Scouse - a Liverpool stew

I did not grow up in Liverpool, and while I have relatives living in Liverpool now, in the past the family have been linked to Liverpool but not from there.  I did grow up surrounded by displaced Liverpudlians, however, and actually scouse, the meal, is known all over the North West.  The Wikipedia entry is here and I didn't find anything to argue with.

Scouse is a stew that is best known as a Liverpool dish, very close to Lancashire hot pot.  The origin is using cheap meat, cooked slowly on the top of the stove, usually with potatoes which were very easy to get hold of in the North West and which stored okay on ships.  It is easy to cook in an old fashioned galley because it is cooked on the top of the stove and could use salted or pickled meat with the potatoes and onions.  The Wikipedia entry refers to a possible Baltic connection, and I have heard that in the past.  It is the industrialised, seaport, melting pot of Liverpool version of peasant cooking - warm, cheap and fills you up.  It isn't as cheap as it was with the cost of cooking on the stove, but a slow cooker does the job just as well.

As you are a veggie I would suggest that you throw in a selection of root vegetables to hand, some onion or variation on the onion theme like leeks, a good handful of barley and then make sure that you have plenty of floury potato to mush down.

My understanding of scouse is that you need really floury potatoes and they go in at the start, unlike most stews, so that they go to mush and thicken up the stew.  As far as I can tell, there are plenty of variations on the theme.  I would say for me that it had to have onion, lamb, potatoes and long cooking to count.  Today's version also has carrots, parsnip and a large amount of swede as the veg box contained a swede as heavy as evil cat.

Edited to add - I used to love turkey scouse, my mother used to make it on 27 December, using the last of the turkey (she wouldn't keep it longer than three days after cooking) with all the veggies still in the veg rack. It tasted wonderful and was certainly not what would normally be called scouse.