HAGGIS has been deep-fried, smothered in whisky cream and rolled in oats, but now the great chieftain o' the puddin' race has undergone the final indignity: it has been made into chocolate.
Whether the Rustic from Robert Burns's Address to a Haggis, who set the earth ''trembling'' with his ''haggis-fed'' tread, would have had the same seismic force had his dinner been rolled into delicate balls can only be surmised.
Nadia Ellingham, an artisan chocolate maker from Edinburgh, reckons that had the poet tasted her variation on Scotland's national dish, he would have raised a toast in its honour.
''Most people screw their faces up or look a bit horrified when I tell them I make haggis chocolates, but once I explain how I make them they understand that it does actually make sense,'' said Ms Ellingham, founder of the Thinking Chocolate firm.
Ms Ellingham created the chocolates for a Burns Night supper but her guests were so complimentary that she has started selling them commercially.
Perhaps judging that chocolate lovers would be less than keen to see their favourite ingredient blended with the traditional sheep's liver, heart, lung and suet, Ms Ellingham does not use offal in the truffles. Instead, she re-creates the flavour of haggis by combining nutmeg, mace, black pepper and oatmeal.
''I scoured around lots of haggis recipes to find a lot of the common ingredients. I filtered it down and came up with the ingredients that come up most often, eliminated the offal aspect of the dish, did some recipe development and it went from there.''
Joe McGirr, of the Scottish Malt Whisky Society, called it amazing. ''You're expecting it to be awful but then you put it in your mouth and you get all these fantastic spice flavours that make up a haggis,'' he said.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/choc-aye-th ... -s45h.html
