Meg Johnston’s Potted Hough
Last week we had a recipe for braised beef shin (hough). A few people got in touch to discuss potted hough, otherwise potted meat, otherwise potted head. Round at the house of some friends for supper, we were served (bought) potted meat as a starter. I remember my Mum making hers, and very good it was too, but I had to confess I had no idea what was involved.
Then I glanced into her cookbook from 50 years ago and voila! But first a quick comment on the basic ingredient. Hough is shin, and that's what she used, with the addition of a marrow bone. Some recipes do use head meat, hence the name potted heid. I suspect that's less common now, but good butchers still make their own, using shin.
In her The Scots Kitchen, F Marian McNeill calls for the knuckle end of the bone with marrow in it, and says you should ask the butcher to break it through. I think mum's idea is better. Having said that, McNeill's recipe runs to eight lines: mum's to four pages. It's a little too rambly to repeat verbatim, but I hope this gives a flavour.
This makes a lot. You will need lots of containers to decant it into.
Meg Johnston's Potted Hough
Ingredients
An enormous marrow bone; 3 lbs (about 1.4kg) shin of beef; salt and pepper.
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Take the largest pot in the business, an enormous marrow bone and at least 3lb (about 1.4kg) hough. Ask the friendly neighbourhood butcher. Put bone and meat in the pot, with enough water to almost cover and some salt and pepper. Bring to a gentle bubble, skim, simmer. Go and see The Sting (Marian McNeill recommends an overnight cook) and when you come back, the meat will be tender and the bone gruesome. Remove the bone – this is the beginning of the nightmare. Simple it is not. Have you ever removed a great heavy slithery bone from a pot of hot liquid? It needs a certain "won't be beaten" approach. Why, you ask, not just wait till it all cools and remove it then? Well, it will then go all solid on you. And once you'd parted that bone from the jellied mess you would have lost half of the meat with which to make this blasted dish.
Right, remove the bone from the hot liquid. Everything else has to come out as well, but read on.
In addition to the meat there will be bits of nausea inducing fat, gristle and sinew. It has to go through a strainer. The trouble is it’s a very heavy pot and you will be short of strainer space.. It's a very heavy pot and no one but no one will ever volunteer to get involved in this whole sorry business. They leave it to you, your soup ladle, spoons and your specs.
I regularly mutter, why did I start this? and you will say the same. Be warned that by the time you’ve finished straining, the kitchen and the stove will be a shambles.
When you’ve finished straining, you come to the really tedious task of cutting up the strings of meat across the grain, removing more unspeakable bits. It gets easier when you come on a bit of hough which only needs a couple of forks to break it up. You begin to feel you're getting to the end of the trail.
You're not. The meat now needs to be simmered in some of the liquid. More decisions. Is there too much liquid in the pot? If there is, the end product will be wobbly and wishy-washy and not the Ma’s potted meat at all. If there's too little, you've burned your boats. You can't add water to it as it won’t gel. It isn't any old liquid, remember, it's the product of all that meat and marrow.
You didn't imagine it finishes at that! You now simmer it gently for a little, about ten minutes, and we now come to the difficult bit – seasoning. Salt, pepper, lots of it. Start tasting and testing ad nauseam. This is the one dish you over salt and over pepper deliberately. When the dish cools it will then be just right. I don't know why.
You are now a wreck and ready to relax. Well, no, you can't! The bowl, dishes, containers you set ready to receive this brew will not be enough and as you go on and on ladling it out you will realise the next move will have to be a visit around all the neighbours pleading with them to take it off your hands otherwise you're going to have to eat the stuff yourself, and that's not a thought to cherish after all you've been through in the making of it. Allow it to cool and store in the fridge.
So when you really want potted meat buy it in a plastic tub from the butcher who sold you the hough in the first place.
In one of the most remarkable coincidences I have ever seen, a post appeared on Facebook two hours after I had posted this online, and a couple of hours before publication time. It was on the page Cowdenbeath Past and Present, with readers sharing their memories of potted hough. https://bit.ly/4yudPdp