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Mutton Pie
A very good family pie is made with the remains of a cold leg, loin, or any other joint of mutton from which nice neat slices of rather lean meat can be cut. These should be put with a good seasoning, in alternate layers with thinly-sliced potatoes, into a pie-dish, commencing at the bottom with some of the meat, and finishing at the top with potatoes. Parsley, savoury herbs, onion, or shallot, with a little mace, white pepper, and salt may be used at discretion. A cupful of good gravy from the meat should be poured into the pie before the crust is put on. Suet is generally used for the crust. Time, an hour to bake. Probable cost, exclusive of meat, 6d. to 8d.
A leftover-joint pie with no ingredient list, written for a cook who already knew how a suet crust behaves. Two things decide whether it works: the potatoes must be sliced thin enough to cook through, and the gravy must be measured rather than poured.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives only "an hour to bake" and names no oven state; a moderate oven, around 350-375F, suits a suet-crust pie of this kind. The filling is already-cooked meat, so the time is really governed by the raw potatoes and the crust setting; a hotter oven browns the crust before the potatoes soften.
- Slice the potatoes thin"Thinly-sliced" here means about 1/8 inch, mandoline-thin rather than chip-thick. Anything heavier will still be firm when the crust is done, which is the usual failure of this pie.
- Suet crustA common proportion is 8 oz plain flour to 4 oz shredded suet, a good pinch of salt, a teaspoon of baking powder if you want it lighter, and cold water to a soft dough. Packet shredded beef or vegetable suet works directly; if using suet from the butcher, chill it hard and grate it.
- A cupful of gravyRead this as about 8 fl oz, and no more. Cold meat gives up little liquid of its own but the potatoes give up plenty, and an overfilled dish boils up into the crust. If you have no gravy from the joint, well-reduced stock is closer than gravy from granules.
- Mutton and its substituteMature mutton is scarce outside specialist butchers. Cold roast lamb leg or shoulder is the practical stand-in, though it is milder and takes the mace and shallot more readily. Trim hard fat off the slices; reheated mutton fat is the part people object to.
- Seasoning "at discretion"For a pie holding roughly a pound of meat: a level teaspoon salt, half a teaspoon white pepper, a small blade of mace or a scant 1/4 teaspoon ground, one finely chopped onion or two shallots, and a tablespoon of chopped parsley with a little thyme. Ground mace stales quickly, so taste it before trusting it.
- Dish and yieldAn oval pie-dish of about 2 pints, filled with roughly a pound of sliced meat and a pound of potatoes, serves four. The dish should be full to the rim so the crust has support and does not sag onto the filling.
- Cost note"6d. to 8d." is the price of the crust, potatoes and seasonings in old pence, the meat being counted as already paid for. It is a measure of the book's thrift accounting rather than anything usable now.
Cassell's was a dictionary rather than a menu book, and entries like this one exist to answer the standing question of the Victorian household: what to do on Monday with Sunday's joint. Mutton was then the everyday roasting meat of British kitchens, cheaper and far more common than lamb, and a leg or loin was expected to reappear in a second and often third form. The suet crust the recipe assumes is the older and plainer English pastry, made with beef kidney fat rather than butter, and it was used for family pies and puddings precisely because it was cheap, forgiving and filling. The layering of meat with raw potato does double duty, stretching the meat and thickening the gravy as the starch cooks out. The decline of mutton in Britain over the twentieth century, as sheep were brought to market younger, is the main reason a dish this ordinary now reads as historical.