Hochepot

Hochepot is a slow-cooked meat and vegetable stew eaten in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region of northern France and in Flanders and Hainaut in Belgium, where the Dutch form of the name is hutsepot. The classic version is built on oxtail, shoulder of mutton and salted bacon, simmered together with vegetables until the meats are tender. The dish is old: its roots are traced to the Middle Ages, and the earliest known written recipes appear in the Manuscript of Sion, a French cookery treatise dated to around the thirteenth century, which describes a poultry hochepot fried in bacon fat with browned bread, liver and beef broth. Later editions of the Viandier of Taillevent kept only a single poultry version, which its modern editor treats as a rewriting of the Sion text. Despite the near-identical name, hochepot is a different dish from the Dutch hutspot, which is made from mashed potatoes.