's much left once you remove glutten containing grains and dairy).  Liver is something I really, really, really don't like the taste of though.

It's not a food that makes me cringe at the thought of it though.  Like that cheese.  Ick.

Anyone for smalahove (http://www.matoppskrift.no/sider/recipe90.asp)?

I've considered myself a pretty stout soul, having eaten octopus, pigs feet, brains, and other crazy things.

But with that cheese, I've finally met my match. The one statement in that wiki entry that brought me to a screeching halt was:

Folk wisdom in Sardinia holds that the presence of still-living larvae are an assurance that the decomposition has not yet advanced to a toxic state

I've eaten haggis made without lung. You would be hard pressed to tell the difference if its a good recipe. You could probably mail order the American made stuff fairly easily if you fancy cooking it yourself. Also every major US city is bound to have some sort of Scotland fan club thing going, and they'll no doubt arrange a Burns Night in January. But I doubt you'll be able to go down the local chippy and get a deep fried haggis supper in many places in America sadly.

Wow, that cheese is just wrong on so many levels.  How you can equate live insects in rotting milk to Haggis is truly beyond me.

:eek3:

Fuck eye protection, I recommend psychiatry.

Not much different than calimari.


Not a giant step from eating pigs' legs.


On many restaurant menus. Tripe though is harder to find these days.


All of us are always swallowing insects, bacteria and other stuff. Using a computer keyboard and eating a sandwich are an interesting combination.

Damn haters.  I come bearing delicious gifts and this is how I'm repaid.  Fine then, more worm cheese for me. :eat:

After reading about the worm cheese, I think I did actually throw up a bit into my mouth.

Ugh.

Yikes.  I remember selling that in the grocery store.  Surprisingly people used to buy it and rave about how great it was.  Anything that smelled as weird and had that funny texture\color was not something I was planning on eating.

Goddamn.  Now I want to fry up some livers and gizzards.  Food of the freakin gods if you don't overcook it. 

Tripe a la Madrilen~a is actually one of my favorite things. I buy about 4 tins of it within a day of getting off the airplane in Spain. You can get tripe in Seattle pretty easily; just head down to Uwajimaya, our pan-asian supermarket. Of course, that does me no good, since I have no earthly idea how to make it.

I hate this thread.  (http://smiley.onegreatguy.net/puke3.gif)  I very much prefer V-Lily's food threads. 

Your intolerance against American cultural norms is both ignorant and prejudiced.   :-P

But seriously, some shit is just gross for other cultures to eat.  Look at the cheese thing for an extreme example, but theres lots of shit around the world Im sure you find disgusting as well.  In America, we tend to avoid organs and bugs except in rural areas (all sorts of farmers I know eat tongues, rocky mountain oysters, pigs feet....).  Thats not ment to slam any of the cultures that do enjoy this shit, but I feel perfectly knowledgable and unprejudiced when I saw EWWW at shit, like when the Japanese were passing around the raw octopus chunks and the concentrated crab brains last night at the restaurant we went to.

Its just cultural and I recognize that.  I mean, I'm sure as fuck never going to eat a cat or dog, even though I know they probably taste not unlike most meat.

Fast food hamburgers though, those cross all cultural boundries.  Nobody can resist them aparently.  The fucking Japanese are all over that shit, and China is filled with a glut of them as well.  Doesnt matter where the hell in the world you are, or what you normally eat, people fight for McDonalds  :-P

If you're ever able to go to a proper Burns Night, GO.  Don't even think twice.

Similarly, visiting Scotland 'around that time' is well advised too.

Try to learn at least one of the poems tho.

This is very true.  Not only do you get one of the more authentically Scottish traditions ( for all that it's only about as old as America  :-D ), if you're a foreigner and can do even one of the shorter, 20-odd line poems then you'll be spectacularly appreciated by the whisky-downing locals, who will happily forgive your dubious pronunciation if you choose one in Scots.

