Haggis and Chips, with Fried Turnip

This delicious dish is slightly heretical.  Normally haggis is served with boiled potatoes (sometimes mashed), and mashed turnip. However the main component of the dish has a history much older than the advent of potatoes in Europe, so the dish has already undergone changes.

Traditional Scottish cooking is based on three basic processes, which were standard all the way back into the neolithic, and beyond: griddle cooking (oatcakes, pancakes, etc.), cauldron cooking (puddings, haggis, and meat preparation in general), and pan cooking (porridge and soups).

This version of the haggis dish involved the steaming of slices of haggis prepared as a sausage, the roasting (griddling) of the chipped potatoes, and the frying of very thin slices of turnip.

Normally the turnip is cooked in much the same way as the potato, by boiling. I find this way of preparing the turnip lacking in sweetness. A friend in London told me about the transformation of the flavour of the turnip if fried in thin slices: it is much sweeter.

So this version of the standard combination of ingredients features thinly sliced turnip. Don't do it any other way!

The haggis was steamed for fifty minutes before serving. The chips were marinaded in a salsa of oregano, sunflower oil, ketchup, vinegar, cornmeal and black pepper, and roasted on the middle shelf of the oven at 180 deg for twenty five minutes, after which the heat was turned down. Watch carefully at this point. The chips will brown nicely because of the cornmeal coating, but the potato will cook properly at a lower temperature.

The thinly sliced turnip was cooked in a lidded casserole dish at the same time as the chips, but at the bottom of the oven. The turnip slices were drizzled in a little sunflower oil, and I added some water. Cooked for the same length of time as the chips.