The best Scottish potted hough -- two Scottish recipes and more

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.

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 week end 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.

Potted hough is made out of beef shin, cut slices through the bones. Bill used to ask the butcher to cut the round pieces into roughly 1 cm thick, but most of the times that is how beef shin were pre packed on the shelves of Pick And Pay at the Kgale View Shopping Center.

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.

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. You who are reading this, if you don't know how bone marrow on a toast is, and if you are still one lively natural human being and not yet cast in plastic, try it as soon as you can get the shin, I am sure you will like it. For me, it is the time of my childhood, when a bone had to be shared by the whole family. Everyone had a little piece of toasted bread with a taste of bone marrow on it. Yummi!!

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.

Te 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 over night 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.
The next day, it was the potted hough for breakfast, for lunch and for dinner and nobody was happier than me, maybe only Bill who felt much appreciated and a proud Scotsman proving the superiority of the Scotts as men, the Scotts as boyfriends and the Scotts as chefs. It all came together in a bowl of potted hough.

I did not have the dish in a long while; my current husband is a German, so I switched my favorite dish to the Pork Knuckle in sour Kraut - but this will be another lens.

An amazing fact surfaces now: I did a bit of research for this lens and I found out that Bill was not exactly truthful to me about the potted hough. He was not using the original recipe but made it up to be simpler.
At second thought though, this should not come as a surprise to me as he did not tell me about himself being still married to another lady either, and that was for the five full years that we have been living together.
Well, it looks like there are two kinds of recipes for the potted hough, The Scottish recipe and Bill's recipe.
So, I tried the original one now, the one that every Scottish recipe site is promoting. I also tried recipes published on various sites that recommend the use of leeks and carrots to the hough./p

I have to admit that Bill's potted hough beats the genuine Scottis recipe. Bill's potted hough is better by far. The use of vegetables makes the broth opaque and the taste is getting close to any vegetable soup you know. The meat getting minced will change the texture and taste into a rather bland cold paste. The potted hough, the way Bill used to make would still win the contest of potted houghs in Botswana, if it would be ever organized. Hm, maybe it can be a project for the future?