Food historian Catherine Brown has discovered something that would be very hard for the Scots to swallow: that the national dish of Scotland was described in a 1615 recipe book The English Hus-wife by Gervase Markham.
Ms Brown, whose findings feature in a TV documentary broadcast this week, said: "It was originally an English dish. In 1615, Gervase Markham says that it is very popular among all people in England.
"By the middle of the 18th century another English cookery writer, Hannah Glasse, has a recipe that she calls Scotch haggis, the haggis that we know today."
But reference to haggis in a 1771 novel by Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, showed it was considered a Scottish dish by the late 18th century.