People who tell people what is in haggis before they eat it are doing them no favours, though: it tastes spicy and delicious and has none of the textures you might expect from the description.  Plus, it has none of the bad mojo in it: no central nervous system.  As has been pointed out, it is a lot more wholesome than the average burger, and a million miles more palatable than stuff like the French Ortolan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortolan_Bunting#Gastronomy), where you force-feed a small bird, keeping it in a box not much bigger than a cigar case, drown it in Armagnac, roast it then eat it whole, unfilletted and with the giblets in place.

Ok, wow, I am avoiding this thread now.


(http://www.clisham.com-a.googlepages.com/runtyeyebleach.jpg)

I thought Surströmming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surstr%C3%B6mming) was among the nastiest foods in the world, but after reading this thread, I have a newfound respect for (and fear of) Sardinia.

Sadly, Hungary doesn't have any foods that can be considered 'vile'; the most controversial Hungarian food I can think of (tökösmákos rétes = strudel with poppyseed and pumpkin filling) is merely described as "odd". We need to try harder or something.


-- Z.

I love Hungarian food, and as you say, have never come across anything in all the times I've been there that struck me as particularly gag-inducing.  It's not great if you don't like heavily smoked meats, but that's about it.  Actually, I remember one Jewish restaurant in Budapest in particular that was very good - Bel Canto - that was serving some sort of stuffed goose neck dish that I was dubious about (goes back to avoiding the spinal column and CNS) but that's about it.

Squirrel paté. 

Yum.

You really can't go wrong with any Central European cuisine, it all tends to be of the dependable meat and potatoes variety.  That's the kind of eating I can appreciate.  Keep your fancy froo-froo cheeses to yourself, thanks, I'll go with some form of fried dead animal and a starch.

Hmm, lots to comment on.

Tripe - just hit any Pho place and it will be one of the options for the soup.
Haggis - always been curious, but never tried it.
Octopus - doesn't even count as exotic - its a standard on most assorted nigiri plates

Liver - ah liver. About once a month I'll hit one of the restaurants favoured by the senior community just so I can order a nice plate of beef liver. Best served with onions and bacon with mashed potatoes. Really don't like beef kidney though. No steak and kidney pie for me.

Chicken livers aren't bad, my mother does an outstanding pate with them.

Other oddities I love: escargo, unagi (fresh water eel), oh, and my favorite nigiri; local place calls it tobi-tama. Its a tobiko (flying fish roe) nigiri with a raw quail egg on top.

Local "delicacy" I have never tried: Salt Spring Island Abelone. They call it that to get you to try it, its actually bbq'd sheep balls.

Let's be honest, chaps, if you're hungry enough, you'll eat anything.


Anyone who says different doesn't actually know what hungry means.

But, but they were talking about eating brains.

:vv:

Me too. And since you put foie gras in your Wellington I'm sure you get plenty of oral sex.

What ?

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=3887.msg110199#msg110199 (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=3887.msg110199#msg110199)

Ok.

 :|

I've had Blood Sausage on three occasions.  I've hated it each and every time.  The texture and flavor are just, off.

I started this thread because my co-worker gave me some Menudo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menudo_%28soup%29) to bring home with me to eat (and he didnt' know what haggis was), Menudo is:


His was made with cow stomach though, and actually was quite delicious.  The texture took some getting used to, just make sure if you eat it to use lots of limon, as it significantly enhances the taste of the soup.

Some of my Cuban friends growing up used 'menudo' as a euphemism for shit.  Dunno if that was because of the band or the soup though.

This thread is damaging my calm. To say nothing of my appetite. (http://media.myspacepimper.com/content/smile/sick/sick_5.gif)

I should have thought serving it with bread would involve less legal problems.

Just as an aside, remember that any organ meat or whatever you buy from the store comes with the same quality standards as the tenderloin you eat. I'm a butcher, I would know :)

Tripe is very, very, very good.

Tripe is much crunchier than I had suspected it'd be. Not bad, but not anything to write home about.

