Stovies: Potatoes, Dripping and Every Family's Recipe

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.

Stovies are a home-cooking tradition, so documentation is sparse and recipes vary widely. Etymology is discussed in Scots dictionaries. The folklorist F. Marian McNeill's The Scots Kitchen (1929; revised 1963) is the main older source used here; her recipes and her notes on how stoved dishes were eaten are good evidence for her time, while her French derivation of the word is one opinion among several. Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, ed. Tom Jaine, 2014) sets out the rival etymology argued by Catherine Brown in Scottish Cookery (1985), and gives background on the potato in Scotland.

What are stovies?

established Stovies are made by slowly cooking sliced or chunked potatoes and onions in a heavy pot with fat, usually beef dripping, and a little water or stock, until the potatoes are soft and partly broken down, with crisp bits at the bottom. Many recipes add leftover meat from a roast, minced beef, corned beef, or sausages. Some versions are almost a mash, others keep the potatoes in chunks.

established Meat was not always part of it. The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929), gives two recipes. The first, from Lady Clark of Tillypronie's collection, is only good potatoes with salt, small pieces of butter and just enough water to cover the bottom of the pot, simmered closely covered until "soft and melted". The second, a cottage recipe, fries sliced onions in beef dripping, adds thickly sliced mealy potatoes, salt, pepper and half a pint of water, and cooks them very gently for an hour and a half, shaking the pan to stop them sticking. She says an old-fashioned iron saucepan with a close lid is ideal, and serves stovies "alone, or as an accompaniment to cold meat", calling them "a grand supper dish on a cold night". In her recipes cold meat is served alongside rather than stirred in.

Stoved hens and limpets

established "Stoving" was applied to more than potatoes. Meg Dods's stoved howtowdie, which McNeill reprints, is a young fowl cooked in butter with button onions in a small closed pot set over embers, served with poached eggs ("drappit eggs") and spinach. McNeill's chicken stovies, from the Highlands, layers jointed chicken, potatoes and onion with butter in a covered pot and simmers them for two or three hours. She notes that this was "long a popular dish at Highland rural weddings", formerly called stoved hens, and that Norman Macleod mentions it in Reminiscences of a Highland Parish. That is an older wedding connection than the modern late-night stovies at ceilidhs.

established On Colonsay, limpet stovies layered scalded limpets with three times their quantity of potatoes in a three-legged pot, with pepper, salt, some of the limpet liquor and plenty of butter, covered with a cloth and hung high over a peat fire to simmer. McNeill's informant had never met the dish anywhere but Colonsay.

The name

established "Stovies" comes from the Scots verb "stove", meaning to stew or cook slowly in a closed vessel. "Stoved potatoes" appear in Scottish cookbooks of the nineteenth century.

shared The verb is often linked to the French étuver, and stovies are sometimes cited as an example of French influence on Scottish cooking through the Auld Alliance. Scots dictionaries suggest the word may also come from Dutch or Low German; the origin is uncertain. McNeill footnotes her stovies recipe "Fr. étuvé" and includes "stoved" in her appendix of Franco-Scottish domestic terms, describing it as a way of cooking potatoes, howtowdie and other things. Her list mixes sound borrowings with guesswork, so it supports the French theory without settling it.

shared The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) sets out the case against. It grants that, with so many French kitchen words in Scots, deriving "stovie" from étuvé, meaning something cooked in a closed vessel with little liquid, is tempting, and that McNeill took that view. But it reports that Catherine Brown, in Scottish Cookery (1985), prefers an English verb "to stove", with its own history. Brown points to Gervase Markham in 1631, who wrote of letting a bird "stove and sweate till evening". She suggests the verb was useful because it sat between sweating and stewing, "since often, as in stovies, very little water is used". She agrees that the usage is especially Scottish but notes it also survived in the north of England. Both theories remain in play; Brown's has the advantage of a dated English example. The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), two years after Brown, still gave the French derivation, from étuver, "to sweat", that is, to cook in its own steam, without discussing the alternative.

established Hope's own stovies are the butter-only kind: peeled potatoes, or scrubbed new ones, in a heavy pan with just enough water to cover the bottom, salt, pepper and about 1½ oz (30 to 45 g) of butter in small pieces, tightly covered and cooked over the lowest heat for about an hour, shaken often. She names Aberdeenshire as the home of stovies and potato cakes, and prints Lady Clark of Tillypronie's "Fowl – stoved", a chicken cooked in butter with onion and Ayrshire bacon "pretty well in its own steam", as a cousin of stoved potatoes.

established The Companion calls the dish "stoved tatties" in full and describes it as potatoes and onions, often with mutton, stewed with very little added liquid. Mutton, rather than the beef dripping and corned beef of many modern versions, is worth noting as an older default.

