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Shepherd's Pie
Peel and slice 2 pounds of potatoes.
Cut up 1 to 2 pounds cold cooked beef, lean and fat together. Place potatoes in pie dish with ¼ pint beef gravy, and season with pepper and salt. Add 2 onions cut in 4 pieces. Place the meat over the potatoes and add more potatoes over the meat. Pour dripping over top layer of potatoes. Cover with paste and make hole in centre, through which pour a little beef stock once or twice while cooking. Bake in hot oven about ¾ of an hour.
This is an older, pastry-lidded shepherd's pie rather than the mashed-potato version most cooks expect. A few points about the layering, the crust and the oven.
- It is a true pieThere is no mashed topping here: raw sliced potatoes are layered with cold meat and sealed under a pastry lid. The potatoes cook in the gravy and steam under the crust, so the dish behaves more like a baked meat pie than a modern shepherd's pie.
- Slice the potatoes thinThree-quarters of an hour is not long for raw potato. Cut them no thicker than an eighth of an inch so they are tender by the time the pastry has coloured; thick slices will still be firm at the centre.
- A quarter pint of gravyIn an imperial measure that is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a cup. It is not much liquid for two pounds of potato, which is why the recipe has you pour more stock through the vent hole as it bakes.
- Hot ovenRead that as 425-450F. The high heat is there for the pastry; if the top browns before the potatoes are done, lay foil over it and carry on.
- DrippingRendered beef fat saved from a roast. Beef tallow, or in its absence butter or a neutral fat, does the same job of keeping the top layer of potato from drying out.
- PasteRead as a plain pastry lid; the recipe specifies nothing further. The Five Roses Cook Book was a flour miller's book, so a pastry crust is unsurprising.
- The vent hole mattersIt is not decorative. It lets steam escape so the crust does not lift and go soggy underneath, and it is how the additional stock gets in. Cut it wide enough to take the lip of a small jug.
- OnionsTwo onions in quarters will still be assertive chunks after 45 minutes. Slice them thinly if you want them to melt into the gravy instead.
- YieldRoughly a 9- or 10-inch deep dish, serving about six. The recipe calls for cold cooked beef; anything braised and well seasoned works as well.
The name's origins are uncertain: "cottage pie" is recorded from the 1790s, while "shepherd's pie" is not attested until the mid-nineteenth century. The now-familiar rule that shepherd's pie means lamb while cottage pie means beef is a later tidying-up: this recipe cheerfully calls for beef. What is more striking is the pastry. The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by a Canadian flour miller and distributed to households that bought its flour, and a shepherd's pie with a paste lid rather than potato served that purpose neatly.