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Lobscouse
Boil some potatoes and mash them in the saucepan; chop some lean cooked salt beef very fine--tinned corned beef will do--and add it to the potatoes, with a small piece of butter and a little milk; season with pepper, salt, and nutmeg. Beat all together over the fire with a wooden spoon until it is smooth and creamy, and serve very hot on a hot dish.
A sailors' hash reduced to its simplest form: potato, salt beef, and enough heat and beating to bring the two together. The recipe gives no quantities at all, so the proportions are yours to set.
- ProportionsRoughly two parts mashed potato to one part chopped beef by volume gives a mixture that holds together and still tastes of meat. A higher proportion of meat, up to equal parts, eats as a substantial main course; 2 lb potatoes to 1 lb beef feeds four.
- Salt beef today"Lean cooked salt beef" means brisket or silverside boiled from a brine cure. Supermarket salt beef and delicatessen corned beef both work; the tinned corned beef the book permits is softer and will break down into the potato rather than staying in flecks.
- Salt the dish lastCured beef and tinned corned beef both carry a great deal of salt. Season with pepper and nutmeg first, taste, and add salt only if it needs it.
- Dry the potatoesDrain the boiled potatoes and let them steam dry in the hot pan for a minute before mashing. Wet potato makes a slack mixture that no amount of beating over the fire will bring back to creamy.
- Beating over the fireThis is the hinge. Working the mixture with a wooden spoon over direct heat drives off moisture and emulsifies the butter and milk into the starch. Keep the heat moderate and the spoon moving; potato starch scorches quickly and a burnt note runs through the whole dish.
- Butter and milk"A small piece of butter" reads as about 1 oz (30 g) for 2 lb of potato, with milk added a spoonful at a time. Add the milk hot if you can, since cold milk stalls the mixture and tempts you to raise the heat.
- ServingIt sets and stiffens as it cools, so the instruction to serve very hot on a hot dish is practical rather than decorative. Pickled red cabbage or beetroot is a common accompaniment to scouse in the north-west of England.
Lobscouse is a ship's dish before it is a shore dish: salt meat, biscuit or potato, and whatever else could be stewed down into one pot, recorded in English from the early eighteenth century. The name's origin is uncertain; related forms survive as Norwegian lapskaus, Danish skipperlabskovs and Low German Labskaus, though these are generally thought to derive from the English word rather than to be its source. The shortened form scouse attached itself to Liverpool, and eventually to Liverpudlians themselves. The version here shows the dish at its most domesticated — no ship's biscuit, no long stewing, just cooked-through salt beef beaten into mashed potato, with the licence to use a tin of corned beef marking how thoroughly the industrially preserved meats of the late nineteenth century had entered the ordinary kitchen.