Scotch Stovie

Until I read through Jamie's book, I had never heard of a Scotch stovie (despite not living so far from the Scottish border, and despite my dad defining himself as Scottish rather than English - wishful thinking on his part). It seems to be a curious cross between mashed potato and pommes boulangere (that is, more mushy than the latter and more solid than the former...).

Scaling down Jamie's recipe to serve just Simon and me, I sweated a sliced onion very gently in butter and olive oil, then added chunks of peeled floury potato and a half-pint of water and simmered with the lid on until the potato was tender, scraping the stuck bits of potato from the base of the pan occasionally. In fact there were very few 'stuck' scraps of potato; it seemed very liquid (I was worried that it was too liquid...) until the last minute when it came together, albeit in a slightly mushy way (Jamie does say you can mash the potato up completely, or leave it as a mixture of mash and lumps, which is what I ended up with). Finally I scattered chopped celery
leaves and watercress over.

OK so the picture makes it look like mashed potato. I promise it had the requisite lumps in it to be a Stovie! It didn't go orange-coloured in the way that Jamie's appeared to from the photo in his book (I expect I was economising on the butter again...!). It was, however, extremely tasty and winningly easy, which is a great potato combination as far as I am concerned. It also went very well indeed with the duck (above).