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POTATO PIE (another way.)
Take half a dozen boiled potatoes, dry and floury, mash them smoothly with three ounces of butter, the beaten yolk of an egg, and a little pepper and salt. Cut a pound of cold roast beef into neat slices free from skin and gristle. If the meat is rather underdone, so much the better. Spread a layer of the potato at the bottom of a pie-dish, put the slices of meat upon it, season with pepper and salt, and pour over the meat a tea-cupful of gravy made by stewing the bones and trimmings, and a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup. Cover with potato, and ornament the top of the pie with a fork. Bake in a moderate oven and serve very hot. Time to bake the pie, half an hour. Probable cost, about 1s. 6d. Sufficient for three persons.
A Victorian cottage pie built from Sunday's leftover joint. Nothing here is dangerous or obsolete, but a few conventions need translating.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F/180C. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the half hour is only to heat through and colour the potato top; give it 35-40 minutes if the components went in fridge-cold.
- Potato quantity"Half a dozen boiled potatoes" assumes medium floury potatoes, roughly 1.5-2 lb raw. Use a baking-type potato (russet, Maris Piper, King Edward) and dry the drained potatoes in the hot pan for a minute before mashing.
- The hinge: dry, floury mashNo milk or cream is added, only butter and yolk, and that is deliberate. A wet mash slumps into the gravy and the layers merge. Mash while the potatoes are still steaming hot and stiff.
- Tea-cupfulReckon on about 5-6 fl oz, roughly a quarter of a pint. Enough to moisten the meat, not to swim it, since there is no pastry base to contain a flood.
- Gravy from bones and trimmingsThe recipe assumes you have the roast's carcass. Simmer bones and scraps 45 minutes with an onion and strain; a strong beef stock reduced by half is a fair substitute.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquor, not the tomato condiment. Specialist and some British grocers still sell it; a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce plus a little soy gives a comparable savoury depth.
- Underdone meatThe preference for rare beef is practical rather than risky. Slices already cooked through will dry out in the oven, whereas pink slices finish at about medium in the same half hour.
- Yield and costThree servings, as stated, at a probable cost of about 1s. 6d.
This is a leftovers dish under a genteel name. The heading "another way" implies Cassell's gives at least one other potato pie, and this version is essentially what later cooks called cottage pie: cold roast meat layered with mashed potato instead of pastry, the potato standing in for a crust that would have needed fresh flour, fat and labour. The name is generally traced to the late eighteenth century, by which time the potato had become cheap and common in Britain; "cottage" is usually taken to point to the modest household that ate it, and the version made with mutton was later distinguished as shepherd's pie. Two details suit the Victorian kitchen: the assumption of a large roast joint eaten in diminishing forms over the following days, and the reliance on mushroom ketchup, a commercial bottled seasoning that supplied savoury depth in the decades before Bovril and stock cubes.