Can an ignorant American ask a question about a Scots dish please?

[Jom222]

Preface-My paternal grandparents who died long before I was born both came from Scotland, Glasgow area, in the 1920's I think.

Growing up in the 70's, my father frequently prepared a dish he said his parents made often, 'mince potatoes and beans'.

The ground beef was simmered with lots of water and sliced onions, basically forever. Then we used a slotted spoon to take the wet beef and it was ALWAYS served with mashed potatoes and canned baked beans (which I understand are very different in the states vs UK)

My brothers, being animals, also added tons of ketchup to it and stirred together it resembled a plate of vomit. Some of them still prepare it to this day! They enjoyed it. I hated it, maybe bc of the appearance, not sure but I remember eating a lot of mashed potatoes those days.

My questions are-

Is or was this actually a common dish?
If so, just Scotland, or all over UK?
Did you have to sit at the dinner table staring at it while being lectured about starving children in India/China?

I saw a thread about the worst meal ever eaten and it got me thinking about this food. I don't like to criticize what people eat, we're all different but that dish was so awful yet my father and brothers all loved it. I don't remember my mother ever making or eating it though. (her cooking wasn't great either but I'll spare you the description of her 1970's 'goulash' for now, those days I ate crackers w/margarine)

Scottish Muir here 🙋🏽‍♀️ mince and tatties once a week growing up. Mince was boiled in water with an onion for about an hour then bisto added to thicken. Served with mashed tatties, peas and bread and butter to dook (dip) in the gravy.
I think the hungry African children might have been more of a Roman Catholic thing as I remember my friends collecting money for the 'black babies'. I am clearly quoting here.

When I make cottage pie I put baked beans on the side, then a big dollop of brown sauce too

Mince and baked beans together? Bleurgggghhhh!!

Garden peas is what you want with mince.

Yes not just Scotland either. If not thickening gravy with bistro, an alternative on cold days was to have dumplings on the top of the mince soaking up the liquid, total comfort food - still with mash, also baked beans, or peas, carrots etc

We had mince and tatties every Tuesday at my gran's house. Bloody lovely.

My mum's version however... bleurgh. She's such an amazing cook but she just never got the mince and tatties right.

My mum would make it with baked beans as it was the only way me and my sister would eat it.

My Granny put butterbeans in her mince.

@Jom222 don't you know it's 'Scottish' not 'scots?'
I got pulled for it by 2 Scottish colleagues once. I digress
I'm surprised nobody has commented on that yet.
Mince and mash is lovely with a swede or savoy cabbage side 😋

I liked mince and tatties, but stovies- which in my house included sausages just bunged in without any kind of browning so they were all limp and rubbery - remains in my memory as a food of the devil.

I was reading through for this comment!

I thought it was always SCOTS not Scottish!
I'll go to the corner for a while and think about this 😂

Not Scottish but this was a weekly dish, plus asl Shepherds pie with lamb mince and cottage pie with beef mince

Now all I want a half soggy, half crispy dumpling 😁 (AKA a doughball in certain parts of Scotland).

Northern English and we had this a lot, I guess it's an easy meal for kids. It had peas and carrots in. I can't remember what we called it other than dog's dinner when it was all mixed together!

We would put Henderson's on it, no ketchup or beans.

Mince is not “boiled” it is simmered in a small amount of liquid. I start by browning the mince with the chopped onions until it is quite dry, this takes probably 15 minutes, I stir occasionally and break up the lumps. It’s best if you can get the butcher to put the mince through the mincer twice to give a finer texture. Once it is browned add a stock cube and some flour, stir and cook for a few more minutes. Then just cover with boiling water and simmer for at least an hour, preferably longer, stirring occasionally. Carrots, either whole or cut up can be cooked in the mince. At the end gravy browning or gravy salt is added to adjust the colour. Many people make mince in 10 minutes- it’s disgusting that way. My mince has been described by more than one person as “just like my granny’s”.

Stovies should be made with left over roast meat (not corned beef or sausages), gravy and the fat from the roasting tin. Add all that to sliced potatoes and a diced onion and cook very slowly for ages until everything is soft. One of the great disappointments of moving from Aberdeenshire to Edinburgh was the awful sloppy mess that is called stovies there🙂.

