The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Mince and Potatoes

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Mince and Potatoes

‘The Child is the father of the man’, wrote Wordsworth, and in my case what fed the child was mince and potatoes. I’m not here to make it sound exciting or delicious; it wasn’t really – it was functional, cheap and pretty much of all of us always ate it because we had to.

I can’t think of any better place to start than mince and potatoes. Mince and potatoes was what we always had. It was what my mother would make from usually ‘half a poun’ of mince beef’ from Hugh the butcher. The problem with ever going to Hugh the butcher was that you could never get away. Often I’d be waiting in the car for what felt like an eternity as he gossiped with my mother about all Crossgar’s goings on.

Mince and potatoes was basically braised minced beef, i.e. fried in a pot or a frying pan, with onions and diced carrots and then simmered in beef stock which would have come from an Oxo cube or Knorr beef cube, not the jelly-like stock cubes you get today. And above all, it must not be seasoned. My mother had many principles and her most strongly held one was never seasoning anything. She doesn’t even have a functioning salt grinder; opting instead for a little thimble of Saxa salt which is brought out every dinner time and rarely used. She’s horrified when I return home and cook a steak, showering it in salt and pepper before searing on a smoking hot pan. And that’s another thing, my mother would only ever heat the pan enough, so everything kind of stewed in its own juices as opposed to caramelising, however who am I to criticise a mother of five who had not travelled (has never, in fact, had a passport) nor had the access to education that I have.

Some frozen peas would then also be added to the mixture or some heated, tinned sweetcorn served on the side, with of course, potato. Now, the potato would often simply be boiled potatoes, which would then be served on a plate in the middle of the table and you would pick your favourite. Butter was always served with the boiled potatoes, alongside an empty Pyrex bowl which would be the receptacle for the skins. To this day, I never really ‘got’ boiled potatoes. They always seemed to me to be a kind of non-food – registering ‘0’ on the sliding scale of flavour.

One of my strongest memories, though, is my father peeling his boiled potatoes with thumb to the flat of the blade of the knife, and the steam always rising, placing the skins to the side of his plate or in the Pyrex bowl. My father speaks rarely of his childhood growing up in a family of eleven on a dairy farm in Coleraine, but watching him peel the potato, in some ways, with the concentration and sense of anticipation makes me think that it somehow awakens the child in him, eating boiled spuds at the table, an action that was ingrained in him from childhood that he’s carried with him all his life. I always marvelled at how he never seemed to burn his farmer’s hands on the steaming spuds as he stripped away the skin with a few strokes, while the rest of us would be a chorus of ouches as we dropped the hot potatoes back onto our plates waiting impatiently for them to cool.

Could there be anything simpler than a boiled potato with, as it was always referred to in our house, a ‘biglumpabutter’ with the ‘l’ said with a fat tongue to mimic a thick country ‘culchie’ accent? And everyone had their own way of dealing with the potato, if it wasn’t served mashed, which it sometimes would be. My approach and often my brother David’s was to mash the potato into a mound with the mince, i.e. mush it all up together, so that what you had was a kind of mashed potato laced with minced beef flecked with either peas or sweetcorn and a shallow pool of weak gravy. If we weren’t cramming ourselves around the kitchen table on stools with wonky wooden legs, we were sitting in the living room, eating it on our laps watching The Simpsons followed by The Fresh Prince of Bel Air on BBC 2, my brother Richard having just woken from his post-work sleep, laid out, hogging the entire sofa, so the rest of us would have to sit on the floor.

Cooking for six people every today seems unthinkable to me. I get myself into enough of a flap when we have a couple of friends for pizza.

But I wanted to start with mince and potato because it seems somehow symbolic: there was always mince and potato. It was a dish that fed us all and that my mother could have made with her eyes closed. Yes, it was unexciting, yes it wasn’t very flavourful, but it was the bedrock of my mother’s cooking and therefore, in many ways, the bedrock of us as a family. When there was nothing else, there was always mince and potato, unexciting but reliable, a kind of medicine that we accepted. A dish that brought us all together even if it was through indifference. We would lament another evening of mince and potato, while clearing our plates.