From making out with your girlfriend on New Year's Eve, to making out with the nearest fireman on St. Patrick's Day, boozy revelry goes best with tradition. Get authentically prepared for Scotland's drinkiest celebration, Burns Night, with the help of Scottish Gourmet USA.
This year's exultation of the life and works of Scottish bard Robert "Auld Lang Syne" Burns marks the national poet's 250th b-day, and'll be celebrated worldwide with dinners featuring recitations, bagpipes, Scotch, and mountains o' traditional food, so you can drink more Scotch. SG e-peddles all the eats you need for your feast, including the required dinner centerpiece haggis, a mixture of lamb and beef meat/heart/kidney, suet, oatmeal, onions, and spices, all wrapped for boiling in a stomach casing -- to which Burns displays his affection in "Address to a Haggis", calling it the "great chieftain 'o the puddin-race" (a people whose Trail of Tears stretches all the way through your intestine). Additional, less-terrifying options include wild-shot pheasant, smoked Scottish salmon, cheddar and blue cheeses served with oatcakes, and shortbreads -- what, no poem for shortbreads?
SG also hawks an award-winning whiskey tasting glass from Glencairn Crystal for the single malts and blends you're expected to consume in copious amounts, all of which'll help ease you into your newest tradition: drunkenly making out with anything in plaid.
