Cottage Pie
For the filling, use either cold roast cut into pieces covered with gravy, or shredded cooked fish with white sauce.
For the crust, lightly pile on a layer of cold mashed potatoes. Bake until browned in hot oven.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in early twentieth-century household books, written for a cook who already knew the proportions. A few decisions are left to you.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in this period means roughly 425–450F. At that heat the potato browns in 20–30 minutes, which is all the dish needs since both filling and topping are already cooked.
- "Cold roast" means leftoversAny cooked joint — beef, lamb, veal — cut into pieces rather than minced. The modern habit of using raw ground meat produces a different dish entirely and requires the filling to be cooked through before it goes under the potato.
- Get the filling hot firstThe hinge of the recipe. Since the oven time is only long enough to brown the top, the meat and gravy should go into the dish already hot, or the centre will still be cool when the crust is coloured.
- How much gravyEnough to coat the meat generously but not to swim it — the filling should be loose, not soupy, or the potato sinks. The recipe gives no proportions; something like a cup of gravy to a pound of cut meat, adjusted by eye.
- "Lightly pile" is deliberateThe potato is dropped in spoonfuls and left rough rather than smoothed flat. The peaks and ridges are what brown. Smoothing the top with a spatula gives a paler, denser crust.
- The fish versionShredded cooked white fish in a white sauce, baked the same way; this recipe treats it as simply an alternative filling. Check carefully for bones; season the sauce well, as poached fish carries very little salt.
- QuantityThe recipe specifies no amounts. Roughly two pounds of filling and two pounds of potato will fill a 9x13 dish and serve about six. In a smaller dish, keep the filling layer under two inches deep so it heats through in the short bake.
The name records the crust, not the meat: a "cottage" pie is one topped with potato rather than pastry, the cheaper covering for a cheaper household, and the term is generally traced to the late eighteenth century, when the potato had become a staple of the English labouring diet. The distinction between cottage pie (beef) and shepherd's pie (mutton or lamb) is a later tidying-up; earlier books, this one included, use whatever cold roast is in the larder and see no need to rename the dish. The recipe is written as a method rather than a formula because the whole point is that the quantities depend on what is left over.