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Hunter's Pie
Take two pounds of the best end of a neck of mutton, cut it into chops, trim these neatly, remove all superfluous fat, add pepper and slat, put them into a stewpan with a small quantity of water, and let them stew gently for half an hour. Boil and mash three or four pounds of good potatoes. Line a buttered pie-dish with them, put in the meat and gravy, and shape a crust over the top of the remainder of the potatoes. Bake in a good oven for half an hour. If the pie is not nicely browned, hold a red-hot fire-shovel over it for a minute or two. Just before serving make an incision in the middle of the crust, and pour in a little boiling gravy. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A shepherd's-pie variant built on bone-in mutton chops rather than minced meat. The method is sound; only the oven language, the meat and the fire-shovel need translating.
- The meat"Best end of neck" is the rack — what a butcher today sells as rib chops or a rack of lamb. Mutton (sheep over two years) is rare outside halal and specialist butchers; lamb rib or loin chops work, though they are milder and cook faster.
- Trim harder than you thinkNeck of mutton carries a great deal of fat, and thirty minutes of gentle stewing renders much of it into the gravy. Skim the liquid before it goes into the dish or the potato crust will sit on a pool of grease.
- Half an hour is short for muttonChops from an older animal want closer to 60–90 minutes of gentle simmering to become tender. Lamb chops will be done in the stated half hour. Either way the meat finishes cooking under the potato, so judge tenderness before assembling.
- "A good oven"Victorian oven descriptions are imprecise, but this implies a fairly hot oven, somewhere around 400°F (200°C). The pie is already cooked through; the half hour is for heating and browning the crust.
- The red-hot fire-shovelA Victorian salamander — radiant heat applied from above. Use the grill/broiler for two or three minutes instead, watching it, as ridged potato peaks scorch quickly.
- Potato proportionsThree to four pounds of potatoes to two pounds of bone-in chops is a lot of potato, which is the point: it lines the dish as well as topping it. Mash them stiff, with butter and little or no milk, or the lining will slump into the gravy.
- The incision and the boiling gravySlit the crust after baking, not before, and have extra stock reduced and boiling. Cold or lukewarm gravy poured in at this stage cools the whole dish. The likely reason for the step is that the potato absorbs liquid in the oven and the pie can eat dry without it.
- Cost and yieldTwo shillings was a modest sum for a family dinner in the later nineteenth century. Five to six servings holds true, though with bone-in chops expect one or two per person rather than a generous portion each.
The name attaches to a dish said to have been made up in advance and reheated for men coming in late and hungry from a day's shooting or hunting — a pie that could sit and only improve; this is traditional explanation rather than documented origin. It belongs to the family of potato-crusted family pies alongside shepherd's pie and cottage pie, which are commonly said to have grown out of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice of substituting mashed potato for expensive wheat-flour pastry in households where flour and butter were watched carefully. Hunter's pie is often distinguished by the use of whole trimmed chops rather than minced or chopped cooked meat, which makes it a dish for fresh mutton rather than for using up Sunday's joint. The instruction to hold a red-hot fire-shovel over the top is a small piece of pre-gas cookery preserved in print: kitchen ranges browned poorly from above, and the shovel, heated in the fire, stood in for the professional kitchen's salamander iron.