Regional differences

established Recipes vary widely. In the north-east, stovies are often made with beef dripping and leftover roast; elsewhere with mince or corned beef. Accompaniments vary too: oatcakes, pickled beetroot, red cabbage or a glass of milk.

established McNeill also quotes Meg Dods on a cheap summer dish given to the girls of Edinburgh's Maiden Hospitals: boiled potatoes, peeled and roughly broken, boiled up again with milk and a little butter. It is a close cousin of butter-only stovies.

Potatoes come to Scotland

established The potato was slow to win Scotland over. The Oxford Companion to Food records that in the north of Ireland and in Scotland, Protestants at first refused to plant it, one objection being that it was not mentioned in the Bible. It became a staple only in the eighteenth century. Scotland later became central to the crop's science: the Companion notes that about 700 potato varieties are held in a government reference collection there.

established Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), dates the potato's arrival earlier than McNeill's first record of 1701. The gardener John Reid was recommending potatoes and explaining how to grow them in 1683, and in the same year they grew in the physic garden of Edinburgh's medical school, forerunner of the Royal Botanic Garden. Field trials followed: John Cockburn of Ormiston seems to have grown them in a tenant's field in 1726, a Kilsyth man tried them in 1728, and by 1739 another Kilsyth farmer was renting fields to grow them. Field cultivation became general in the Lothians only in the 1760s. Johnson found in Skye in 1773 that potatoes, though not long known, were "now one of the principal parts of their food", and by the 1780s they were a staple of every class in the western Highlands. The north-east was slower: in Moray and Nairn the poor ate them "only thro' necessity, never thro' choice", and servants in many families refused them as a meal.

traditional Hope repeats, while calling it apparently apocryphal, the story that Clanranald brought potatoes from Antrim to Benbecula in 1743, imprisoned tenants who refused to plant them, and was told at harvest that they might be made to grow them but could not be made to eat them.

established Hope also traces the cost of dependence. In the western Highlands an acre of potatoes could feed three or four times as many people as an acre of oats or bere, which allowed the population to rise on ever smaller holdings. When blight destroyed the crop in 1845 and 1846, relief committees from Glasgow and Edinburgh averted an Irish-scale famine, but emigration from the Highlands followed. Elsewhere in Scotland the lesson spurred breeding of new, disease-resistant varieties, in Angus, Fife, Orkney, the Lothians and Ayrshire, among them Champion, Up-to-Date, Majestic, Kerr's Pink, Great Scot and, later, the Pentland range.

Stovies' cousins

established Stovies belong to a family of Scottish potato dishes. The Companion names several. Clapshot, which McNeill recommends with haggis, is potatoes and turnip cooked separately and mashed together with butter and chives. Tatties 'n' herring are salt herrings, soaked, then steamed on top of potatoes boiling in their jackets. Hairy tatties are mashed potatoes beaten with finely flaked salt cod, which breaks into hair-like strands; the Companion calls it "a sort of northern brandade". Stovies differ from all of these in being cooked slowly in fat with almost no water, so the potatoes catch and partly collapse.

At weddings and ceilidhs

established Stovies are commonly served late in the evening at Scottish weddings and ceilidhs, providing cheap, filling food for dancers.

• "Stove" in Scots means to stew.
• Every family seems to have its own stovies recipe.
• Stovies are often served at weddings.
• Pickled beetroot is a common accompaniment.
• The dish was a way to use up leftovers.
• Stoved hens, a chicken-and-potato dish, were a Highland wedding favourite long before stovies became ceilidh food.
• Colonsay had its own limpet stovies, cooked over a peat fire.
• The first stovies recipe McNeill gives uses only potatoes, butter, salt and a splash of water.
• The verb "to stove" was also used in the north of England, and appears in Gervase Markham in 1631.
• Early Scottish Protestants objected to the potato partly because it is not in the Bible.

• Disputed: Whether "stovies" comes from French. The verb is often linked to French étuver and the Auld Alliance, and McNeill and Annette Hope took that view. Her list of Franco-Scottish terms supports the theory without settling it, and Catherine Brown prefers an English verb "to stove" attested in 1631. Scots dictionaries also suggest Dutch or Low German, so the origin is uncertain.
• Myth: "Stove" is an exclusively Scottish word. The verb also survived in the north of England.
• Myth: There is one authentic stovies recipe. Recipes vary widely by region and family.
• Myth: Clanranald imprisoned tenants who refused to plant potatoes in Benbecula in 1743. Hope repeats the story but calls it apparently apocryphal.
• Myth: Stovies always contained leftover meat. McNeill's recipes have none, and she serves cold meat alongside. The Companion suggests mutton was an older default than the beef dripping and corned beef of many modern versions.