Growing up in a “good Irish family” of six children in the Greater Manchester town of Bury, meals were the beating heart of life, says Mary-Ellen McTague. Her mum was an excellent cook, and her dad was happiest sitting for hours at the table with a bottle of wine and his family gathered around. 

But McTague herself was a fussy eater. It wasn’t until she went to France at 18 and ended up in the middle of nowhere, forced to eat whatever was put in front of her, that she saw the light. “Fortunately,” she says, “it was lots of lovely fresh Provençal vegetables.”

Though she is now one of the most successful restaurateurs in one of the UK’s buzziest cities, her choice of dish reflects a homely tradition of cooking from the days when there was a butcher down the road, and someone at home to wait until a shoulder of lamb had cooked to perfection. 

On paper, by the time her Lancashire hotpot has been brined and braised, it will have been 16 hours in the making. But it doesn’t have to take that long, she insists. You can miss out the eight-hour soak in salted water and you can turn the oven up to speed up the six-hour braising time.

Brining has been around for thousands of years, but McTague picked up the technique from the Fat Duck, where she trained under Heston Blumenthal. He also taught her the more recent flavour-enhancing technique of caramelising onions with star anise. “It’s one of my top tips,” she says. “You can use it with everything from stock to pasta or rice.” 

This spring, McTague opened her latest restaurant – Pip - in Manchester’s Treehouse Hotel. At the same time she was granted charitable status for Eat Well MCR, which she founded with two friends during the pandemic as a collective providing top-class meals for people in need. 

She has come a long way from the food-averse university dropout who decided – in what for years she believed to have been an epiphany – to throw up her language degree and seek her fortune as a chef. “I was in my second year and was definitely about to fail,” she says. It was only years later that she was diagnosed with ADHD, and realised that changing course on a whim “was classic ADHD behaviour”.

Fortunately, it worked out for her. After working in a music venue, serving food to visiting bands, she got hold of a copy of the Good Food Guide and wrote to several top restaurants, two of which responded. One reply was from Blumenthal, who told her to come back when she had some experience, and the other was from the Lake District’s Sharrow Bay hotel. “I was the first woman ever to work in the Sharrow Bay kitchen, apart from the bakeress and the woman who came to make marmalade once a year,” she says. There were three head chefs, and at first only one of them would talk to her, though “they got better after I became useful to them”.

Her experience of being “the only woman in the kitchen, or one of a very small minority” sent her off on a quest for the wisdom of female chefs and food writers. They have become her inspiration, and she has accumulated a library of old cookbooks stretching back to 18th-century pioneers such as Hannah Glasse and Elizabeth Raffald. 

Though the ratio of men to women has improved over the years, she says, “still people will ask how many boys I have in my kitchen”. It doesn’t help that it is a high-stress career with long hours, throwing up particular challenges for high-flyers like McTague, who is divorced with two school-age sons. She simply could not have done it without the help of a devoted aunt, she says.

The challenges are logistical as well as culinary. This interview is timed to take place just after the peak lunch rush-hour at Pip, which is delayed because they are short-staffed. Then there’s the small matter of fundraising for Eat Well, which relies on selling tickets to starry dinners. The handy thing about these dinners, she says, is that leftovers can be boxed up and sent out for lunch the next day, so the clients are eating the same as the well-heeled patrons. Luckily, everyone loves a good hotpot.

Interview by Claire Armitstead

(Note: if you wish to brine the lamb before cooking, this needs to be done beforehand. See instructions at the end. The garlic beurre noisette can also be made in advance.)

This is much lighter and fresher than the stuff in jars. It creates a fresh, crunchy foil to the rich lamb, roast potatoes and buttered broccoli, and also goes a very pretty colour once the lemon juice is added.

This is the thing that is going to make your broccoli really delicious. It can be made in advance, in a decent-sized batch, and then stored in the fridge to flavour veg – or even spread on toast!

This is an optional stage – you do not have to brine the lamb! If you do, it will render it all the more tender, seasoned and delicious, but you can just season the meat with salt and pepper ahead of cooking if you don’t want to, or don’t have time.