KITCHEN STORIES |

January always comes as a shock.

The holiday season revs up before Halloween, accelerates at Thanksgiving and is way over the speed limit by Christmas. There's another small but intense surge before New Year's. Then, it's all over. Just like that. It's dark, it's cold. No more twinkly lights, no more parties. The Christmas trees are on the curb, and you are in the dumps.

I have two words for you: Robert Burns.

The beloved poet of Scotland has given people a reason to live through January. He was born on Jan. 25, and since his death in 1796 his life and literature have been celebrated around the world on that date at Robert Burns suppers.

There's no Robert Frost supper, so why a Robert Burns supper? Burns was a hard-living man, and a few years after his death his close friends chose to honor him with an evening of things he loved: Scotch whisky and poetry. Besides, as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June."

So pull yourself together, stuff a sheep's stomach with offal and oatmeal, stock the liquor cabinet, get some bagpipe music and have a party. You don't have to be Scottish to participate. Maybe you once transferred planes in the Edinburgh airport. Maybe your brother married someone with a distant cousin who has been to Scotland. Maybe you like to watch golf on television.

My husband's grandfather grew up in Scotland, so it is surprising, given that close connection to the land of the loch and glen, that I've never hosted a Burns supper. According to family lore, my grandfather-in-law was born in a building that had been one of Burns's favorite brothels. You can't get much more intimate with the Scottish bard than that. So this year I decided to embrace January and have a Burns supper. Given the many components, I needed a dry run.

My friend Duncan Spencer, author and former Washington Star reporter, is the real deal -- well, his father was -- so I turned to him and his wife, retired Post reporter Megan Rosenfeld. They know things like the names of clan chiefs.

The first thing they told me was that haggis is nonnegotiable. I had heard of haggis, just never thought I'd have one in my home. But there is no Burns supper without it. By immortalizing haggis in verse as the "great chieftain o' the pudding race," Burns assured its appearance at the dinners in his honor.

Haggis is an unlovely word for what many consider a rather nasty dish. It is essentially a steamed pudding made of a forcemeat of sheep's liver, heart and lungs stuffed into a sheep's stomach. Salt and pepper to taste. There are other ingredients: oats and whisky.

Steel-cut oats and what Scotsmen call "the water of life" seem to be the foundation of Scottish cuisine. Samuel Johnson called oats "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people." (To which his biographer, Scotsman James Boswell, supposedly retorted: "Which is why England is known for its horses and Scotland for its men.") And the number of words for whisky -- drappie, drap o' dew, creature, dram, tipsie, doch-an-dorris and usquebah, to name a few -- is one sign of its importance in the culture and cuisine.

I was thrilled to learn it is acceptable to make something called mock haggis, basically haggis for cowards. I jumped through that loophole and mixed ground, cooked liver with ground lamb (to take the place of the unmentionables), shredded suet, sauteed onion, toasted oatmeal and, of course, a splash or two of tipsie. I put it in a bowl, placed the bowl in a steamer and let it cook for three hours. Unmolded it and doused the whole thing with about a half-bottle of single malt.