Haggis is Scotland’s national pudding: a sheep’s pluck — heart, liver and lungs — cooked, minced and mixed with toasted oatmeal, suet, onion and a lot of pepper, then packed into a sheep’s stomach and simmered for hours. It is the descendant of the oldest kind of sausage there is, a stomach stuffed with fat and blood roasting on Odysseus’s fire, and it tastes far milder than its reputation: nutty from the oats, peppery, and rich. This is a US-legal haggis, and the reason is one regulation. Since 1971, 9 CFR 310.16 has said “Livestock lungs shall not be saved for use as human food,” after a USDA study found most inspected lungs contaminated with dust, mould and stomach contents that inspection could not reliably see. A petition to repeal the rule was denied on 8 May 2026, so the lung stays out. The lung in a Scottish haggis is mostly bulk and a light, spongy texture; here extra heart and fatty lamb shoulder replace it, with beef suet and pinhead oats doing exactly what they do in Edinburgh. I have not made this one yet; the formula is built from Marianski’s traditional haggis with the lung replaced, and is untested.
Ingredients
OFFAL AND MEAT (cooked first)
- 1 lamb heart pair, about 450 g (1 lb)
- 340 g (12 oz) lamb liver
- 450 g (1 lb) fatty lamb shoulder or neck, boneless — replaces the lung
PUDDING
- 250 g (9 oz) pinhead (steel-cut) oatmeal, or medium oatmeal
- 225 g (8 oz) beef suet, fresh from the butcher, finely chopped or grated
- 2 medium onions, 300 g (10 oz), finely chopped
- 500 ml (2 cups) strained cooking liquor, approximately
- 20 g (3½ tsp) fine salt — about 1.3% of the mix; adjust after tasting
- 8 g (1 Tbsp) black pepper, freshly and coarsely ground
- 1 g (½ tsp) ground coriander
- 1 g (½ tsp) nutmeg
- 0.5 g (¼ tsp) mace
- 0.5 g (¼ tsp) ground allspice
VESSEL (choose one)
- 1 cleaned sheep or lamb stomach (ordered from a halal or specialty butcher), or
- 65 mm fibrous or beef bung casing, about 45 cm (18 in), or
- 1 buttered 1.5 L (6-cup) pudding basin, covered with foil
Directions
Key ingredients
- In the collection: Black Pepper and oats. In the collection, Goetta (Cincinnati Pork and Oats) is the American oat-and-meat cousin, and Fried Liver and Onions is what to do with the leftover liver.
- Cook the offal: trim the heart of tubes and hard fat. Put heart and lamb shoulder in a pot, cover with cold salted water, bring to a simmer and skim. After 30 minutes add the liver and simmer 30 minutes more. Everything must be fully cooked here because the pudding stage only reheats and binds. Lift the meat out, strain and keep the liquor.
- Toast the oats: spread the oatmeal on a tray and toast at 180 °C / 350 °F for 10–15 minutes, stirring once, until it smells like biscuits. This is where most of haggis’s nutty flavour comes from; untoasted oats taste raw and pasty.
- Mince: when cool enough, grind the heart and shoulder through a 6 mm (1/4”) plate and grate or grind the liver fine. Liver is strong; grating it spreads it evenly so no bite tastes of it alone.
- Mix: combine meat, oats, suet, onion and seasonings, then add enough liquor to make a loose, porridge-like mixture — it should drop off a spoon. The oats will swell in the cooking and take up the liquid. A stiff mixture makes a dry, crumbly haggis.
- Taste: it is safe to taste now, since the meat is cooked. Haggis should be distinctly peppery. Correct the salt and pepper.
- Fill loosely: fill the stomach, casing or basin only about two-thirds full. The oats expand by roughly a third; a full casing bursts. Press out the air, tie or seal, and prick a stomach or casing a few times with a sterile needle.
- Simmer gently: lower into water at 85–90 °C / 185–195 °F — barely moving, never boiling — and cook 2 hours for a casing or stomach, until the centre reads at least 74 °C / 165 °F. For a basin, steam covered for 2 hours. A rolling boil splits the stomach.
- Serve: split it at the table and spoon it out with neeps (mashed swede or rutabaga) and tatties (mashed potato), and a dram if it is Burns Night, 25 January. Leftovers slice and fry well for breakfast.
Notes
Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. Marianski’s traditional haggis is the backbone: 400 g lamb heart, 300 g liver, 300 g lungs and trimmings, 500 g cooked oatmeal and 100 g onion per kilogram of meat, seasoned with salt, pepper, coriander, nutmeg and cinnamon, stuffed into a stomach and cooked at 85 °C for 2–3 hours. Deviations: (1) the lung is removed and replaced with fatty lamb shoulder and a larger share of heart; (2) beef suet is added, as in Scottish butchers’ haggis; (3) cinnamon is swapped for allspice and mace, a common Scottish choice; (4) onion is raised; (5) final temperature set at 74 °C because the mixture contains reheated cooked offal. Untested.
Why there is no lung — the law. 9 CFR 310.16(a): “Livestock lungs shall not be saved for use as human food.” The rule was proposed in 1969 (34 FR 20433) after a USDA study found that 93.5% of beef lungs passed as fit for food had abnormal conditions and most were contaminated with dust, mould and rumen contents, and that the lung’s structure made inspection impractical; it became final on 17 June 1971 (36 FR 11638), backed by a further study of calf and sheep lungs. In January 2023 a physician, Dr Jonathan Reisman, petitioned FSIS to lift it. On 8 May 2026 FSIS denied the petition “without prejudice”, saying it contained no studies showing lungs are safe and citing a 2015 Colorado State University study that found Salmonella in 54.2% of sampled pork lungs. So imported Scottish haggis remains barred, and so does lung from US animals. Black pudding is not affected by this rule; it contains no lung.
Where haggis came from. The earliest written recipes are English, not Scottish: “hagese” in the verse cookbook Liber Cure Cocorum (Lancashire, about 1430), and “hagws of a schepe” in another English collection of the same period. Gervase Markham printed a haggis pudding in The English Huswife in 1615, and the food historian Catherine Brown has argued from such sources that the dish is English in origin. Others point to the general Norse and northern European habit of cooking offal in a stomach. What is not in doubt is that Scotland kept it when England dropped it, and Robert Burns’s “Address to a Haggis” (1786) made it national. The Burns Supper on 25 January is where most haggis is eaten now.
The name. Usually traced to Middle English hag or haggen, to chop; the Old French hachis is a related candidate. The origin is not settled.
Variations. Beef haggis; venison haggis; vegetarian haggis made with oats, pulses and vegetables; lung-free lamb-and-beef haggis made by US producers.
Sourcing and gear. Lamb hearts and livers come from halal butchers and farm shops. Fresh beef suet comes from any butcher; boxed shredded suet is coated in flour but works. Sheep stomachs are hard to find; a fibrous casing or a pudding basin is honest and easier.
Still open. No US maker’s lung-free formula has been compared; the ratio of extra heart to shoulder here is a judgement, not a published figure.
The photo. The photograph is a Scottish haggis, which contains lung; the recipe here does not.
Read more on the site. Blood, Liver, Head and Offal · A Grand Tour