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Deeney's: Meet the people behind Leyton's famous haggis toastie

It’s all haggis on deck at Deeney’s this weekend. The capital’s number one offal toastie emporium faces its busiest days of the calendar around Burns Night, shunting off its signature doorstoppers — made from spiced, minced lamb innards mixed with oatmeal, smoked bacon, Scottish cheddar and caramelised onion — to parties across London, where full-kilt bankers raise a toast to the poet Robbie Burns, the national bard of Scotland, and strip the willow until dawn.

“And that’s just catering the ceilidhs around town,” says Carol Dwyer, who co-owns the E10 café with her husband Paddy. “We’re having Leyton’s first basement ceilidh downstairs ourselves, where a touch of tartan will suffice for dress code.”

They’ll also supply the demands of 150 revellers at London Fields Brewery, backed up by the Edinburgh ceilidh band Cora, and are collaborating on a Yard Sale Pizza “love-in”: a one-off Burns Night pizza special topped with haggis, cavolo nero, spicy black chilli chutney and mozzarella.

Deeney’s has been converting the capital to haggis since 2012, when Carol and Paddy launched a street food stall orbiting Hackney, Clapton and Broadway Market. It’s since become a business with two sites in Leyton, including the new, bigger café on Leyton High Road, where we’ve met today, and a franchised offshoot in Tokyo (yes, really).

“People want a sandwich that isn’t what you can get on every corner,” says Carol. “Although we had beef, chicken and ham on the menu, people wanted haggis. So it’s a customer-driven product. We had a niche and we ran with it.”

The new 50-seat site, opened in Leyton last year, means they can power through more kitchen orders: the £6 Macbeth, £6 Lady Macbeth (made with vegetarian haggis), £7 Hamish Macbeth (with bacon), £5 Just Cheese (no haggis, just cheddar) and £6 Ham-ish (no haggis, cheddar and bacon). But it’s at the food markets that the questions fly in.

“We get asked hundreds of times every day, ‘What’s haggis?’” says Paddy. “We’re straight up: it’s like a spicy lamb sausage with a stuffing texture. It’s familiar enough for people to know it’s like sausage meat, and we don’t go into much detail to put them off. Same as sausages. No one wants to know how the sausage gets made.”

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Historically, the Scots would make it from the offal from a slaughtered lamb or sheep, using the animal’s stomach as a cooking bag (today, the bags are largely synthetic). Minced heart, liver and lungs are bulked out with oatmeal, onions, suet, seasoning and spices before cooking. “A lot of American tourists have interesting ideas about what it is. A lot of people still think it’s an animal that runs around the Highlands,” says Carol. “It was in an episode of the Simpsons and that’s where a lot of Americans get that from,” adds Paddy. “Groundskeeper Willy making haggis. He nearly ruined our business for us.”

The couple’s Burns Night celebrations are a “tongue in cheek” take on the “staunch Scottish” tradition, which is “as it should be”.

“Robbie Burns was definitely taking the piss when he toasted the haggis,” says Paddy. “Enjoy the poetry, the food, and have a bit of laugh with the dancing.”

A rendition of the Selkirk Grace, a toast to the lassies and vote of thanks, then — but plied with plenty of McClelland’s Speyside and Highland Park single malt whiskies?

“We’ll have a couple of whisky cocktails, like the Le Frog, a French martini made with Laphroaig, so it has the tartness of a French martini but the smoky, peaty flavour of a whisky,” says Paddy. Raise a glass to that.