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Cottage Pie
Some cold potatoes Some cold chopped meat A little gravy Salt and pepper to taste A little dripping
This is a formula rather than a method: the book assumes you already know that cottage pie is minced cooked meat under a potato crust, browned in the oven. The proportions are left entirely to the cook, so the notes below fill in what the page takes for granted.
- Working proportionsFor a dish serving four, reckon on about 1 lb of cooked meat to 1.5 lb of potato and roughly a cup of gravy. The meat mixture should be moist but not soupy, or the potato layer will sink into it.
- DrippingBeef dripping is the fat rendered from a roast, saved in a jar. Butter or a neutral oil does the same job here: a little worked into the mashed potato and a little dotted or brushed over the top to brown.
- Cold potatoesLeftover boiled potatoes mash stiff and lumpy when cold, and can turn gluey if worked hard to compensate. Warm them through first with a splash of hot milk before mashing, or the crust will be dense and hard to spread.
- The gravyThis is the hinge of the dish. Cold roast meat is dry, and the gravy is what makes it edible; add enough to bind the mince thoroughly. If you have none saved, a well-reduced stock thickened with a little flour or a beurre manié does the job.
- Oven and timingThe page gives no oven direction at all. In a modern oven, 400F for 30 to 40 minutes will do, until the filling bubbles at the edges and the top has taken colour. Because everything in the dish is already cooked, the oven is only reheating and browning.
- Reheating cooked meatCold meat kept for a day or two should be brought right through to steaming hot, not merely warmed. Make sure the centre of the filling reaches at least 165F before the pie leaves the oven.
- Chopped, not groundPeriod recipes mean meat chopped by hand or put through a mincer, which gives a coarser, more varied texture than modern pre-ground meat. Chopping leftover roast on a board is closer to what the book intends.
Cottage pie belongs to the great nineteenth-century literature of cold meat cookery, the branch of household writing devoted to using up the Sunday joint before it spoiled. The name is generally traced to the late eighteenth century, when the potato had become cheap enough to serve as the staple of a labourer's or cottager's table, and it was applied to any minced meat baked under a potato crust; the narrower modern distinction, cottage pie for beef and shepherd's pie for mutton or lamb, is a later and never wholly consistent convention.