Robert Burns night

Maintaining a full-blooded Ikarian in the family requires a lot of Mediterranean cooking. But we’re not all Greek around here. Personally, I’m a Heinz 57 in the heritage department, which means I get to cherry-pick from the family tree. Once a year on dear Rabbie’s birthday I take the opportunity to let my tartan freak flag fly and honor the Scottish ancestors with a special dinner.

Scottish cuisine is pretty simple stuff, as you might expect from a hardscrabble northern country. Key dietary components are fish, game, sheep, oats, dairy products, and root vegetables. For our Burns dinner I went with Scotch eggs (hardboiled eggs wrapped in sausage meat, rolled in breadcrumbs, and deep-fried), salmon steaks, rumbledethumps, and boiled kale. For dessert, shortbread and a dram or two of Glenmorangie for toasting the bard while reading (and singing) a few of his fine works aloud in our best accents. Mark it on your calendar: it's the best way to spend January 25th.

No doubt you’re wondering about the rumbledethumps. They are a vegetable side dish prepared as follows: peel and cut into chunks 1 lb. each of potatoes and turnips. Boil together until soft (as for mashed potatoes). Drain and mash with 2 T. butter. Slice thinly ½ lb savoy cabbage , also chop up 1 small onion. Fry cabbage and onion together in 2 T. butter until soft. Mix cabbage with potatoes & turnips. Grate ¾ cup cheddar cheese; mix ¼ C in with the vegetables and spread in a buttered glass baking pan. Sprinkle remaining cheese on top. Bake at 350 until cheese is well melted.

Rumbledethumps, by the way, are Gordon Brown’s favorite food – a wise choice, because in these thrifty times the populace will find fault with mealtime extravagance in its leaders. Look at what the Globe is saying this week about our own head of state: “IMPORTED BEEF!” (it's in the red circle emblazoned on the Prez's chest).
Lay off, tabloids: these folks grow their own vegetables. I am a little concerned about those “crazy conga lines” though.

Many Scottish dishes have odd names: cock-a-leekie, crowdie, cranachan, tuppeny struggles, roastit bubble-jock, Forfar bridies, inky-pinky, bawd bree. Some of these are corruptions of French words (a legacy of the Auld Alliance with France back in the late Middle Ages – for instance, Old French hutaudeau became “howtowdie”, escalope became “collops”) but personally I think some were invented to make bland dishes sound more interesting. If you can’t enjoy your food, at least you can laugh at it.






I need to check with my lamb source to see if I can procure the required ingredients locally for a homemade haggis next year - apparently the USDA thinks lamb lungs are not a foodstuff. I’ve actually eaten haggis on several occasions and and I can concur with the 2001 Larousse Gastronomique that "although its description is not immediately appealing, haggis has an excellent nutty texture and delicious savoury flavour". Kind of like lamb stew. There was a baked potato franchise in Edinburgh that I frequented for a short while called Spudulike, and one of the tastiest tatty toppings on offer was the haggis.

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.