The conversation went a little like this: ''I'm knocking off a few lambs this arvy, you want the tongues?''
Well, of course. Lamb tongues are like royalty in the offal kingdom. Odes, nay, canons have been penned about this piece of wonderment. So easy to prepare, so textural, so much fun to mess with the kids' heads. ''Oh look, your tongue fell out overnight.''
Geoff Carter is tall, lean and leathery. He knows something about everything and has a penchant for tight-fitting Stubbies, which were designed solely for blokes like him - with skinny pins and no bum to speak of, like his torso is joined directly to his legs.
''I've gotta clean up the guts for my Scottish mate,'' he continues. ''So he ken make his haggis.''
It's one of those tics of speech - when you mention Scotland (or Ireland or France), you end up adjusting your accent.
Hmm, I think to meself, a day before deadline with an empty Word document, and no idea how to cook this mysterious highland food: ''Could I grab a pluck, too?''
The deal is done and I receive, along with a truckload of grapes, a bucket with the cleaned stomach, the lungs, the liver and heart of a sheep. You can't get much more paddock-to-plate than a pail of sheep parts.
You can use the entire stomach and just keep stuffing it until its full, or just use part of the stomach, which is what I'm doing - there's only so much haggis you need. Being a ruminant, sheep have the enviable ability to be able to eat all day, storing it in one part, then regurgitating and chewing it before digesting it. Life seems so boring for us, only being able to enjoy our food once.
So - everyone OK with this? - you need from your bucket the stomach that most resembles a balloon. There's a name for this, but there's no labels, so the best I can suggest, unless you have a vet with you, is to look for the smallish round bit. Once separated, turn it inside out. There's a certain amount of inbuilt elasticity, given it is a stomach and is meant to expand. You end up with something that looks like coral.
Now you strip this cartilage-like material off with a sturdy brush.
As an interlude - I'll play some Enya music - let's look at a bit of haggis history. Some say the haggis was brought to the Scottish glens by the Romans. About Robbie Burns night, consumption peaks, with many a bloated centrepiece hacked to pieces at secret poetry gatherings by Freemasons and St Andrew's hooded fellows the world over as the pipers pipe. Tradition has it that the haggis is served with boiled and mashed neeps - turnips or swedes - and tatties - potatoes - that have been cooked in the same stock as the haggis. No prizes for guessing what you drink with this: whisky, of course.
At this point I have to confess I've never seen a haggis, let alone prepared one, so I'm flying blind, as I suspect you might be.
I do have plenty of Scottish blood. Recently, my daughter travelled to Scotland, where she looked up family history. Weird, I know. You tend to think 18-year-olds are at clubs being photographed drunk for Facebook.
It turns out our namesakes have a long history of being in bloody battles. If you watch Braveheart, which seems to be the sole authority on Scottish history, those people who run into battle first and are unvaryingly slain by the British, well, that's what my family did.
Now, where were we? That's right - the stomach, if you've chosen wisely, will accommodate with unusual accuracy the lung, the heart and the liver, minced up, plus oatmeal and seasoning.
Do you ever have that feeling that you're walking ahead of a group of people and you are talking quite passionately and then you suddenly realise that everyone left your side a while ago?
That's how I'm feeling now. Hands up if you might try this recipe. Thought so; it's not like they have an aisle in Supabarn selling animal organs. You need to know a guy like Geoff.
I'll hand over to Fergus Henderson and give you an adaptation of his haggis recipe that saw me through the day. Henderson's new The Complete Nose to Tail, which combines his two previous books, is out now and is a one-stop shop for all your weird animal cooking. It's a great book, one I could never part with.
Try it if you like. Haggis could very well be one of those dishes, like fermented rotting tofu and live wriggling prawns, that you can go through life quite happily without, but here I am laying down the challenge.
Some hae meat and canna eat, And some wad eat that want it, But we hae meat and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thankit.
Haggis
Ingredients
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1 sheep's pluck, see above, but just use one lung, the heart and half the liver for this version
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3 onions, chopped fine
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2-3 tbsp butter
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500ml lamb stock (an adaptation, you can use the pluck's boiling water if you like)
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250g pin-head oats, also called steel-cut oats, toasted
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½⁄ cup chopped parsley (an adaptation that tames the animal character a bit)
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1-1½ tbsp allspice
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salt and lots of pepper
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100g suet (sure, it's like pouring kerosene on a fire, but you've gone this far already)
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1 sheep's stomach, just the round bit, washed well - you can't do this too much
Method
- Place the pluck in well-salted water and cook for two hours at a low simmer. Open the windows. Cut up and mince finely. Throw away the mincer.
- Cook the onions in butter until they are really soft. Mix the stock and oats together to swell, then mix with the other ingredients.
- Take the stomach out of the water, rinse it again just to be sure. Stuff it with the mixture. Any extra can be fed to the dog, who will love you forever. Don't overfill. Tie the opening up well with strong string and gently poach this for an hour or 90 minutes. Watch it doesn't split open - leaving you with a soup you can't use, so watch carefully. Did you open the windows? Cool and serve with lots of mustard and whisky.
- Down a few drams well beforehand to steel yourself.