Sometimes, when it comes to culinary history, Britain is its own worst enemy. For a long time, British food has been seen as a joke among other nations, but also nearer to home. Even when the dishes are near indistinguishable, we’re still happy to poke fun at our own fare: we love panna cotta but laugh at blancmange; we cringe at stew but revere boeuf Bourguignon. They’re the same, but that doesn’t stop us.
Where better to showcase the unsung hero braised beef mince than in a beautiful short-crust pie?
Mince gets the worst of our inward-turned opprobrium, a leitmotif in our national food anthem. A pot of stewed mince speaks to all that is wrong with British food: staid, bland, brown, probably overcooked and definitely stuck in the 1950s. Even in the age of slow food and whole-food movements, the world scoffs at Britain’s slow-cooked, whole-food favourite.
In 2017, British readers lost their minds when American food website Eater listed ‘mince on toast’ as a quintessentially British dish.
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