Scottish Mince & Tatties

I really couldn't find anything much about the history of this Scottish dish, but potatoes came from the New World and they were only introduced to England in the late 1500s, and then from there to Scotland and to the rest of the British Isles. Once potatoes became available in Scotland, the basic ingredients needed for the dish means it could have easily developed at any time. The thing is, whenever "Mince & Tatties" first appeared, it remains a popular dish in Scotland to this day.   

 

Ingredients:

 

1 pound coarsely ground beef

2 tablespoons vegetable oil (or sunflower oil)

1 cup chopped onion (relatively small chop)

1 cup chopped carrots (small chop)

2 cups beef broth + 1/2 cup, if needed

1/2 teaspoon Gravy Master or Kitchen Bouquet

1 tablespoon thick ketchup 

2 to 3 tablespoons flour 

1 teaspoon ground black pepper

salt (according to salt amount in broth)

potatoes, boiled, then mashed according to your own method

In a skillet or pan, heat the oil over medium high heat. Add the finely chopped onion and saute for 1 1/2 minutes, then add the carrots and saute another 1 1/2 minutes. Add the ground beef and cook the meat, breaking up any clumps of ground beef and mixing the vegetables into the beef. Stir in the ketchup, then sprinkle the flour over the ingredients and mix it in. Add the beef broth, ground black pepper and salt, stir well to mix. Lower the heat to low and cover the skillet/pan, either with a lid or foil. Cook the "stew" for 30 to 35 minutes, but at the 20 minute mark, add the Gravy Master or Kitchen Bouquet, stir well and add any more beef broth, if the gravy is too thick. Replace the lid or foil and continue cooking over low heat for another 10 to 15 minutes. Meanwhile, boil the potatoes in salted water, drain and mash the potatoes according to your own recipe. Serve the stew with some mashed potatoes right on the side. 

WORD HISTORY:

Clan-This word is closely related to "plant," a Latin word borrowed from that language. "Clan" goes back to Indo European "plat," which had the notion "to spread, to broaden, to make flat, to flatten," and adjectivally meaning "flat." This picked up an "n" in Old Italic, which then gave Italic's Latin offspring "planta," meaning "sole of the foot" (the 'flat' part of the foot), which took on the meaning "offshoot, a (plant) shoot," and on the verb side, "to plant" (I will elaborate more on this when I do the history of "plant"). The Latin form spawned lots of borrowings, including into Old Irish, which in ancient times used the harder "k" sound for borrowed words with "p," and this gave Old Irish "cland," meaning "plant," but thus also, "offspring," and this was borrowed by Gaelic as "clann," meaning, "offspring, children, family, family group of the same stock, tribe." This was borrowed by English in the early decades of the 1400s with essentially the same meanings. Since those times, its meaning has broadened to use for some animals, especially for hyenas. In the United States, the word has a strong association with the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group founded in the post-civil War era and known for using terror tactics to intimidate the group's targets.