Cottage Pie
Cover bottom of a small greased baking-dish with hot mashed potato, add a thick layer of roast beef, chopped or cut in small pieces (seasoned with salt, pepper, and a few drops onion juice) and moistened with some of the gravy; cover with a thin layer of mashed potato, and bake in a hot oven long enough to heat through.
A leftovers dish rather than a formula, which is why no quantities appear. The points below fill in what Farmer assumed her readers already knew.
- Oven temperature"Hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken as roughly 400-425F. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the bake only needs to be long enough to heat through and colour the top -- half an hour or so.
- The hinge: the meat must be moistRoast beef that has already been cooked once will turn dry and stringy on reheating. Moisten the chopped meat generously with gravy until it looks almost too wet before it goes in; the potato layers seal in whatever steam is left.
- Onion juiceAn old shortcut for onion flavour without texture: grate an onion and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate on a microplane and use the liquid. A teaspoon of very finely minced onion, softened in butter first, does the same job.
- QuantitiesFor a dish serving four, figure about 1 lb of chopped cooked beef, 3/4 to 1 cup of gravy, and roughly 2 lb of potatoes mashed with butter and hot milk.
- Bottom crust of potatoThe bottom layer will not crisp; it is there to keep the meat from catching on the dish. Spread it while hot so it holds its shape, and grease the dish well.
- If you have no gravyBeef stock thickened with a little flour-and-butter roux stands in. Without some sauce the dish is dry, and no amount of baking will fix it.
- Browning the topThe thin top layer will pale rather than brown at this length of bake. Brush with milk or dot with butter, or give it two minutes under the broiler at the end.
Cottage pie and shepherd's pie were long used interchangeably, both meaning cooked meat under a potato crust; the modern rule that shepherd's pie must be lamb and cottage pie beef is a later tidying-up. "Cottage pie" is recorded from the late eighteenth century and "shepherd's pie" from the mid nineteenth, and the usual explanation -- that potato served as the crust of a household that could not afford pastry -- is traditional rather than documented. The dish belongs with the made-over meat recipes: turning cold roast beef into something that reads as a dinner rather than as leftovers.