Shepherd Pie
Chop some cold cooked mutton quite fine.
Measure and for each pint add salt and pepper to taste, ½ teaspoonful of onion juice, a dash of curry powder and ½ pint of brown sauce. Mix and spread in a greased dish. Cover with a thick layer of hot mashed potato, dabbling the top with a little beaten egg yolk. Brown in a quick oven.
A frugal use for the remains of a roast leg or shoulder, and closer to the original shepherd's pie than most modern versions, which start with raw ground meat.
- The "12 pint" is a typoSet beside the "½ teaspoonful of onion juice", this is almost certainly ½ pint (1 cup) of brown sauce per pint of chopped mutton. That ratio gives a moist but not soupy filling; add it gradually and stop when the meat holds together.
- A pint of meatVolume, not weight: a pint of finely chopped cooked mutton is roughly 12 oz, about what you get from a pound of raw meat once roasted and trimmed. Enough for two generous or three modest servings.
- Quick oven425-450F. The filling and the potato both go in hot, so the oven is only there to set the glaze and brown the top -- 15 to 20 minutes, or less under a broiler.
- Brown sauceNot the bottled condiment sold under that name in Britain. This is espagnole or a simple pan gravy: fat and flour cooked to a nut brown, moistened with meat stock. Leftover gravy from the original roast would serve.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated pulp through a sieve. It seasons without adding raw crunch to a filling that gets no long cooking.
- Chop, do not grindHand-chopping cold mutton gives a texture that reads as meat; a food processor turns cooked lamb to paste in seconds. Pulse very briefly if you use one.
- Everything hot going inThe potato must be hot and stiff enough to spread without sinking, and the meat should be warm. A cold assembly needs considerably longer in a cooler oven, which tends to dry the filling.
- Lamb worksMature mutton is hard to find outside specialist butchers. Cold roast lamb behaves the same way and is milder, so season to taste; the curry powder and onion may have suited mutton's stronger flavor.
Shepherd's pie began as a way of using up cold roast meat rather than as a dish cooked from scratch. The now-standard distinction by animal -- sheep for the shepherd, as against cottage pie made with beef -- is a later convention; the two names were used loosely and interchangeably for much of the nineteenth century, and cottage pie is the older term. Recipes of this kind spread through nineteenth-century English and American household books alongside cheap potatoes, and they belong to a whole genre of "remade" dishes -- hashes, croquettes, rissoles -- whose purpose was to get a second meal out of a roast without it tasting like leftovers. The dash of curry powder is a small mark of the period: by the late 1800s curry powder was a common pantry tin in Britain and America, used less to make Indian food than as a general savory seasoning for reheated meat, much as Worcestershire sauce was.