Story Break
A Wee Mouse Haggis
Long days on the trail really make you drag. You get tired. And hungry, so you’ll daydream about food you ate in a previous lifetime. You can’t carry enough to eat, the longer you go, so you get more and more hungry. You don’t notice this until you’re on the trail a while. Like weeks.
You start to wonder about things. You look at the sky and see cotton candy. You stop for water at a muddy stream and you want to puke it gets so hard sometimes and tired, but you have to, and while you’re topping up your bottle you start thinking about coffee with cream and sugar in it, and you don’t drink it that way. I did. I thought about it. I can’t stand coffee with cream in it, cream and sugar. How can people drink that slop I think when I see people doing it. And then all day that’s all I thought about, how the cream is smooth and fat and rich and the sugar is doing something down there mixed in with the coffee, floating around carefree and sweet, waiting to be swallowed. Everything hot and smooth almost like a full meal, thick and life sustaining. And I thought about it all day and dreamed about it all night until I almost died.
Give me a heavy mug full of hot black coffee and I’m happy. Has a sharp inky cutting edge on it. Give me just a mug full of boiling hot water and a couple tablespoons of ground coffee. I’ll throw in the coffee and I’m happy, I like it simple. You don’t need more than water and coffee and a cup. Fancy doesn’t taste good. What tastes good is what tastes good. But I wanted that cream and sugar like it was life itself.
The longer you’re out the more you think. Songs start drifting through your head. Ones you’ve heard over and over but can’t even hum. They just float up to the top and out come the words, and the melody. You sing them over and over again. Just like that. You never knew the words, you can’t sing, you can’t hold a tune and then you sing all day. And you’re always thinking about food. It gets down to that. Always food.
You start thinking about things you’ve had. Then about things you’ve never had. Hakarl: fermented Icelandic shark buried in sand for months while it ferments. Sauteed silkworms like they eat in Chinese factories, no waste. Things like that. Snake tongue on a cracker. Bat wings with peanut butter, crunchy, light, tasty. Spider salad. You daydream. In the past people took what they had and made something from it. They were hungry. Sometimes it killed them. Sometimes it didn’t, and sometimes they made it the national dish. Times were hard. You used the spare parts of everything. You had to eat.
Like with haggis. In Scotland where they had sheep and never wasted anything. In case of a sheep drought. They had sheep droughts. Poor people, they were. Like hikers. They chopped up whatever and mixed it with oats and whatever and stuffed it back into the sheep stomach and boiled it and ate it. It kept them going.
Now they throw it too. Times are better. They can take food and make a sport out of it.
McKean Foods sponsors the World Haggis Hurling Championships. They’ve made haggis since 1850, McKean has. Can’t get away from it, so they play with it. “The tradition of Haggis Hurling dates back to early Scottish Clan Gatherings, where the women folk would toss a haggis across a stream to their husbands, who would catch the haggis in their kilts.” The Scottish way — carrying a pail of boiled sheep guts out to the fields for hubby’s lunch.
Robin Dunseath started it though in 1977 at the Edinburgh Gathering of the Clans. He is an Irishman. It was his joke. He wanted to revive an ancient sport that never existed to prove how gullible people were.
Nobody questioned him, they just threw with pride. Then he started awarding certificates in the Fellowship of the Order of the Crumbs to the best ones. People who got them he called FOC-ers. Dumb FOC-ers, them, they didn’t get it. After 20 years of this he wanted to move on from this joke and confessed and no one believed him. It had to be true, they were doing it every year now, it just had to be true. They planned to make it an Olympic demonstration sport in 2004.
How to hurl haggis. It has to be done while standing on top of a whiskey barrel. Hurlers get points for distance and accuracy, but nobody says what they aim at, maybe they just try to get it as far away as they can. “The Haggis has to be edible,” that’s another rule (probably capitalized out of respect). No word on how they define edible, but the sheep stomach bag can’t break open when it hits the ground. Instant disqualification. Everyone might puke, at the least. Someone bold goes up to check on it to make sure it didn’t break.
