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Hot Pot Pie
Take the remains of cold beef or mutton, and slice it thinly. Slice up also a proportionate quantity of onions and potatoes. Put in a piedish a layer of meat, one of potatoes, and one of onions, seasoning them with pepper, salt, and chopped parsley. Continue thus until the piedish is full. Put in about half a pint of water or stock and a little butter, cover with another dish, and put into a slow oven for an hour and a half to two hours.
A leftovers dish rather than a pie in any pastry sense: sliced cold roast layered with potato and onion and left to steam itself tender. Two details decide whether it works — the meat must be sliced genuinely thin, and the dish must stay sealed.
- Slow ovenConventionally somewhere around 275-300F/140-150C. The point is a long, gentle steam that softens the potatoes without drying out already-cooked meat; at a higher heat the liquid is likely to boil away before the ninety minutes are up.
- The half pintAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, a scant 1 1/4 US cups. Stock is much better than water here, since cold roast meat has already given up most of its own juice.
- Cover with another dishVictorian kitchens inverted a second piedish over the first as a lid. A tight sheet of foil crimped over the rim, or a lidded casserole, does the same job. Without a seal the top layer of potato dries to leather.
- Slice thinly, and mean itPotatoes and onions want to be about 1/8 inch; the meat as thin as your knife allows. Thick slices of cooked beef or mutton in a slow oven go stringy rather than tender, because there is no braising liquid deep enough to rescue them.
- PiedishUsually an earthenware baking dish, often oval. Any similar baking dish works, but choose one deep enough for four or five alternating layers rather than a wide flat one.
- FinishingIf the top is pale after the covered cooking, uncover for the last 15 minutes and raise the heat to about 400F to brown the potatoes. The original assumes you were happy without this.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantities. As a working guess, roughly 1 lb of cold meat, 1 1/2 lb potatoes and two onions will fill a medium piedish and serve about four.
The name is loose: there is no pastry anywhere in it, and the dish is essentially a domestic Lancashire hotpot built from the Sunday roast rather than from raw chops. Layered meat-and-potato bakes of this kind belong to the great Victorian genre of "remains" cookery, the sections of household manuals devoted to using up cold joints he size of roasts, the absence of refrigeration, and the moral weight put on thrift in middle-class kitchens. It teaches a method rather than a formula: layer, season, moisten a little, seal, and let a cool oven do the work over two hours while the cook is occupied elsewhere. Mutton would have been the commoner starting point, when it was cheaper and far more widely eaten than it is now; lamb shoulder is the nearest modern equivalent.