Home › The Principles of Cookery › Husband's Pie
Husband's Pie
Take the remains of a cold loin of mutton, and cut the meat into square pieces; lay them in a dish with small pieces of bacon on top, then a layer of baked or fried mushrooms. Season to taste with salt and pepper, put half a pint of good gravy or stock in, cover with bread-crumbs, then with mashed potatoes, and bake for half an hour in a fairly hot oven.
A leftovers pie from the cold-joint era, close cousin to cottage pie but built from cubed meat rather than mince. Two details carry it: the gravy must be genuinely good, and the meat is already cooked, so the oven's job is browning and heating through, not cooking.
- "Fairly hot oven"Read this as roughly 375-400F (190-200C). Everything in the dish is cooked already; the half hour is there to crisp the potato crust and bring the centre up to steaming.
- Half a pintAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. That is a generous amount for a pie this size; the crumb layer will take up some of it rather than letting it flood the potato.
- Cold loin of muttonMutton, meaning sheep over about two years, is rare outside specialist butchers. Leftover roast leg or shoulder of lamb behaves the same way; cut it into ½-inch dice and trim the hard fat, which will not render further in half an hour.
- The gravy is the recipeWith cooked meat and no long braise, nothing new develops in the oven. Use the reduced roasting juices from the original joint, or a proper stock reduced and thickened — a thin, watery liquid produces a thin, watery pie.
- BaconUnsmoked streaky or green bacon is the likelier intention, laid over as small pieces to baste the dry cooked meat. Smoked bacon works but will dominate lamb; use less of it.
- MushroomsBaking or frying them first is not optional. Raw mushrooms release a surprising amount of water in a covered dish and will dilute the gravy.
- The crumb layerDry breadcrumbs between the meat and the mash act as a barrier, absorbing gravy so the potato does not go sodden underneath. Fresh soft crumbs collapse; use stale or lightly dried ones.
- YieldHow far it goes depends entirely on how much meat is left on the loin; three or four is a reasonable expectation with the potato topping. Bake in a shallow dish rather than a deep one so the crust-to-filling ratio holds.
Cassell's is full of dishes like this one — a whole genre of Victorian cookery devoted to what to do on Monday with Sunday's joint, when a roast was bought large and the cook was judged on whether anything went to waste. The jocular name belongs to that tradition of domestic titles ("Husband's Pie", "Bachelor's Pudding", "Poor Man's Goose") which tend to signal a made-dish assembled from remains but dressed up enough to put in front of the head of the household without apology. The technique is the same as cottage and shepherd's pie — the latter not recorded by name until the 1850s — though the difference here is that the meat stays in recognisable pieces rather than going through the mincer.