YOU DON’T have to be Scots to celebrate Burns Night, 25 January 2014. You do have to like good food and great revelry. Big ask, eh?

Like the best traditions, Burruns Nicht (not a typo) is made-up. Who cares? A Burns supper is a way to remind ourselves what a fine and folksy poet was the rural rake who’s become known worldwide as “the immortal bard”.

Now a Hackney street-market-based business, Deeney’s, has launched its own range of haggis.

Co-founder Carol Deeney, above, told Loving Dalston that since the firm started selling haggis toasties (a new tradition?) at its stalls in Broadway market, above, and Chatsworth Road markets, there been  “quite a hankering for haggis in Hackney”.

She has a point: every January Sainsbury’s in Dalston sells out of vegetarian haggis. Deeney says her toasties can be veggie but “at the moment we will be retailing just the regular haggis made of offal, oatmeal and spice.”

Deeney’s imports its haggis from a butcher in the North East of Scotland where she was raised. Deeney says: “Bringing it down from Scotland means people here are getting authentic stuff.”

It will go on sale in Broadway market on Saturday 18 January 2014.

Deeney doesn’t want you to eat haggis only to commemorate the birth of Burns (1759-1796). She says: “We want people to experiment with it and include it in their weekly meals.

“It’s flavoursome, versatile and very sustainable.”

Hamish Scott 100113 

* The ingredients for a Burns supper, online bagpipes and meaning of headline word sonsie

* Emboldened underscored words in most cases indicate a hyperlink, a reader service rare among websites. If a link does not work, it is probably because the site to which the URL refers has not been maintained.