I could have done an offal thing in Jerusalem

From 2004 to 2007 my work took me and my family to live in Jerusalem, a mysterious, intoxicating, fascinating, place.  One thing I didn’t do there I now realize I could have done probably easier than anywhere else I’ve lived, is make haggis.

Haggis Recipe Ingredients:the stomach bag of a sheep, sheep offal, (innards) including lungs, heart, and kidneys, beef suet, toasted coarse Scottish oatmeal, onions, salt, pepper and cayenne pepper.

Basically, you take the excessively cleaned stomach you’ve soaked overnight, and fill it with the innards that you’ve cooked for several hours and added the other ingredients, also cooked and all chopped finely.  Then, after sewing the stomach, you boil that for another three hours.  Serve hot.  I like haggis and I like culinary experiments.  This all sounds very tempting to me.

There was a narrow, smelly street in the heart of the Old City in Jerusalem, not far from the Lutheran Church, that we called Meat Alley.  My daughter and I on our first intimidating visit there on a hot August Saturday, accidentally stumbled upon that memorable lane.  It was all we could do to get to the end of it without losing our breakfast.  The place was rank with the smell of freshly cut meat, drained blood, and yes, offal: shop after shop sold nothing but the insides of animals.   The organs, all still connected to the tube (or tubes…I didn’t investigate closely) that had held them together inside the animal that once used them, hung like grisly trophies on wires across the front of these shops, or were stacked on tables.

After that first encounter we visited the Old City all the time, regularly.  For a year or so, we even went to church at the Holy Sepulcher so were down there almost every Sunday.  We got to know Meat Alley a little better and even shopped for meat there ourselves.

While reading about Burns Suppers a couple years ago, planning our first, I ran across the haggis recipe, and I could only shake my head with rue, picturing those lines upon lines of animal organs for sale in Jerusalem that I had missed out on.  It would have been simplicity itself to go down there, get a stomach and the other parts, then go home to make my haggis.

I would have done it.  I really would have done it.