The recipe of the best potted hough ever, if you know what I mean! Potted hough comes from the Scottish "hough", a word that means shin, that is the part of the leg between the knee and the ankle bones. Potted hough means therefore shin in a pot. In old Scottish, the dish is also referred to as potted heid, or cheese heid. The reasons for that are not known nowadays. It must be one of those Scottish things that not even the Scottish understand. Scottish - Come hither tae yer mither cause yer fayther disney want ye. English - Please child, come to your mother as your father is really not interested at all! What is a Scottish smile? A useful collection for those who want to communicate with a Scotsman. Scottish women speak Scottish. Glossary of Scottish slang and jargon with their meanings and examples of their use. Scotland's local words are wonderful. The reach heights and plumb depths.
They are rarely less than descriptive. Welcome tae the Scottie Translator from Scotland. Write yer wee bit English phrase in the kistie on the left an we'll chynge it intae Scottie juist lik that! The advantage of moving in with a man, as opposed to get married first is that the person moving in is regarded as a guest for a while. If that person is clever, the while can last forever. It is only that if the person is a woman, she has to decide about wanting to change the man and things or just let them as they were before moving in, when everything was fine. Some women are strangely oblivious of their own good. They want to start cooking and washing right away, before even knowing why. The man will resent this first as an invasion of his territory but at the end he will accept the new system out of love. Then very soon he will get used to it and try as much you would like, he will never revert to his old ways of being the Master of the house, kitchen included.
A Scottish cook book -- I guess it has a potted hough recipe too! When I moved in with Bill, I did not try to change his habits right away. It was not much to be done in Gaborone on a weekend but golf so Saturdays were Bill's golfing days. He used to feel guilty about leaving me alone and wanting to be extra nice in the evenings there was always something special he cooked for me. But no matter how hard he tried, there was nothing that I was more pleased with than the potted hough. He introduced me to this Scottish specialty one day when he run out of other ideas, he said, and never understood why do I like potted hough so much. Well, first of all because of the taste, than the texture, than the fact that it is one clean natural dish with no chemicals added or chemically changed by some complex processing.
Donald wheres your troosers? Potted hough is made out of beef shin, cut slices through the bones. The pieces of shin are placed into a pot, no salt added yet, with water to cover comfortably over. When the content of the pot starts boiling, the fatty foam is spooned off in the first five minutes, as to leave the broth clear and nice. The meet is cooked on a slow heat for long time, up to six hours till the meat can be taken apart just by probing into the pot with a fork. Does it sound strange to the modern human? Then the bones must be taken off the pot, into a mound on a steaming plate. The bones than can be emptied from their marrow which must be eaten on a piece of toasted bread, salted slightly, there and then, next to the stove, before dinner, in fact before or after anything.
If the marrow gets cold, it is all spoilt. Bill never wanted any of it, he said he did not know about that dish. Well, after the bones are out of the pot, the hough is almost done. By now, there is not much broth left, it all boiled down to just cover the meat. The meat appears as of little short strands, like shredded, as it is taken off the bones. The bones are clean of meat, nice bones. The little pieces of fat are taken apart from the neat meat. The remaining broth is cleaned of most of the fat floating on the surface. This can be done simply with a spoon. Then, the broth must be poured over the strands of beef in the bowls. The bowls are left overnight to set into a firm form of aspic. The content of the pot, the potted hough, is dished into bowls and let to harden as an aspic. Even in the heat of Botswana, the potted hough got into the form of an aspic over night without fail every time Bill cooked it.