Alan Pettigrew got the hurling world record in August 1984. He stood on his barrel at the island of Inchmurrin at Loch Lomond and heaved his one and a half pound regulation haggis 180 feet and 10 inches. The Guinness Book Of Records says so. Now some people do it professionally. They still believe it’s real. They daydream too, about the Olympics one day. Hunger will do that to you. People want something to believe in and dream about. If you walk all day, every day, you dream. Sometimes about haggis.
Mouse Haggis, An Ultralight Dining Experience
Ingredients:
- 1 mouse stomach
- 1 mouse liver
- 1 mouse heart
- 2 mouse lungs
- 1 mouse brain
- 3 and a half thimbles of quick-cooking oatmeal
- 1 thimble of chopped onion
- 1 thimble of suet or butter
- 1 pinch cayenne pepper
- 1 pinch grated nutmeg
- Salt & pepper to taste
Remove the mouse stomach, cut it open and discard undigested food.
Place the mouse’s liver, heart, lungs and brain into a tiny pot and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil and simmer for one hour. Chop the organs into small bits. Keep the the liquid.
Toast the oatmeal. Mix the other ingredients with the oatmeal and add the liquid.
Fill the stomach with all this and pin it closed with a toothpick or a thorn. It’s too small to sew shut the normal way so don’t even try.
Simmer the filled mouse stomach for one hour. Poke a few holes in the stomach while cooking to keep it from exploding. You probably don’t have to do this unless you sew it shut. Don’t get carried away and try any needlepoint. You just want supper.
To serve, drain the haggis, place it on a plate, open the stomach, and spoon out the filling. Or just swallow it all because it’s small. You’d need a doll spoon anyway.
Note: The U.S. government has declared that sheep lungs are dangerous for human consumption, so traditional haggis is illegal in the U.S. Some state and local laws ban the sale or consumption of sheep stomachs and/or brains. Probably goes for mouse organs too.
While your haggis is simmering you can go ahead and butcher the rest of the mouse. Try not to cut yourself. It’s a wild mouse and you don’t know where it’s been. Try not to drool. That’s bad too.
You have some sort of knife even if you’re going light. Take it and skin the mouse carefully. When the skin’s off you can remove the meat. The chuck is up front where the shoulders are, like on a beef carcass. Take a hunk off of each side as far down each front leg as it’s worth going.
Find what you can around the ribs, but there won’t be much. Mice don’t bulk up much, even the ones that are body builders, and the wild ones never are, they’re runners and diggers — mostly shoulders and butts.
You should get some more meat along the spine though. The rib eye, tenderloin and sirloin areas where mice have well-developed muscles are back there. The rear is going to be your other big bonus. This is where you’ll find the rump roast. Use your judgment in how far down the back legs to go. Set all the cuts aside on a clean rock or a leaf while you’re doing the butchering. You can fry up the pieces, or throw them in with the haggis, or roast them on the end of a small stick while the haggis is cooking.
If you’re a good mouse hunter you’ll have more than one. Mice are nutritious.
They Know How To Do It In Zambia:
How to Cook Mice
The cooking of the mice is very simple. The mice are gutted, boiled in plain water for about half an hour and salted. They are then fire dried until they are nearly bone dry. Mice are never cooked any other way.
Some do not know how to cook mice.
Some do not know how to cook mice.
Onion, tomatoes in the mice.
Onion, cooking oil in the mice.*
So goes the song about a silly young modern housewife who did not learn proper mouse cookery. She made a grave mistake. These ingredients are taboo in Zambian mouse cookery. Don’t be an embarrassment on the trail. Learn how to cook your mice. Don’t play with your food. Your world record for hurling mouse haggis will not count, whether it is from your hand or out of your mouth.
* “Mice as a Delicacy: the Significance of Mice in the Diet of the Tumbuka People of Eastern Zambia”, by Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph.D. See https://bit.ly/2T77zWR (Bridgewater.edu) or http://bit.ly/JPMtoG (Internet Archive) for more info.