A beginner's guide to Burns Night

By Fliss Freeborn

Never hosted a Burns Night feast before? Let us walk you through the evening's food, drink and festivities to see if we can't convince you to remedy that.

Haggis, neeps and tatties — Image caption,
It's time to make a whisky toast to Robert Burns

Every year on 25 January, an estimated worldwide celebrate the birthday of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns. A highlight in the winter calendar for Scots and non-Scots alike, Burns Night is a muckle (great big) celebration of the poetry and songs penned by the bard, with traditional food and drink playing a central role in the festivities. Here’s a beginner’s guide to cooking this traditional Scottish feast and giving your dinner guests a Burns Night to remember.

The starter

While the star of the meal is always a served with neeps and tatties, the starter is generally one of a handful of Scottish soups.

The usual contenders include cock-a-leekie, which is a chicken and leek broth often bulked out with rice and prunes; a chunky vegetable soup made with dried peas and pearl barley called Scotch broth; or creamy Cullen skink – a smoked haddock and potato chowder originating from the northeast of Scotland. Some hotels and restaurants put smoked salmon and oatcakes on the menu here too, though this isn’t popular with purists.

If you’re keen to stick to a smaller budget or have plant-based intentions for the New Year, you’re best off choosing Scotch broth and making it with vegetable stock. This is also the most straightforward soup of the three, although all can be cooked in advance and reheated on the day to help things run smoothly.

When you serve your starter, a few lines of grace attributed to Robert Burns should be spoken before everyone tucks in:

Some hae meat, and cannae eat,

And some wad eat that want it,

but we hae meat and we can eat,

And sae the Lord be thankit.

The main

Graces uttered, soup slurped and perhaps some red wine poured, we move on to the main attraction: the haggis.

Before we can talk about the important ritual of presenting this traditional Scottish centrepiece, we need to get a few things straight. Namely, what a haggis actually is – and how one might go about buying and preparing it.

For the uninitiated, haggis is minced sheep lungs, hearts and livers, mixed with suet, barley, spices and onion, all stuffed into a sheep’s stomach. Once we accept that haggis will never win any beauty contests, we can focus on its full-bodied, meaty flavour, its easy preparation and surprisingly economical price tag.

These qualities make haggis a firm favourite year-round, with one leading manufacturer shifting an estimated and seeing a six-fold increase in demand over the Burns Night period. Over half of this output was sold south of the border; consumers in England and Wales are becoming increasingly partial to this rich and warming wintery dish.

In terms of preparing haggis, you’ll be relieved to hear that while you can make your own from scratch, it’s also perfectly acceptable to buy one ready-made. Most large supermarkets will stock them around Burns Night, or you could ask your local butcher to order one in for you, should they not make their own.

If you’re buying a butcher’s haggis, it will most likely be encased in a sheep’s stomach, stapled at either end and require a long boil on the hob to cook it through. Alternatively, most supermarket versions will arrive in discardable plastic casing, whose contents can simply be microwaved for an impressively speedy centrepiece. That said, you can also boil or bake this kind of haggis in its case. While both of these methods are happily hands-off, they are considerably more time consuming.

The vegetarian alternative to haggis

Vegetarians and vegans, if you’re still reading at this point you'll be pleased to know there’s also the option of celebrating the Bard's birthday with a plant-based haggis. Featuring oats, lentils, vegetables and spices, it can also be bought ready-made if you don't fancy rustling up your own.

Pleasingly, there’s little in the way of snobbery about vegetarian haggis. In fact, many meat-eaters I know actually prefer the veggie version over the original. So if your feelings toward offal are tepid at best, it’s a great place to start.

Side dishes

And so, to the haggis' all-important accompaniments: neeps and tatties. ‘Neep’ is the Scot's word for ‘turnip’, but if you ask any Scottish person to find you a turnip in the supermarket, they’ll return with what someone south of the border would call a swede. Don’t argue – this is what you should use. Tatties are, much more simply, potatoes.

To prepare the neeps and tatties, both are peeled then boiled in separate pans of salted water before being mashed – still separately – with large quantities of butter and a splash of milk. The neeps often have a good grinding of black pepper stirred through them too, but the potatoes need little enhancement if they’ve been chappit (mashed) smoothly enough. Because of their higher water content, the neeps can be made ahead and reheated easily in the microwave or on the hob, but the tatties are best served as fresh as possible. Plant-based alternatives to butter and milk are fine to use here too.

Many restaurants use a ring mould to layer up the haggis, neeps and tatties into one towering stack, but this removes the opportunity for the magnificent haggis serving ritual, which is key to a traditional Burns supper.

If you want to do things properly, have everyone stand while a bagpiper plays A Man’s A Man, For All That – a catchy wee Burns number. (You’ll find your favourite music streaming platform will have several versions if, like most of us, you have neither a set of bagpipes nor the skill to play them properly.)

At the same time, the chef carries the haggis through from the kitchen and sets it on the dining table. Then someone – it helps if they have a talent for theatrics – will recite Address to a Haggis, the poem Burns composed as an ode to the ‘great chieftain o' the pudding-race’.

During the third stanza, the haggis is cut dramatically with a sword to reveal its innards, though a large kitchen knife will suffice. Towards the end of the poem, drams are poured and everyone toasts the haggis with the last line of the final stanza, before it is served alongside those neeps and tatties.

A whisky cream sauce made with cream and mustard is a lovely addition to the meal here, although I’ve also attended more budget-conscious suppers where instant gravy is the preferred lubricant.

After everyone is sufficiently fu’ (full up), it’s time for some more poetry. In the jovial spirit of Robert Burns, the male members of the party may take turns to recite humorous – but never offensive – verses detailing their opinions of the women present. This is called Address To The Lassies. It is then countered, usually to gales of laughter, by the ‘lassies’ hurling back their own witticisms in the Reply To The Laddies. By the time this is over, everyone will be ready for dessert.

Dessert

Cranachan is the typical Scottish pudding served on Burns Night and consists of layers of toasted oats, raspberries and whipped cream laced with honey and whisky. You can use fresh or frozen raspberries, but when it comes to the whisky it’s always best to use a splash of the good stuff – you’ll really be able to taste the difference.

I like to reserve half the raspberries and crush them with the back of a spoon before layering into the glasses, and I also prefer an unpeated (non-smoky) whisky for the cream. Cranachan can be made ahead of time, although bear in mind that the longer it’s left, the less crunchy the oats will be. I’ve found making it mid-afternoon to serve in the evening is a good compromise.

To end the festivities, some more poetry may be recited before a toast to the host is made and everyone joins in for a rendition of of Auld Lang Syne – perhaps Robert Burns’ most famous work. If you’ve been doing things right, plenty of whisky will have been drunk and everyone will have had a braw nicht (a wonderful evening) celebrating one of the world’s best-loved romantic poets.