robbie, þorri, nýyrði

It's Burns's supposed birthday, and the BBC has a whole website dedicated to Burns Night doings. Included are recipes. Reading them, it occurs to me that it must be some cosmic calendrical joke that puts Burns Night in all its haggis-munching glory in the month of Þorri in all its hákarl-chewing horror. Trust Iceland to be the place where people eat sharks rather than the other way around. Cured shark, as I suppose one should render kæstur, though the cure may be in this case worse that the disease.

I digress. Glancing, as I said, over the Burns Night food tips I of course find a note on haggis:

Haggis
A one kilogram haggis should be boiled in a large pot for approximately 20 minutes. For larger sizes, consult the label for boiling time. Vegetarians should look out for the many variations of vegetarian haggis.

I was previously unaware of the existence of vegetarian haggis (but I will now look out for it, in the full range of that phrase's ambiguity). What could possibly be the point of vegetarian haggis? Is it in any way distinguishable from a bowl of oatmeal? And furthermore, is there vegetarian hákarl? Here I have a leap of intuition: maybe that's what tofu is. Tofu and hákarl share at least a vague physical resemblance, as both are sold in the form of white cubes. And this would provide at long last a good nativist word for the soy protein: grænmetishákarl.

Of course tofu is an unconvincing substitute for hákarl, being mild and inoffensive in flavor, whereas hákarl tastes much like something between strong licorice and Danish cheese soaked liberally in kerosene. But I'm sure that vegetarian haggis is about as similar to traditional haggis as tofu is to hákarl. Which is another way of saying that I may be on to something here with this coinage.