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Beef Pie-Potato Crust
1 Tablespoon Barley Flour Cold Beef and Gravy Butter Sliced Onion, Salt, Pepper Barley Flour, Egg Potatoes Cut the cold beef in pieces and with what gravy you have, half fill granite baking pan; add butter, sliced onion, salt and pepper and water enough to make plenty of gravy. Put over fire and thicken by dredging in the flour. Cover up where it may simmer.
Boil enough potatoes to fill the dish; mash smooth, beat light with milk and butter and place in thick layer on top of meat. Brush over with egg. Place dish in oven until potatoes are browned. Make plenty of gravy.
A cottage pie built from Sunday's roast, with almost no quantities given. The proportions below are a working guide; the method itself is sound and needs only translation.
- Quantities to work fromFor a 2-quart baking dish, figure roughly 1½ lb cold cooked beef, whatever gravy you saved, 1 medium onion, and about 2 lb potatoes for the crust. The beef layer should half-fill the dish before the potatoes go on.
- Granite baking panGraniteware is the speckled enamel-on-steel cookware of the period. It goes from burner to oven, which is why the recipe never asks you to transfer anything. A cast-iron skillet or an enamelled braiser does the same job; a glass or ceramic dish will not take direct stovetop heat.
- Barley flourBarley flour thickens more weakly than wheat and gives a slightly cloudy, faintly sweet gravy. Expect to use about half again as much as you would of wheat flour, and dredge it in a little at a time over simmering liquid, stirring, or it will lump.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; ranges of the period frequently had no reliable oven gauge. Bake at 400-425F until the potato ridges take colour, 20 to 30 minutes. The filling is already hot from the stovetop, so the oven is only browning the top.
- Reheat the beef properlyCold cooked meat needs to come back to a full simmer in the gravy before the potatoes go on. Do not rely on the oven stage for that; a thick potato lid insulates the meat underneath.
- The potato crustMash while hot, beat with warm milk and butter, and spread it while still soft enough to seal to the edges of the dish. Sealed edges stop the gravy from boiling up the sides. Rough the surface with a fork before the egg wash so there are ridges to brown.
- Egg washOne beaten egg, or a yolk loosened with a spoonful of milk, brushed thinly. Too much pools and sets into a rubbery film.
- "Make plenty of gravy"This is the instruction that matters. Barley flour and dry roast beef both drink liquid, and a pie that looked wet going in can come out dry. Err generous with the water at the simmering stage.
- YieldServes four to five as a main course with a green vegetable.
Barley flour appearing as a matter of course in a beef pie is consistent with the wheat-conservation years around the First World War, when American households were urged to substitute barley, oat, corn and rye flours so that wheat could be shipped to the Allies. This is an economy dish twice over: it uses barley in place of wheat, and it exists to finish the cold remains of a roast. The form itself is much older and much wider than any wartime detail — a layer of chopped meat under a browned potato crust is the English cottage pie, the name generally traced to the late eighteenth century, when the potato became cheap enough to serve as a lid rather than a dish in its own right. What the recipe assumes about its reader is telling: she has a roast most weeks, she saves the gravy, and she owns one granite pan that goes on the fire and into the oven.