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Saunders
Mince one pound of under-cooked meat of any kind, moisten with two or three spoonfuls of good gravy, and season with pepper and salt. Spread a layer of mashed potatoes on a dish, put the mince upon them, and cover the whole with mashed potatoes. Rough the surface of the potatoes with a fork, and bake the preparation in a moderate oven. When the top is lightly browned the whole is done enough. Send to table with it in a tureen a little of the same gravy with which it was moistened. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold meat. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian réchauffé of cold roast meat under mashed potato — essentially cottage pie assembled from what the joint left behind. Almost everything here still works; the language is what needs translating.
- "Under-cooked meat"This means meat from a joint roasted rare or underdone, not raw meat. Any cooked leftover beef, lamb or mutton does the job; the point is that it will finish cooking in the oven rather than drying out.
- A moderate oven350F/180C. Half an hour at that heat browns the potato crust and heats the filling through.
- Heat it properlyReheated cooked meat should reach 165F/74C in the centre. With a cold filling and cold mash, thirty minutes may not be enough — judge by the middle, not by the colour of the top.
- MinceIn this period mince was often hand-chopped rather than the fine extruded product sold today, though mincing machines were also in use. Chop it fairly coarsely with a knife or pulse briefly in a processor; food-processor paste turns the filling pasty.
- Spoonfuls of gravyTwo or three tablespoons for a pound of meat, enough to moisten and no more. A wet filling will bubble up through the potato and loosen the crust.
- The mashed potatoReckon on about 2 lb of potatoes for the two layers. Mash them stiff with butter and a little milk — slack mash slumps into the meat instead of sitting on it. Roughing the top with a fork is what gives the browned ridges.
- BrowningIf the surface is still pale at the end, a few minutes under a hot grill finishes it faster than more time in the oven, which only dries the filling.
- Cost and yieldSixpence in the original is meaningless now; the useful figure is the last line — three to four servings from a pound of leftover meat, with extra gravy sent to table separately in a jug.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the réchauffé, the cookery of the second appearance of the joint. Middle-class Victorian households roasted large pieces of meat on Sunday and were expected to disguise the remainder respectably through the week, and books of the period devote whole chapters to hashes, rissoles, croquettes and pies built on cold beef and mutton. "Saunders" is one of the family of minced-meat-under-mashed-potato dishes that also includes cottage pie and shepherd's pie; the name is obscure and is generally treated as a dialect or household term rather than one with a documented origin. What distinguishes it here is the double layer of potato, above and below, and the insistence that gravy be sent separately in a tureen — a small piece of table manners that tells you the dish was meant for the dining room, not the kitchen table.