English rather than Scots but mince (veggie in our case) and onion with baked beans stirred through, and with mash (and possibly some grated cheese) put as a layer on top, served with carrot & peas, is a pretty standard midweek dish - it's just a using-up-the-second-half-of-a-tin-of-baked-beans version of cottage pie.

@Chemenger has it right. You need to frizzle the mince gently first, to break up any lumps and brown it slightly, then cook it very, very, very slowly to make it tender. Boiling just toughens it.

I'm vegetarian but I make a version of mince and tatties for my DH. It's not authentic but it IS based on the trad method of cooking I was brought up with. In the past, fast 'high temperature' cooking was simply not available to ordinary familes.

Mince (around 10% fat, steak if possible - 500g), with 2 big onions, 2 or 3 big carrots, 3 or 4 outer sticks of celery, trimmed (perhaps also some swede/turnip) all chopped into pea-sized pieces, plus 2 big cloves of garlic, finely chopped, dried oregano and black pepper. A tin of good tomatoes. Half the tomato tin of water. No salt until almost the end of cooking. Mix all together, then cover tightly and simmer very gently for 2 hours, stirring from time to time. You should end up with something (as others have said) rather like the meat component of cottage pie. No slush.

Serve with sliced steamed new potatoes - or mash - and steamed cabbage/cauliflower plus peas. Some heated sauerkraut also goes very nicely with it, though that's about as untraditional as you can get. Beetroot/red cabbage in vinegar are also good, in moderation.

Stovies IME are not at all the same dish, whatever BBC food site might say. They are sliced/chopped floury potatoes, plus onions, perhaps with swede/turnip, plus meat scraps and fat and dripping and only the barest minimum of water - enough to stop it sticking. Again, cook very slowly and gently. Plenty of salt and pepper. You can make a very good veg/vegan version by omitting the meat elements and using olive oil. Chopped parsley and garlic - French 'persillade' - is utterly untraditional, but very good. Lovely served with lightly steamed chopped spring greens, kale, or savoy cabbage.

NB - not a baked bean in sight. I don't often eat these, but the last time I did (Heinz standard variety) I really did not like them. IMHO too much sauce, far, far too sweet, and the beans were strangely chewy. Have they changed the recipe?

I'm from the north east of England and mince and taties was quite a common everyday dish for the working classes. If you were really fancy you'd use beef gravy granules so not just wet minced beef.

It’s basically a jacket potato with beans and cheese, without the jacket.

Given how many people leave the skins of jacket potatoes anyway, I can’t really see the issue.

Love mince'n'tatties, but it does sound like your family version suffered from corruption in the translation across the Atlantic. Maybe your father was recreating it from memories rather than having been taught a recipe?

One immediate problem is if he was using ground beef rather than minced beef. The distinction is important. Other than that, it sounds like the quantities of water and onion were off, and the addition of baked beans sounds like a hanging offence against the culinary arts.

The best way I've found of doing mince is in the slow cooker, but that wasn't something my mum had or would have used when she made it.

Not poverty as such in the UK in WWII, but food was rationed. Actually, compared to the dire poverty of the Great Depression of the interwar years and before, the rationing of WWII was a big improvement. Children in particular were better nourished under the rationing system.

Poverty in Glasgow was the poster child for British poverty up to the 1980s and maybe beyond.

I actually love minced beef and have always loved meals made with it - but I think in the past, it was probably less-wanted cuts so it was much more gristly, fatty and chewy? A lot of people who have childhood memories of it from the 70s/80s or earlier find the very idea of it grim whereas I associate it with spaghetti bolognese, chilli con carne and shepherd's pie, all soft and easy to eat and full of flavour (from a stock cube obviously )

Particularly the idea of boiling it to death for hours makes me think it would have been very tough cuts of meat that they were trying to soften.

No need to think about anything. Scots is perfectly valid.

I never use Scottish, always Scots.

"Scotch" is a no-no. That's a type of whisky.

Perfectly permissible.