Mince and Tatties: Scotland's Everyday Dinner

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Mince and tatties is home cooking, so its history is poorly documented. Its popularity is widely reported, but claims that it is uniquely Scottish should be treated with care. The older history here rests on the folklorist F. Marian McNeill's The Scots Kitchen (1929; revised 1963), which prints a recipe for minced collops and quotes earlier writers on collops; the Glasgow saying she records is reported, not dated. Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, ed. Tom Jaine, 2014) supplies the history of the words "collop" and "mince", of shepherd's pie and of skirlie. Where its date for "skirlie" seemed to clash with McNeill's citation of Jamieson's dictionary, the Dictionary of the Scots Language was checked.

The dish

established Mince and tatties is made by browning minced beef with onion, adding carrot and stock or water, and simmering it slowly, sometimes thickened with oatmeal or flour. It is served with boiled or mashed potatoes. Some families add peas, others serve it with skirlie, oatmeal fried with onion in dripping.

Minced collops

established Before "mince" there were collops: slices or small pieces of meat. The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929), heads her recipe "Mince or Minced Collops (An everyday Scottish dish)". Steak is minced with a little fat, browned in hot dripping with a chopped onion and beaten with a wooden spoon to keep it free of lumps, then simmered gently for at least an hour with gravy or water. It is thickened at the end with breadcrumbs, a dessertspoonful of oatmeal, which she says "gives a very agreeable flavour", or barley, and sometimes seasoned with mushroom ketchup. She serves it on a hot ashet with sippets of toast and slices of hard-boiled egg, or "with a border of mashed potatoes", which is mince and tatties in all but name. She adds that minced collops could be baked, and would keep for a while packed in a jar like potted meat, and that hare, venison and veal were treated the same way.

established Collops had a long Scottish pedigree. McNeill records that Dawney Douglas's tavern in eighteenth-century Edinburgh served minced collops and hashes for sixpence a head, and that Meg Dods put minced collops on her menu for St Andrew's Day and Burns Club dinners. Meg Dods's collops-in-the-pan, which McNeill also gives, are thin slices of rump fried quickly in butter with plenty of onions under a close lid. Scott's George Heriot, in The Fortunes of Nigel, promises his guest "a dish of beef collops for auld Scotland's sake".

shared The word itself is a puzzle. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) notes that the Oxford English Dictionary calls it of obscure derivation, perhaps connected with coal. Its first meaning was a rasher of salt bacon fried with eggs, which the historian C. Anne Wilson called a peculiarly British way of eating bacon. It later came to mean any slice of meat. Hannah Glasse's recipes for "Collup and Eggs" and for "Scotch Collops" show the shift. The Companion says Scotch collops were well known from the 17th to the 19th centuries, though the way of making them changed. Venison collops are still spoken of. The Scottish move from sliced collops to minced collops is the bridge to modern mince.

established The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), prints an early Scottish collops recipe from the manuscript receipt book of Lady Castlehill, dated 1712 and now in Glasgow's Mitchell Library: "To make Scotch Collops, either Beef, Veal, or Mutton". The meat is sliced thin, beaten tender with a rolling pin and fried "without any other Liquor but their own gravy", then sauced with butter, vinegar, verjuice, lemon and anchovies. These are sliced collops, not minced, which shows the older form.

shared Hope also took a firm line on how minced collops should be made. She called the dish "quite simply, mince" and thought that water, mushroom ketchup and breadcrumbs or flour turned it into "a barbarian mockery" of a good everyday dish. Her method has no added liquid: the mince is cooked in butter and pounded with a wooden potato masher to keep it crumbly, then covered with onion and left over the lowest heat for an hour to make its own gravy, following Lady Clark of Tillypronie's rule that good beef should do so. Toasted oatmeal is stirred in at the end, and the only accompaniment is mealy potatoes steamed in their "jaikets". Her objection to added thickeners differs from McNeill, who used breadcrumbs, oatmeal or barley and sometimes mushroom ketchup; both are traditional, and the difference is one of taste.

Mince as a dish

established The Companion points out that "mince" has two meanings in Britain: meat put through a mincing machine, and a savoury dish made by cooking that meat with water, a little onion and seasoning. Mince and tatties uses both. Mince is cheap, uses the less tender cuts and trimmings, and can be stretched with breadcrumbs, oatmeal, rice or other grain, which is what McNeill's oatmeal and barley thickening does. Beef is the usual mince meat in Britain, as the Companion notes, against beef with veal or pork on the Continent and lamb in the Muslim world.

