The Haggis. All over the world, people either love haggis, or find the very concept of it disgusting, but that hasn't stopped it being an incredibly widely exported and consumed dish from the UK. This article will hopefully present some facts about haggis that you never knew, and possibly even dismiss a few of the things you believe that aren't true.

Firstly, it's widely believed that haggis is a Scottish dish, and this may not be the case. The first recorded haggis recipe actually comes from Lancashire in North West England, and there is a lack of evidence to show that it could have originated in Scotland at all. In fact, its origins may well be in the French Andouillette, a sausage made from much the same ingredients that go into haggis and was brought across from France with the Normans. The dish's popularity in Scotland likely arose because of the large amount of sheep that were kept there, and the need to make, filling, nutritious food from everything available.

A haggis itself actually possesses little difference in the parts of an animal it uses to a medium-quality sausage, the main reason that it receives the reaction it does is because people are aware of what goes into it. The heart, liver and lungs are all things that are considered offal, and rather than the intestines, which the offal is stuffed into to make sausages, everything is instead placed in the stomach. The addition of onion and oatmeal may make it different to most sausages, as does the coarse cutting of the meet, but most people who find the idea revolting are perfectly happy to eat the same food if it has a different name.

The concept of an animal's innards cooked in its own stomach may go back even further than the Normans, as there are references to such practices in Ancient Greek tales, such as the Odyssey, initially told around 700BC.

Finally, a tale often told to tourists is that the haggis is actually an animal, with one set of legs shorter than the other, allowing it to stand on the Scottish hills. It is killed and its legs removed, then cooked and served. A survey conducted on American visitors to Scotland found that nearly a third of them believed this to be true.