Sloppy Mince and Creamy Mash

A cozy meal for a rainy spring day

I was just telling my good friend that I want to get back into writing about food for the fun of it. The pandemic was a great prompt, but now that it’s over, sitting down and writing feels staid when there are places to be and things to do. And so much has happened so far in 2025!

I’ve been battling headaches (they’ve been getting better, thankfully), had a scary visit to the ER when something showed up in a CT scan of my brain (it’s a cavernous malformation, and probably, likely, hopefully harmless), and just finished up a cycle of many, many doctor appointments.

Good things cause life to march by, too: a promotion, weekly boxing classes, a cookbook club, time with friends and family. The in-between moments (after boxing or after I drop John off at the train station in the morning) get filled too, oftentimes with mindless scrolling, putting around, or running errands.

But on an uncharacteristically cold and rainy late spring day, I decided to pause and delve deep into a cooking session: I am roasting beef bones to make stock for mince (a.k.a ground beef) and mash, and the house smells like beef: rich, savory, and treacly.

I was inspired by this lovely little article by Tim Hayward on the merits of mince, which is what they call ground meat in the UK. Hayward gives a simple recipe for mince on toast, which is based on the classic Scottish dish of mince and tatties: ground beef swimming in a rich brown gravy, studded with carrots, thickened with oatmeal, and pepped up with ketchup and Worcestershire, served alongside a swoosh of mashed turnips and potatoes. If you squint, it seems a bit like a sloppy Joe. After reading the article, I flipped to page 184 in The British Cookbook to a stunningly plated dish of mince and tatties: The mashed potatoes look a bit like a large quenelle but with a seam down the middle that gives them a more organic texture. Puddled up next to the creamy spuds is a decadent scoop of mince with a rich, burgundy colored gravy and pops of red that look like peppers but are, indeed, carrots. My mind again sprang to sloppy Joes. Mind you, as a kid, I thought sloppy Joes were gross—ketchupy beef with onions looked like a hamburger that got chewed up and spit out. But now I appreciate the dishes’ components, which, when done right, create what’s essentially a deeply savory ground beef stew.

So for my mince and tatties, I leaned a little in the direction of Sloppy Joes with some finely diced peppers, and elevated the humble meal by making homemade beef demi glace (in a pressure cooker, to speed things up) and adding a splash of Guinness for a note of almost cocoa-like, malty bitterness. I add a dab of mustard, too. My version turned out less saucy because it was getting late and I was getting hungry, and the British Cookbook recipe (and indeed, most mince and tatties recipes) call for a 40-minute stew. Suffice it to say, I’m not sharing the “recipe” now, because it needs some tweaks (basically, I needed more time to reduce the puddle of sauce), but I felt like publishing this anyway as a step forward into writing and chronicling more about the food I make and eat.