My dogs eat dried tripe.  They love it.  Humans, generally, cannot be in the same room as them at the time.

Obviously  you have not sampled one(or both!) of the two.  Just because they both have tentacles does not mean they taste the same or have the same texture.

You sure those were brains?  When we shoot that shit, it's the crab equivqalent of the liver.  I can only handle a couple shots because that stuff is super rich, but then I'll take some mixed with eggs, over rice.

While it does contain a very small amount of crab brains it is actually a mix of everything that is left in the crab after the white meat is removed (think zombie food).

Sorry I meant the sheer daring of it all. Woo, octopus.


http://www.tripesite.com/ - site of The Tripe Club of New South Wales, who meet to eat tripe.

I've worked in Italian restaurants. The smell of tripe being cooked is enough for me to never even try the stuff, it's vile.

Being Italian myself I've tried Tripe a number of times and a number of different ways. Fried, in a brown, gravy-like sauce, in a marinara sauce, etc... Never liked a single one of them. The non-fried versions are sort of like chewing on rancid rubber.

I'm also not a big fan of another Italian dish usually just known as Agrodolce around my family. It's actually Agrodolce (sweet and sour) innards. Basically that sack of stuff you get inside a whole turkey or chicken done up in a sweet and sour and sort of vinegary sauce. Just the smell of that stuff is nauseating. Not to mention when my dad would get back around to it the next day and pop it in the microwave. You wouldn't be able to use the micro without everything tasting live vinegar and ass for days.

Thinking about tripe though reminded me that the Feast of the Assumption is coming up soon. Always the best time in Cleveland at least to head to little Italy for the festival.

I see no reason for me to eat the bad parts of animals anymore.

Also, I don't care for pickled jellyfish at all.

Depends what a 'bad' part is, I mean most people would consider Cow Tongue to be utter horrendous but it is absolutely delicious on rye with mustard.

In a restaurant three weeks ago I ate beef cheeks (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dcfoodies.com%2F2005%2F05%2Fbeef_cheeks.html&ei=vMqoRubAB5SmoAS4wJ2RCQ&usg=AFQjCNHDB1fwzNA4eAmQ3millfKHdq8i1Q&sig2=1pDqY7uzGkBxIr1jA1nSCw). They weren't all that good - just very cooked beef.

Beef cheek meat is pretty good if cooked right. I've had it as burrito filling and I loved it. Also, the meat surrounding pig ears is absolutely delicious. Of course, you have to know that, else some wise guy will eat all the meat and leave you with the flappy cartiledge, which is just bland and has a yucky texture. Pig's feet are also a bit yucky. Its like mainlining pig fat, for the most part. Its all part of poor people food, which can be yummy if done right, but for the most part its not, so there's a good reason why we as a culture only eat the 'choice parts'.

The bad parts of animals are the ones that "taste great when cooked right" but otherwise would make you gag.  Refer to chitlins and souse, and other things.  Some animals, like jellyfish, seem to be composed of nothing but bad parts but that's probably because I don't like gristle or any sort.  My grandmother was all "Eat your gristle" and I was like "Ah, wow, I am FULL".

I have only eaten tripe julienned in pho. The French love the icky parts and use them in many dishes, but that definitely stems from their cuisine's origins in peasant culture. The icky parts are still more or less poverty food, but pig cheeks are rumored to be the most succulent of all meats.

This thread reminds me of an episode of Boondocks where the gist of it was pointing out that the only reason these type of culinary items became "cultural" was because the culture was poor as dirt and that shouldn't be an endorsement of the cuisine.

Skipping ahead without reading the thread. We actually have tripe soup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shkembe) as a national meal. It's fucking awesome.


God I hate Hungarian Cuisine. You guys put sugar in everything. And I mean everything. I mean I decide to go safe and order a cucumber salad and I get cucumbers with sugar. Just cut the damn thing and give it to me, I'll deal with the spices.

