When you here the great Spanish and French chefs go on and on about their wonderful culinary heritage and bore you to tears with stories of their mothers great cooking, the gargantuan family meals, foraging for truffles with there family pig and so on and so forth, does it not make you want to throw findus crispy pancakes at them till they shut the hell up ?
If it does then it could be that you too were born in Scotland. A land so deeply connected to nature and great produce but with no real concept of how to use it.
It really is no wonder that I grew up with very little culinary appreciation for my national dishes. The only way I enjoyed eating haggis was when it was deep fried at the local chippie and the only black pudding my mother ever bought was from the supermarket and tasted like stale biscuits.
And this wasn't for lack of suppliers. I lived only a stones throw from the famous MacSweens butchers, which now sadly just an online wholesalers making much more money I suspect. I also lived just round the corner from some of the best fish shops in scotland and for the record my families history in Edinburgh is one of running a large network of quite excellent fruit and veg shops. Also I didn't come from a family short of money or an appreciation of good food, so I should have been in a prime position for a childhood filled with romantic tales of gastronomic bliss.
..but I didn't. In fact my greatest food memories tend to be of Mediterranean food on holiday or Indian curries on a sunday night. Or possibly the great Italian food that is so abundant in Edinburgh and considerably better than anything that I could regard at the time as being Scottish. Truth be told I probably grew up as little about Scottish food as your average tourist... Haggis and deep fried mars bars ? Yeah sounds about right.
So I decided to have a look at some traditional Scottish Recipes and see if I could see any redeeming features worth exploring. And I decided to start with one of my favorite comfort foods "Stovies"
Stovies for those that don't know are a dish made with leftovers much like a lot of peasant dishes. A post sunday roast dish useful for soaking up the booze on during the weekday drinking sessions. They are also very high in calories and moreish from what I can remember.
The main ingredients seem to be as follows.
Left over beef mince or dice
Potatoes (or tatties)
sliced onion
beef dripping
stock
The recipes all tend to suggest adding the fat and cooking the onions and beef until brown. Adding the potatoes then the stock and cooking it all down. Of course being a leftovers dish there could also be a number other ingredients used. Such as turkey or lamb, turnips or leeks, really whatever you have lying around.
This at first appears to be a rather bland recipe without many possibilities but then when you look at it in more detail and break it down what you have are a number of classic processes. The most apparent to me is the caramelization of the onions and the addition of stock. Which to me spells out french onion soup. Taking this idea further what we actually have here is a stew with an onion soup base or potatoes and meat cooked in french onion soup. And when you think about it that way its easy to see how you can make this into a great dish. If you concentrate on getting the best onion soup repipy everything should fall into place.
So what I did first was get my onions as caramelized as possible. To do this get your pan hot with a little oil and throw in your finally sliced onions with a little salt and leave until they are just about to catch. You then stir the onions around the pan picking up all of the caramelized goodness, leave and repeat until very brown indeed. This should be a long process to get the best out of your onions. Some people caramelize onions for 24 hours plus. That not to say you have to but generally speaking the longer you take over this the better the results will be. You can also if you wish add in a pinch of sugar to help move things along. If you cant get your stove low enough to cook the onions slowly a good tip is to take both ends of a large tin and place it between the pan and the stove lifting it away from the heat.
Next throw in some white wine to deglaze the pan and reduce until the wine looses its harshness, then throw in your stock. I used veal stock but chicken stock would be just as good. Also I'm not using any meat in this recipe, instead I'm serving it as a potato accompaniment to a meat dish. If you did however want to make it with lamb shoulder, beef cheeks or maybe even ossobucco I would probably braise the meat in stock separately first, then use the resulting stock to make the dish and add the braised meat in later. I say this because it will add a better depth of flavour to the meat and the final dish and will also make the timing easier of the whole dish as the potatoes will need much less cooking.
Next I waited for the stock to reduce to the point that I felt I had just enough stock to cover the potatoes once added. I then added the potatoes and waited until they were just about cooked when I added some finely diced carrots and turnip.
The interesting this about this dish for me is how the sauce thickens beautifully with the potato starch and when you are left with is a wonderfully thick potato stew rich with meat flavour and sweet with the onions. To me it has its greatest potential as a side dish rather than just stodgy pub food. Also it doesn't need to be all that calorific. With less of the beef dripping and using a light chicken stock it could even be quite healthy and summery.
Here I served it with some 24 hour cooked flank steak and some morels cooked in a brandy and cream sauce. It was quite delicious, and I will definitely do it again.
