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LANCASHIRE PIE
Take cold beef or veal, chop, and season as for hash; have ready hot mashed potatoes seasoned as if for the table, and put in a shallow baking-dish first a layer of meat, then a layer of potatoes, and so on, till dish is heaping full; smooth over top of potatoes, and make little holes in which place bits of butter; bake until a nice brown.
A leftovers dish with almost no measurements, which is the point: it scales to whatever cold roast you have. A few specifics will keep it from drying out.
- Oven temperature"Bake until a nice brown" with everything already cooked means a hot oven working only on the surface. 400F for 25-35 minutes browns the potato without drying the meat; the top will colour faster under a short broil at the end if it is stubborn.
- ProportionsRoughly equal volumes of chopped meat and mashed potato, finishing with potato. For a 2-quart shallow dish, about 1 lb cooked beef or veal and 2 lb potatoes mashed with butter and milk. Serves four.
- "Season as for hash"Most likely salt and pepper, and perhaps a little onion, going by the book's hash recipes; the meat is chopped rather than ground. Chop by hand to about pea size; a food processor turns cold roast to paste.
- The hinge: moistureCold cooked meat has no juice left to give, so a dry pie is the usual failure. Moisten each meat layer with a few spoonfuls of leftover gravy, or stock loosened with a little flour, before the potato goes on.
- Bits of butter in holesThe holes appear to serve as wells that hold the melting butter so it soaks down rather than running off the smoothed top. Use about 2 tablespoons in total.
- Leftover safetyCold roast used this way should have been refrigerated promptly and be no more than three or four days old. Reheat the assembled dish until the centre is steaming hot, not merely until the top has browned.
Buckeye Cookery gathers this under "Fragments," the chapter devoted to using up what the household already had -- a category that carried real weight in an 1870s kitchen where a Sunday roast was expected to reappear through the week. The dish is close to the English cottage pie in plain form, and the Lancashire name points to the industrial north of England, where potato-topped meat bakes and hot pots were everyday cooking; American compilers of this period sometimes attached such regional names loosely, and how this one came by its title is not recorded. What distinguishes it from a plain hash is the potato topping, which lets the oven brown a surface while the meat beneath stays covered -- something like a pastry lid, at less labour and cost.