That doesn't sound like the cucumber salad I know. The one we have the cucumber is sliced and salted, then rinsed and mixed with sour cream, pepper and some other things I cannot remember. It's basically salty, wet sour cream and cucumber. Of course that might be a Romanian dish because I can't remember who in the family is Romanian and who is Hungarian. :-P

That would be Snezhanka, it's Russian IIRC, but it's more likely for Romanians to have it than Hungarians. It's definitely not Hungarian though :)

(http://www.happy.bg/menu/images/m_20040120115736_77746.jpg)

A regular cucumber salad in the Region would be Sliced cucumber with vinegar and salt.

No mention of Rocky Mountain Oysters?  :-D


Every so often in my store I get questions for goat testicles. Apparently it's for some sort of mexican recipe. Anyone know more about this?

The texture is eww.  They should call them Rocky Horror Mountain Oysters.

Anyone fancy some jellied eels and pie, mash & liquor?

I got to have fresh 'straight off the scalpel' rocky mountain oysters once. I was visiting some friends in North Dakota, where they had a farm next to some cowboy ranchers. Turns out, it was the week they decided all 20 head of young male cattle needed to have their balls sliced off. Since I couldn't help with the corralling or the other manly activities involved, I got to carry bucket of bleeding balls across two fields to the kitchen where the women dropped them in a McCormick spice breading mix and fried them up.

They were rather good, if memory serves.

The worst Hungarian dish I ever had was the eggplant paste whose proper name escapes me.   It's all orange and my girlfriend's grandparents used to make it... (tho they were Hung/ Rom so it might have been Romanian.)

  And when I say it was the worst, it doesn't mean I hated it.  It was quite tasty, it was just the most 'Off" thing that took a little getting used to.  Spread it on some dense white bread and eat it with breakfast. Mmmm, good.

Amen.

That cucumber in sour cream or yoghurt with various herbs thing is pretty much universal once you get to the danube and points south-east, as well as a lot of North Africa: I have Greek, Turkish and Iranian relatives and they all eat it.  It's about the only thing they have in common.  Tzatziki in Greece, Maast-o-Khiar in Farsi, Raita or Rathia depending where in India you are, etc...

I used to get drunk on Red Horse and balut!  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut

God I miss Angles City/Clark AFB, Philippines, arrived with an earthquake, chased out by a volcano, and had more fun than should have been allowed.

!!!

I remember a dish so strong smelling that my father was forced to prepare it at the bottom of the garden, and we shut all the windows, lest the house stink of blacan for weeks on end. Blacan is a fermented shrimp paste, really nice if you put a teaspoon of it in a curry, but my father did something odd involving a gas torch. Tiny little dried fish fried with peanuts was another stinky snack he liked.

Ihad a lovely octopus and raddicio salad for lunch today. The octopus was soft and tender, and a pleasant suprise and so often it's not prepared right and ends up rubbery. Really isn't a big deal on a freaky food thread tho.

Blood Sausage (black pudding), a regular weekend breakfast for me. Pressed tongue is a regular sandwich filling too. Stuffed lambs hearts are good. Ox tail I buy and cook when ever i see it during the winter, its the best casserole meat and I know of. Pigs trotters and green pea soup were another childhood favourite. Sweetbreads I've had before (thymus gland of calves). I like snails, and have had abalone before too, which is a sorta endangered giant marine snail. They tend to taste of what ever you cook them in, so the snails are sorta chewy garlic and parsley butter flavoured things. Abalone was sorta chewy and fishy. Jellyfish i had once, at chinese banquet. That was.... weird. I would love to try that cheese, lutefisk, and that pressed smoked sheeps head you get in petrolstations in Iceland just to say I have, and will more or less eat anything if its a local dish and not just a grossout dare.

Having said that, I ate a bunch of fishes eyes a few months ago (dug them out of the fishes heads on the plate rather than bought or prepared), just to freak out my bro and mate whilst we were eating. You know those chewy sweets with liquid centres ? Well.......