Macsween’s come up with a Trump-friendly American haggis - Susan Dalgety

Macsween's have changed their formula for US markets

There is nothing more satisfying on a cold January night than tucking into a steaming plate of peppery haggis, buttery tatties and neeps, with a glass of spicy red wine to wash it down. My loyalty to the memory of Rabbie Burns draws a line at whisky. I think it is a horrible drink, even the smell makes me retch, unlike my English husband who collects single malts with the same relish I shop for clothes.

Our haggis was, of course, Macsween’s. The Edinburgh family firm has been making it for more than 60 years and is now Scotland’s biggest producer of the dish. Their traditional haggis is, in my book, the best you can buy. But until now they have been unable to export it to the USA, where the number of Americans with Scots heritage is estimated to be 25 million – including the newly-elected President Trump, who is half Scottish, and his Vice President JD Vance, who describes himself as a “Scots Irish hillbilly”.

Haggis has not complied with American food regulations since President Nixon banned its export in 1971 because it contained sheep lungs. For a country that worships cheese in a can and hot dogs made of “emulsified meat trimmings”, banning haggis because of a few crumbs of sheep lungs seems a bit rich. But Macsween have come up with a new recipe where they replace lungs with heart and are confident it will pass America’s stringent rules.

So from next year, Americans will be able to enjoy a proper Burns supper, with Scotland’s best haggis

as its centrepiece.

Macsween’s challenge must now be to get President Trump to host one at the White House, in honour of his mother Mary Macleod who left Scotland in 1930 when she was 18.

Traditionalists might baulk if the famously teetotal Trump toasts the “great chieftain o' the pudding-race!” with diet Coke. But worse, he is likely to insist the Immortal Memory is a tribute to his ‘genius’ rather than a celebration of Burns’ enduring spirit.