Shepherd's pie and cottage pie

shared The nearest relative is shepherd's pie. The Companion describes it as minced meat under mashed potato, or under pastry "in Scotland in former times". Properly it is made of mutton or lamb, often left over from a roast; cottage pie is the beef version and is the older name. "Shepherd's pie" is not recorded before the 1870s, when mincing machines arrived, but the Companion says it is generally agreed that the dish itself began in the north of England and Scotland, where sheep were plentiful, and is probably much older. The French equivalent is hachis Parmentier.

established Mincing machines were not an unmixed blessing. The Companion quotes Jane Grigson on the institutional cooks who used them to depress their victims with watery mince and rubbery shepherd's pie. Mince and tatties carries some of that school-dinner memory too.

Skirlie

established McNeill gives skirlie, or skirl-in-the-pan, as a dish of Aberdeenshire and the north-east: suet melted in a very hot pan, onions browned in it, and oatmeal stirred in to soak up the fat, served with potatoes. She quotes Jamieson's dictionary, which explains the name as the noise of the frying pan when the fat goes in.

shared The dating needs care. The Oxford Companion to Food says the name "skirlie" does not seem to have been used before the 20th century, and derives it from "skirl", to shriek like bagpipes, after the noise in the pan. The Dictionary of the Scots Language agrees on the short form, whose earliest dated quotation is from 1914, and treats it as a diminutive of the older "skirl-in-the-pan", the name Jamieson recorded. So the dish and its longer name are older than the word "skirlie". The Companion describes it as oatmeal, onion and suet fried with seasoning, used as a stuffing or served with roast meat or game, and puts it in the same family as the white pudding. Annette Hope (1987) adds that skirlie as a dish in its own right was traditionally eaten with potatoes and "a glass of sweet milk".

The tatties

established The potato half of the dish has its own history. Hope records that potatoes were grown in Edinburgh's physic garden by 1683, tried in fields in the Lothians and at Kilsyth from the 1720s and 1730s, and grown generally in the Lothians only from the 1760s. In the north-east they were first fed to animals: it took the grain failure of 1782 to persuade farmers they were worth growing, and in Moray and Nairn they were eaten by the poor "only thro' necessity, never thro' choice". By the 1980s, she notes, the Scots preferred potatoes to oats, with strong regional loyalties: white-fleshed varieties in the west, the yellow-fleshed Record in Angus, Duke of York in Aberdeen. She also reports an estimate that Scots then got up to half their daily vitamin C from "tatties".

established Clapshot is another northern accompaniment that sometimes stands in for plain tatties. The Companion, following McNeill, describes it as potatoes and turnip cooked separately and mashed together with butter and chives. In Scotland the "turnip" is normally swede.

Cheap and filling

established Mincing meat allowed cheaper, tougher cuts to be cooked quickly and stretched further. Earlier recipes, such as McNeill's, start from steak minced by hand; the cheap butcher's mince of the twentieth century made the dish a weekday standard. With the spread of mechanical mincers and butchers' mince in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mince became an affordable everyday food. Mince and tatties was served in homes and school canteens across Scotland.

"Talking mince"

established In Scots slang, "mince" has come to mean nonsense or rubbish. To be "talking mince" is to talk nonsense, and to have "a heid full o' mince" is to be confused.

A national favourite

shared Mince and tatties regularly appears in polls of favourite Scottish dishes and is celebrated as comfort food. Similar dishes are found across Britain and elsewhere, but the name and its associations are distinctly Scottish.

• "Tatties" is Scots for potatoes.
• "Talking mince" means talking nonsense.
• Skirlie is often served with mince.
• Mince made cheaper cuts usable.
• It was a staple of school dinners.
• The older name for the dish is minced collops.
• McNeill records that "mince and mashed" was to Glaswegians what sausage and mash was to Londoners.
• A spoonful of oatmeal was a traditional way to thicken mince.
• A "collop" was originally a rasher of salt bacon fried with eggs.
• Scottish shepherd's pie was once topped with pastry rather than potato.
• The short name "skirlie" is only recorded from 1914; "skirl-in-the-pan" is older.

• Myth: Mince and tatties is uniquely Scottish. Similar dishes, such as English mince and mash, are eaten across Britain and elsewhere. What is distinctly Scottish is the name and its associations.
• Myth: Mince dishes only reached Scotland in the twentieth century. Mince became a mass weekday staple then, but its forerunner, minced collops, was served in eighteenth-century Edinburgh taverns, and Scotch collops were well known from the 17th to the 19th centuries.
• Myth: "Skirlie" is an old word. The short form is recorded only from 1914, though the longer "skirl-in-the-pan" is older, so the dish is older than the word.
• Disputed: when shepherd's pie began. The name is not recorded before the 1870s. It is generally agreed that the dish began in the north of England and Scotland and is probably much older.
• Disputed: how minced collops should be made. McNeill thickened them with breadcrumbs, oatmeal or barley and sometimes added mushroom ketchup. Hope thought added liquid and thickeners a "barbarian mockery" and cooked the mince in its own gravy. Both are traditional, and the difference is one of taste.