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Mutton, Minced and Baked
Take slices of mutton (the meat from a cold roast leg is best) without much fat, mince them, and add a tea-spoonful of savoury herbs, a blade of pounded mace, two shredded shallots or an onion chopped very fine, and some of the meat-gravy to moisten, with a very little flour to thicken the gravy, and season with pepper and salt. Fill a pie-dish with alternate layers of mashed potatoes and the minced mutton; put potatoes at the bottom of the dish, and finish the top in the same way. Time, half an hour to bake. Sufficient, a pound and a half of mutton for four or five persons.
A cottage-pie built from Sunday's cold roast leg, with the layering reversed from what most cooks expect: potato on the bottom as well as the top.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 375F, suits the stated half hour; the meat and potato are already cooked, so the aim is to heat through, cook out the little flour, and brown the top.
- "Mince" means chopIn this period mincing meat meant chopping it fine with a knife, or passing it once through a mincer. A food processor will turn cold mutton to paste in seconds, which gives a dense, pasty filling. Chop by hand to roughly the size of a pea.
- Blade of maceOne blade is a single piece of the lacy husk surrounding the nutmeg seed. Pounded, it comes to about a quarter teaspoon of ground mace, which is a fair substitute.
- Savoury herbsUsually a dried mixture along the lines of thyme and marjoram, often with sage or savory and parsley. A teaspoon of dried mixed herbs is a reasonable equivalent.
- The gravy is the hingeMoisten only enough to bind. Too much liquid and the potato layers collapse into the meat and the whole dish turns to soup; the very little flour is there to hold the gravy in place against the potato rather than to make a sauce.
- Mutton and its substitutesTrue mutton, from a sheep over two years old, is uncommon at supermarkets. Cold roast lamb shoulder or leg behaves the same way, though it is milder; the shallots and mace were chosen partly to stand up to mutton's stronger flavour, so go lighter on both with lamb.
- Mashed potatoThe recipe does not say whether the mash is freshly made or left over. Stiff, cool mash layers most cleanly; freshly made mash should be on the dry side and allowed to cool a little, or it will not hold as a base layer.
- YieldA pound and a half of meat plus potato serves four to five, as stated; use a pie-dish that the layers fill comfortably.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the English "made dish" -- the recipes that existed to consume the cold joint honourably. A household that roasted a leg of mutton on Sunday faced it again on Monday and Tuesday, and cookery writers of the 1870s to 1890s are often said to have given whole chapters to hashes, rissoles, croquettes and shepherd's pies designed to disguise its origins. This particular arrangement, meat between layers of mashed potato, is a close cousin of what came to be called shepherd's pie; the name is recorded from the mid-nineteenth century, while "cottage pie" is older still, appearing by the end of the eighteenth century, and the distinction between shepherd's pie for lamb or mutton and cottage pie for beef hardened only later and never entirely.