Click here for how to make traditional haggis

Haggis is a braw dish, so long as ye dinnae look at the ingredients,” said one canny Scotsman - and how right he was. A haggis recipe from my mother-in-law's 1975 Glasgow School of Cookery book (see recipe, right) makes me queasy just reading it.

Any recipe that involves grating liver (if life's too short to stuff a mushroom, it's definitely too short to grate offal), washing your “sheep bag”, ensuring that your windpipe is “hanging out of the pan” and then boiling it for three hours until it is “warm-reekin” is not for the faint-hearted.

And what exactly is meant by the ingredient “pluck”? A quick inspection of the dictionary reveals it to be the liver, heart, lungs and windpipe of the sheep - a gruesome combination on any shopping list. Times may be tough and the recession may have heightened the appeal of the cheap cut, but there are limits. Much as I love lamb, I draw the line at wolfing down its vital organs.

Thankfully, you don't have to make your own haggis; you can get it straight from the chill cabinet at your local Sainsbury's, Waitrose and Marks & Spencer - in fact, you can even get a lentil-packed vegetarian version if you so desire. In the run-up to Burns Night, Macsweens of Edinburgh exports up to 800 tonnes around the world, from Canada to Kazakhstan, which is an awful lot of haggis by anyone's standards. And Americans will go to extraordinary lengths to lay their hands on a haggis (importing sheep's lungs is banned in the States), even smuggling them through Customs to make sure that their Burns Night has that authentic Scottish touch.

Which is odd really, because to my mind this strange, furless creature looks as unappetising as it's possible for food to be. However, my Scottish husband has a soft spot for these “wee timorous beasties”, so I have offered to cook him a ready-made one, complete with neeps an' tatties (mashed turnip/swede and creamed potatoes to the uninitiated) for a mock Burns Night supper. Like the Glasgow Cookery School recipe, it still contains pluck as well as suet, spices and oatmeal - although the lining is more likely to be synthetic than an old-fashioned sheep bag, which is a relief of sorts.

So what's the best way to cook a haggis, I inquire of my mother-in-law (who once cooked 20 of them for a Burns Night supper so knows what she's talking about). Having never eaten, let alone cooked one, I don't know whether I should be baking it in the oven, frying it in a pan or boiling it on the hob.

“You can microwave it but I prefer to boil it,” she advises. “Not too fast though or it will explode in a greasy mess”. The thought of our supper going off like some offal-packed timebomb is too awful to contemplate so I take her advice and let it simmer on a low heat for an hour, all the while skimming off the grease before serving it up with the neeps an' tatties.

Of course if I were holding a proper Burns Night Supper, the haggis's journey wouldn't end there - it would be the centrepiece of a ritual that begins with it being piped into the room on a silver platter, followed by a recital of Burns's poem Address to the Haggis, during which its skin would be split (affectionately known as “trenching your gushing entrails”), finishing with a tribute to Burns' Immortal Memory and a Toast to the Lassies.

Sadly, our supper was a more sedate affair, lacking both whisky and wassailing, but my husband pronounced the haggis “excellent” and came back for seconds. And while it didn't look particularly lovely served up on the plate, it didn't taste too bad, either - a bit like oaty mince, peppery and a wee bit bland, but there wasn't a windpipe in sight. And for that I am grateful.

Times Recommends

• Top Ten most searched for recipes
• Chalet Chef 2010: the winning menus
• Gin and pomegranate jellies