Events
Burns Night is one of the few winter occasions that was built for the cold. Haggis, whisky, a lot of people in a room, a poem shouted at a pudding. It is already a feast with a bit of theatre in it. What it is missing, in most hotel function rooms, is a fire.
We have cooked a few Burns suppers outdoors now, for a Scottish society, a private party in Kent, and once for a village hall that moved the whole thing into the car park when they saw the fire. It works better than it has any right to, and the menu is mostly the traditional one, done over embers rather than in an oven.
You do not need to make a haggis. Buy a good one, from a Scottish butcher who still makes their own; Macsween is the one most people can find and it is excellent. What you can do is cook it on the fire, which is how it was done for a couple of hundred years before anyone had an oven.
Wrap the haggis tightly in a double layer of foil, with a splash of whisky inside the parcel. Bury it in the embers at the cool edge of the fire, not the hot centre, for about an hour for a 1kg haggis, turning it once. It steams in its own fat and the whisky, and comes out with a faint smokiness the oven version never has. Pipe it to the table if you have a piper, address it if you have the nerve, and cut it open with the biggest knife in the house.
Haggis is the ceremony; the venison is the dinner. A whole haunch of Scottish red deer, in season and at its best in January, goes on the asado cross over oak in the early afternoon and comes off four hours later. We carve it at the fire. A haunch feeds twenty-five and looks like a Burns Night ought to look.
For a smaller party, venison loin seared on the embers and served pink, or a pot of venison and whisky stew that has been bubbling at the edge of the fire since lunchtime, with a crust of bread.
Swede and potato, mashed, with too much butter. Over a fire, both go into the embers whole, skin on, for an hour, then get peeled and mashed in a pot on the grate with butter, salt and a lot of black pepper. The swede picks up smoke and a touch of sweetness from the embers and is better than any version I have had indoors. Keep them separate on the plate; mixing them is a crime in some households.
With the haggis, a peaty Islay. Lagavulin, Ardbeg, Laphroaig; something with smoke to meet the fire. With the venison, something softer and richer from Speyside or the Highlands. And a bottle of blended for the toasts, because there will be toasts, and good single malt is wasted on the fourth one.
The best Burns Night I have cooked was minus three in a field in Kent, forty people in coats, a piper, a fire you could feel from ten metres and a haggis dug out of the embers with a shovel. Nobody wanted to go in. That is the whole case for doing it outside.
- Cai
25 January 2027 is a Monday, so most Burns suppers will land on the Friday or Saturday either side, and those two nights go early. If you want one around a fire, for a society, a company or a houseful of friends, talk to me before Christmas. And if the date is gone, a fire feast in the depths of January is just as good without the poem.
