Cottage Pie
Mince any kind of cold meat together, put in about one and one-half inches deep in a pie dish; cover with gravy, a little salt and pepper. Then put on it a thick covering of mashed potatoes, cross it in diamonds with a knife. Bake until it is crisp and brown on the top.
A leftovers dish with no quantities and no oven setting, which is how it was meant to be written. A few decisions have to be made for you.
- Oven and timeBake at 400F for 30-40 minutes, until the top is browned and the gravy bubbles at the edges. The filling is already cooked meat, so the only aim is heating it through and crisping the potato.
- QuantityThe recipe gives a depth but no dish size, so yield is guesswork: an ordinary pie dish filled an inch and a half deep with meat and topped with potato will feed about four, which suggests something in the region of a pound of cooked meat and a similar or slightly greater weight of potatoes.
- "Any kind of cold meat"Beef, lamb, mutton or a mix, cut by hand into small dice rather than pulverised in a processor. Cold roast meat minced too fine turns pasty once it is baked under a lid of potato.
- GravyEnough to moisten thoroughly, not to submerge, about a cup. Too little and the reheated meat is dry; too much and it seeps up through the potato and stops it browning. It should be well seasoned, since the meat itself has already given up much of its flavour.
- The potato lidMash while hot with butter and a little hot milk, and spread it while still warm so it seals to the rim of the dish. A cold, stiff mash breaks up as you spread it and lets gravy through the gaps.
- Crossing in diamondsScoring the surface with a knife is not decoration alone; the ridges catch heat and brown, and the cuts let steam escape. Dotting the top with butter before it goes in helps the crust.
- Not shepherd's pieThe two are made identically. By modern convention shepherd's pie is lamb and cottage pie is beef, but the older books, this one included, use whatever cold meat the house has.
Cottage pie belongs to the frugal end of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery, where Monday's supper was built out of Sunday's joint. The name is generally traced to the late eighteenth century, when the potato had become cheap enough to be a poor household's staple rather than a curiosity, and "cottage" seems to have signalled plain country food rather than any particular village. The recipe gives no weights because it was not really a recipe so much as a method, applied to whatever the larder held.