Scouse with corned beef

Scouse is Liverpool’s stew, and it gave the city’s people their name. National Museums Liverpool traces the word to lobscouse, “a stew often eaten by sailors throughout Northern Europe”. Norway still makes it as lapskaus, and the Norwegian national encyclopaedia notes that Liverpool has a strong lapskaus identity of its own.

What sailors made it from is on record. Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, in its 1811 edition, defines lobscouse as “a dish much eaten at sea, composed of salt beef, biscuit and onions, well peppered, and stewed together”. That is the case for corned beef here. A Liverpool kitchen today uses fresh beef or lamb, and we could not find corned beef scouse documented as a city tradition, so we will not claim it is one. But salt beef from the ship’s stores is where this dish began, and a tin of corned beef is the nearest thing to it in a modern cupboard. Scouse made without any meat at all is blind scouse, recorded in Liverpool from at least 1939.

The thing that makes scouse scouse is the texture. Fresh potatoes, simmered for a couple of hours, collapse and thicken the whole pot until a spoon will stand in it. Tinned potatoes never do that, because they hold their shape. A small handful of instant mash stirred in at the end does the same job in two minutes.

1. Heat the oil in a pan and add the dried onion for a minute.
2. Drain the potatoes and carrots. Keep the carrot liquid and make it up to 600 ml with water. Cut the potatoes into quarters.
3. Add the potatoes, carrots, liquid, crumbled stock cube, Worcestershire sauce and pepper. Bring to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes. Press some of the potatoes against the side of the pan with a spoon as it goes.
4. Cut the corned beef into chunks and stir it in. Simmer 5 minutes more. It will start to break up, which is right.
5. Off the heat, stir in the instant mash a spoonful at a time until the stew is thick enough to hold a spoon. You may not need all of it.
6. Taste before adding any salt. The corned beef and the stock cube have usually supplied plenty.

Serve in bowls with pickled red cabbage on the side, as Liverpool does, and bread if you have it. The sharp cabbage against the rich, peppery stew is the whole point.

Serves 4.