Britain and Ireland · Volume 32, The Mill, the Pie and the Steel Pan
Scouse
Liverpool
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 2 hours 20
- Researched
- No outside sources linked
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
This modern museum recipe, with its two meats, tomato puree, treacle and mustard, is a refined version of a much plainer 1797 description, potatoes, small pieces of meat, pepper, salt and onion boiled together into a hash, and this chapter presents it honestly as a refinement rather than a precise historical reconstruction. A meatless version, blind scouse, made when meat could not be afforded, is widely referenced but was not traced to a dated primary source in researching this chapter.
As tradition built it
Serves 4 to 6. About 2 hours 20 minutes.
Ingredients
- 500g beef chuck, diced
- 500g lamb mince
- 2 onions, diced
- 5 carrots, chopped
- 2 tbsp tomato puree
- 600g potato, in large chunks
- 1 litre beef stock
- 1 leek, sliced
- 2 tbsp black treacle
- 1 tbsp wholegrain mustard
To serve
- to serve crusty bread and pickled red cabbage or beetroot
Method
- Brown the diced beef chuck in oil over high heat and set aside; seal the lamb mince in the same pan.
- Reduce the heat, soften the onions and carrots, then return the beef.
- Stir in the tomato puree, add the potato, then the beef stock, and simmer gently for roughly 2 hours until the beef is tender and the potato has partly broken down to thicken the stew.
- Stir in the sliced leek, black treacle and wholegrain mustard for a final 20 minutes, then season.
- Serve with crusty bread and pickled red cabbage or beetroot.
What a modern chef changes
Two proteins cooked to their own correct texture, and a stock clarified for the table
Rung 2
Method
- Cook the beef chuck and lamb mince separately and sous vide, the beef at 58°C for 24 hours and the lamb held only briefly at a higher heat to keep its coarser, mince-based texture, per rung two's own logic applied to two proteins that behave completely differently under long, gentle heat.
- Clarify the finished braising liquor through a gelatine raft and a chinois for a genuinely clear stock, poured back over the meat and a small dice of vegetables cooked separately to retain bite, rather than left thick and cloudy as the one-pot method gives it.
- Dehydrate a portion of sliced potato until fully crisp, to scatter over the top as a textural counterpoint to the soft, broken-down potato thickening the stew itself.