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I decided to try my hand at making Scouse last night (as I’m sure everyone on Twitter was painfully aware, given my excitement about it for most of the evening). My flatmate Jemma had a go at it the week before, but while it was alright, it didn’t hit the spot. The sauce was too watery, and the onions were big thick chunks rather than really thin slivers. I can see why that happened now, but at the time I wasn’t sure what went wrong. More on that later though. Firstly, a little background for those not in the know!

Scouse is the signature dish of the people of Liverpool (affectionately or perhaps not, called Scousers). It’s essentially a meat stew, and comes from the Norwegian word “lapskaus”, which evolved into “lobscouse”, which evolved into “scouse”.

For the veggies among you, there’s also a meat-free variety called Blind Scouse. The dish was brought to us by sailors docking in the Port of Liverpool, and I guess it just got adopted into our culture. Feel free to make thievery jokes at this point if you wish.

You’ll find most local people around here know someone who can make a good pan of Scouse. Generally it’s someone’s Mum or Nan. I intend to break the mould and become world-renowned for my delicious take on a much-loved favourite. Hmm, we’ll see. I was a bit scared doing this, since the only thing I’ve ever cooked in a similar vein would be spaghetti bolognese, which is pretty hard to mess up. Scouse can go very wrong – we don’t want watery and we don’t want flavourless! Here’s what I used, and it was enough for two decent sized bowls:

200g of casserole beef chunks
1/3rd of a large onion, chopped
5 small potatoes, 2 diced and 3 chopped
1 carrot, cut into medallion slices
1 beef stock cube
Worcester sauce
Cold water

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: Three hours
Eating time: Five minutes

First thing first, I chopped some stuff. The onion went into thick slices. I always stick my tongue out when chopping onions so that the bottom of the tongue absorbs all the moisture and stops any crying. Tastes like crap, works like a charm. Two of the potatoes got finely diced. I say finely, but I’m terrible at cutting and chopping, so it was a tad big. It worked perfectly for what I needed them for though, so don’t worry if they’re not too small. Have a look at the picture to see what I mean, you

want them a little bit smaller than that. I chopped the other three potatoes too, but really I should have left them until I wanted to put them in (they were pretty much just laying around for a few hours, and went a tad brown…oopsies). The carrots…hmm, well, I didn’t actually have a carrot so I used frozen ones from my vegetable mix. And yes, I now have a bag of frozen peas and cauliflower, sans carrot.

I then put the meat into a hot frying pan to seal it, or brown it really, with a tiny bit of oil and a few generous splashings of worcester sauce. If your meat is quite fatty (I’m looking at you, ASDA), then don’t forget to drain it when done. Then the meat, onion, carrot and diced potato got chucked into le pan. Added to this was enough cold water to cover the ingredients, salt, pepper and a ground-up stock cube. I then simmered the lot, stirring occasionally, for two hours. If you want to truly want to emulate

my recipe, then you’ll need to spend the two hours watching Rocky plus having a shave and a haircut.

After the two hours was up, I was really worried that the sauce hadn’t congealed at all. It was just meat and veg in brown water. The idea is that the diced potato and onion will melt and thicken the whole thing up (I was once told that with REAL scouse, you can put your spoon in at the end and it will stick in the air). Cue a phone call to the mother asking if I should put cornflour in, like with roast dinner gravy. Mums are the best. Have you told yours you love her lately, hmmm? No, me either probably. She said yes to the cornflour, but I decided to hold off for a bit. Cooking is about having a bit of faith in yourself, I’ve decided. I added the rest of the chopped potatoes, gave it a good stir and set the timer for another two hours. For the record, now is a great time to take a bath! You probably need it, let’s be honest.

Here’s the thing though, after maybe an hour or so, the pan started getting a bit too hot and so I was stirring more and more regularly. The previously-watery liquid had taken on the potato and onion and was now a thick, viscous gravy. I decided that I was pretty much done (it was 9pm and I’m an impatient soul). I’d completely and utterly forgotten to purchase a thick crusty cob, which is an essential part of the Scouse experience, but I did have an almighty tub of pickled beetroot in the fridge. I took a pretty picture of the stew in the bowl, with a few slices. I then put a LOT more on, and wolfed the whole thing in around three minutes flat. I offered Jemma some, but she didn’t even bother to reply to my text. I think she’s scared of not being the Number One Chef in Chéz Lid anymore.