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Meat and Potato Pie
Cut any cold cooked meat into small pieces, there may be more than one kind. Carefully remove all gristle and any stringy fat; put it in a deep baking-dish, the sides of which have been well buttered and lined with mashed potatoes, the thickness of an inch. Cover the meat with a well-seasoned brown gravy or stock to which has been added 1/2 cupful of stewed tomatoes, or 3 tablespoonfuls of tomato catsup. If there is a little cold rice, add 2 or 3 tablespoonfuls.
Add a well-beaten egg to the mashed potato, spread lightly over the top of the pie, leaving the surface rough; put bits of butter over the top and bake until well browned, which will take about twenty minutes.
A leftovers dish with no oven temperature and no quantities, so the proportions are worth pinning down before you start.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. Twenty minutes to a browned top implies a fairly hot oven; something in the region of 400F is a reasonable modern choice. The filling should be bubbling at the edges before you take it out.
- Quantities to work fromFor a 2-quart baking dish, figure on about 3 cups of chopped cooked meat, 1 to 1 1/2 cups of gravy, and roughly 2 lb of potatoes mashed for the lining and lid. Serves four to six.
- The hinge: a dry filling ruins itThe meat is already cooked and will not release juices, so it depends entirely on the gravy. Add enough to moisten the meat thoroughly without swamping it, or the pie bakes out dry and floury.
- Lining the dishAn inch of mashed potato pressed up the buttered sides needs to be stiff -- mash made with butter and very little milk. Loose, creamy potato will slump into the filling.
- Catsup is not modern ketchupPeriod tomato catsup was thinner, sharper and less sweet. Three tablespoons of today's ketchup will read noticeably sugary; the half cup of stewed tomatoes is the better of the two options.
- The egg in the toppingBeaten egg stirred into the potato lid is what lets the roughed-up surface set and brown rather than dry out. Keep the peaks high and dot them with butter.
- Reheated meatCold cooked meat reheated in a pie should reach 165F through the centre. Twenty minutes will brown the top; if the dish came straight from the refrigerator, give it longer and cover loosely if the potato colours too fast.
- The riceTwo or three tablespoons of cold rice is a small addition rather than a bulk ingredient, and will soak up some surplus gravy; leave it out if your gravy is already stiff.
Meat and potato pie of this kind belongs to the nineteenth-century household economy of using up the joint: a Sunday roast reappeared through the week as hash, croquettes, rissoles or, as here, baked under a potato crust. The formula is close kin to shepherd's pie and cottage pie, but the instruction that "there may be more than one kind" of meat marks it as a scrap dish rather than a made dish -- beef, mutton and a little ham could all go in together, bound by whatever gravy was left. The tomato catsup and the stewed tomatoes suggest an American kitchen of the period, where bottled catsup was a common pantry staple. "Warmed-over" cookery was a respectable branch of household management, not an apology.