What is haggisography?

Haggisography is any writing about haggis. Haggis is a type of sausage, a delightful and tasty dish out of Scotland that mixes boiled and diced sheep heart, liver, and lungs with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, salt, and stock, puts it all inside the sheep's stomach, and boils it for 2 hours. It is served with potatoes and swede or neeps and tatties. Assuming they don't mean a person of Scandinavian descent, I understood exactly one of those words. Haggis has been described as dogfood-like with a lungy aftertaste.

The most obvious example of haggisography is a recipe. But haggis-themed literature does have a strong tradition. Consider children's books (please let this be a children's book) like Hamish the Hairy Haggis. Or detective novels such as Death by Haggis. Robert Burns wrote the poem "Address to a Haggis" With such classic lines as "Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve." Classic Burns. Then there's a history of the dish called The Haggis: A Little History written by one of the hosts of Two Fat Ladies which was a charming traveling food show on BBC in the 1990s.

Sadly, one of the Fat Ladies, Jennifer Patterson, passed away of lung cancer and they had to stop the show. The other Fat Lady, Clarissa Dickson Wright, died in 2014. Before she passed, Clarissa wrote an autobiography called Spilling the Beans: The Autobiography of One of Television's Two Fat Ladies . It's not a hagiography, however, as Clarissa was no saint. Turns out the ingredients in haggis got along better than Jennifer and Clarissa did.

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