Minced Beef
Take the lean of some coid roast beef. Chop it very fine, adding a small minced onion, and season it with pepper and salt. Put it into a stewpan with some of the gravy that has been left from the day before, and let it stew for a quarter of an hour. Then put it (two-thirds full) into a deep dish. Fill up the dish with mashed potatoes, heaped high in the center, smoothed on the surface, and browned. Very nice with Chili sauce. Cold roast mutton or lamb may be minced as above, adding some sweet marjoram to the seasoning, and filling up the dish with mashed turnips instead of potatoes.
Also cold roast pork, flavoring the seasoning with a little chopped sage. Cover the top with sweet potato, boiled and mashed, or with apple sauce that has been stewed as thick as possible.
A leftovers dish rather than a formula: the amounts are entirely at the cook's discretion, and the method is what matters. "Coid" in the first line is a typesetting slip for "cold."
- The hinge: keep it moistCold roast beef is already fully cooked, so the quarter-hour stew is only there to soften the meat and marry it with the onion. If yesterday's gravy has been eaten, use a cup or so of beef stock thickened lightly with a roux; dry mince under mashed potato is the usual failure of this dish.
- Chop, do not process"Chop it very fine" means knife work. A food processor turns cold roast beef to paste in about four seconds, and the texture never recovers.
- Browning the topNo oven or temperature is specified; the recipe says only that the surface is 'smoothed on the surface, and browned', which a salamander, a range top or an oven could all achieve. If baking, roughly 400F for 25-30 minutes until bubbling at the edges, then a few minutes under the broiler for colour. Dot the potato with butter first.
- Chili sauceIn American cookery of this period this is a thick, sweet-sour tomato relish in the ketchup family, not a hot pepper sauce. A tomato chutney or a good ketchup is closer to what was intended than sriracha.
- Sweet marjoramSimply marjoram as sold today; the "sweet" distinguished it from wild marjoram, which is oregano. About a teaspoon dried for the lamb version.
- Mashed turnips'Turnip' in American books may mean the white turnip or the yellow turnip (rutabaga/swede). Either works, but rutabaga is sweeter and holds a heaped shape better; drain it very well, as it carries more water than potato.
- The pork variationApple sauce "stewed as thick as possible" is a topping, not a sauce, and needs to be reduced until a spoon leaves a channel in it. Thin apple sauce will sink into the mince.
This is a close relative of what British cooks now call cottage pie, and the older name survives here: a mince, not a pie, defined by the meat rather than the crust. Nineteenth-century American household books devoted whole chapters to the second appearance of a joint, because a Sunday roast was bought large and the family ate down through it for days, and the tone of such recipes is thrift without apology. The list of variations at the end is the real point of the entry mmutton with turnip, pork with sweet potato or apple and the pairings follow the same logic as the accompaniments to the original roasts.