Isherwood column: To the haggis
By Justin Isherwood
January 25th … is skirt night at our house, friends and kinsmen; should you be wearing a kilt, you’re invited.
In the new age of LGBTQ liberation, it is easier for Scots and their remnants to wear a skirt than in previous times.
Never to mind the kilt has been worn by men for most of 500 years, and only recently displaced by pants.
A kilt anthropologist, apparently there are such things, invented the phrase “male unbifurcated garment” to describe a kilt. When I first read the phrase I was confused until I realized what he meant was unbisected garment, if maybe also untwained, this word’s advantage being it is attached to a western literary tradition.
Originally the kilt was called a breacan, a leine, an feileadh mor, the last referring to the belted kilt where a bedspread size cloth is laid on the ground, the wearer dividing it in half with a belt while stuffing the extra yardage into stacked layers behind, rendering his latter quarter bullet proof. Any extra material tossed over the shoulder. To the result, what this person is wearing in public is the full wind sail of the Cutty Sark, to readily double as a sleeping bag, tent, or field hospital. A garment when worn in the company of poachers renders the principle invisible, by legend, an appropriate Scot’s practice.
Yet to describe the benefit of such a kilt on date night. As a rural child might, I have felt sorry for subsequent generations who do not have access to a 1959 Chevrolet and its back seat. Better yet, the 1948 Desoto with opera doors. Forgetting to mention no rightful father would let his daughter out with a kid in a 1959 Chevrolet.
The kilt is basically a polite form of public nakedness. I will not take the effort to explain that remark. This I believe the ugly truth why the kilt has endured, because it is an adequate statement of the average male id.
Were I a psychologist, which I’m not, early on I would ask male patients to wear a kilt as therapy. Privately at first, eventually in public spaces, to risk being vulnerable. Risk being different. Risk feeling exposed.
Robert Burns, who is the subject of Burns Night, was a world-class philanderer, a pornographer, to add a revenuer. Robert Burns almost certainly never wore a kilt. Despite Burns Night around the world collects an exceeding mob of kilt-wearers, including bagpipes, claymores, drums and whiskey, all because of Robert Burns. Burns did at the very least participate in whisky, as a Crown gauger. Still no kilt but whisky counts, as both whiskey and kilts are tied-on.
To suspect that Burns practiced haggis; haggis is nothing else but an over-large boiled sausage filled with assorted plant and animal debris. Same as a hot dog or a Lambeau-stadium brat, filled with stuff you don’t want to know. What through history poor people eat, because it’s cheap and nominally part of greater capitalism’s waste stream, so please don’t ask.
My mamma’s meatloaf in reality was haggis – the classic, the essential, the criminal haggis. Her haggis meatloaf contained the same amount of meat for six people as it did for 16. Even as her kid, I believed my mom was a witch. No matter who or what showed up at the door at meal time, or how many, extra plates were added, they were filled. What haggis can do.
I never asked for the recipe of her haggis. It would take a microbiologist to discover the alien substances present. Oatmeal of course which is also Scots – required ingredient to meatloaf haggis. Tree bark can be substituted if oatmeal is short, as well as the oat straw itself.
The quality of a great chef is what they can conspire to camouflage as food. Haggis is the art of food survival. My mamma’s meatloaf was whatever; carrots and corn, rutabagas and parsnips, combined together with certain radar-confusing spices, and her witch’s spell. We ate it willingly and didn’t know the difference.
This, the essence what is celebrated on Burns Night; the life sustaining table, even if you are poor. In crude terms, how to turn arubbish pail into food.
Burns Night celebrates this somewhat awkwardly, a fornicating poet who wrote a junk form of the English language, and is one of the most celebrated nights on Planet Earth. Burns did not wake the dead, didn’t walk on waters, just lived and died and sang out loud.
Haggis, one of the world’s premier junk foods, and I do mean junk. This, our focusing metaphor. Not the kilt, not the whisky, not even the poetry. As explains the toast of Burns Night … to the haggis.