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Shepherds' Pie
Grease a deep baking-dish with some of the melted fat from a two-pound tin of beef. Boil or steam four pounds of potatoes, mash and season them, and put them an inch thick at the bottom and sides of the dish. Then put a layer of half a pound of fried onions all over the potato layer. Mince the meat, add the jelly from it, and half a pint of canned tomatoes, with a little stock or plain gravy of any sort. Pile this in the centre of the dish; put the remainder of the potatoes thickly on the top; rough the surface with a fork, and bake until well-browned in a moderate oven, i.e. for about three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. to 1s. 8d.
A store-cupboard version built on a tin of cooked beef rather than yesterday's roast, so the oven time is only about browning and heating through. A few of the quantities and terms need translating.
- Moderate oven350F (180C, gas 4). Three-quarters of an hour is right for setting the crust and browning the top, since every component goes in already cooked.
- The tinned beefA two-pound tin of beef of this period meant pressed cooked beef packed in its own jelly and fat, the sort sold for ships and pantries. The nearest modern equivalents are canned corned beef or a good cooked brisket, about 900g; if you use fresh-cooked meat you will need to supply the fat and the jelly yourself, as gravy or reduced stock.
- Jelly and fatBoth are working ingredients here, not waste. The fat greases the dish and flavours the crust, and the set jelly is one of the moistening ingredients in the filling, alongside the tomatoes and the little stock or gravy the recipe calls for. Do not drain the tin.
- Half a pint of tomatoesAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 285ml, so roughly two-thirds of a standard 400g tin, drained of its thinnest juice. The filling should be moist, not soupy, or it will undermine the potato lining.
- Four pounds of potatoesAbout 1.8kg, which is a great deal, because the potato lines the base and sides as well as the top. Mash it stiff rather than creamy: a loose mash will slump down the walls of the dish before it sets.
- Assembly orderThe inch-thick potato shell wants to go into a well-greased deep dish while still hot and workable, then the fried onions, then the meat piled in the centre so it does not touch the sides. It behaves more like a raised pie than a modern shepherd's pie.
- SeasoningThe original says only "season them". Canned beef is already salty, so salt the potatoes lightly and taste the filling before it goes in; pepper, and a little Worcestershire or mustard if you want it, belong in the meat.
- Yield and costSix to eight generous servings. The stated 1s. 6d. to 1s. 8d. is the probable cost of the whole dish.
- The nameMade with beef this is what most cooks now call cottage pie; shepherds' pie has come to mean the lamb version. Victorian and Edwardian books used the two names loosely for any minced meat under mashed potato.
Minced cooked meat baked under a potato crust belongs to the long tradition of second-day cookery, and the names have separate histories: "cottage pie" is recorded from the 1790s, while "shepherd's pie" is not attested until the mid-to-later nineteenth century. Either way, the dish belongs to a period when the potato had become cheap enough in Britain and Ireland to serve as both the container and the bulk of a meal. What marks this particular version as late Victorian is the tin: Cassell's assumes a two-pound tin of preserved beef as a normal household staple, which it had become after canned meat from South America and Australia began arriving in British ports in quantity from the 1870s onward. That is why the recipe opens with melted fat from the tin and takes the jelly for granted, and why the cost is quoted down to the penny. The dish here is not a way of using up a joint but a way of turning a shelf-stable tin, half a pound of onions and four pounds of potatoes into a hot supper for a large family.