Robert Burns 'supercharged' haggis to become 'international icon of Scottish culture', academics claim

A paper by Professor Gerard Carruthers and Dr Paul Malgrati of the University of Glasgow and the University of the Highlands and Islands reveals how Burns’s 1786 poem, To a Haggis, transformed haggis from a humble peasant dish into a powerful symbol of Scottish identity.

In the paper, entitled Scottish Food Patriotism and the Literary Antecedents of Robert Burns’s ‘To a Haggis’, the academics say Scotland’s national poet "recast Scotland as a hearty nation, keen on food and flesh, against the grain of religious puritanism.”

They raise the question of how a “strange feast of cooks and ingredients” which created the first Burns suppers could have inspired a global event celebrated by millions of people around the world every year on Burns Night.

The research traces the poem’s roots through medieval epics, Renaissance satire and Enlightenment verse, uncovering a tradition where food became a battleground for national pride and social values.

The details of the findings will be presented at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies Conference being held on the 17 January, hosted in collaboration with the National Trust for Scotland Robert Burns Birthplace Museum.

The year’s conference will explore and celebrate the 225th anniversary of the first Burns Supper, which took place in 1801 on the 5th anniversary of the death of Scotland’s national bard.

Professor Gerard Carruthers, Francis Hutcheson chair of Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow, said: “Burns didn’t just write about haggis, he took an existing national symbol and supercharged it so that it became an international icon of Scottish culture.

“He was simultaneously a brilliant appropriator and an innovator. We see this in general with ‘To a Haggis’ but also in his little-noticed reading and utilisation of Allan Ramsay’s list of foreign food against which the Scottish delicacy is to be set.”

Dr Malgrati, lecturer in Northern Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands, said: “'To a Haggis' distils almost four hundred years of Scottish self-consciousness about diet, from oaten bread to offal meat.

“Burns's bon vivant bravado may seem a bit of harmless fun today, but in his time it served as a rhetorical weapon, not only to uphold Scottish peasant pride but also, and more controversially, to recast Scotland as a hearty nation, keen on food and flesh, against the grain of religious puritanism.”

In their paper, Professor Carruthers and Dr Malgrati point out that the earliest advocates of the Burns Supper format were Freemason and militiamen who raised its profile and popularity around the globe in the 18th century.

They wrote: “Burns Supper rose from within a distinct demographic - one that reflected Burns’s unique yet historically grounded adaptation of Scotland’s tradition of food patriotism.

“That such a strange feast of cooks and ingredients could inspire a global celebration - observed by millions from Alloway to Auckland and Atlanta - is hardly the least remarkable chapter in the world’s cultural recipe book.”

The research is part of the project The Burns Supper in History and Today, funded by the Shaw Fund at the Centre for Robert Burns Studies, University of Glasgow.