Mutton Pie
Mutton, Cold, Sliced Potatoes, Parsley Herbs or Onion Mace, Salt, Pepper Use any cold mutton from which lean slices may be cut. Put into a pie dish in alternate layers with thin sliced potatoes, making meat the first layer.
The seasonings may be added at discretion. A cupful of gravy from the meat may be poured into the pie before the crust goes on. crust goes on. Pile mashed potatoes lightly on top for the crust.
A cold-roast-leftovers pie with a mashed potato lid rather than pastry. The original assumes you have yesterday's joint and its gravy on hand, and gives no oven setting or timing at all.
- What it actually isThis is a shepherd's-pie construction, but with sliced raw potato layered between the meat as well as mashed potato on top. The sliced potatoes must be cut thin — 2-3 mm — or they will still be firm when the top has browned.
- Oven and timingNothing is specified. A moderate oven, 350F/180C, for 45 minutes to an hour suits it: long enough to cook the sliced potato through, and the last 10 minutes can go higher, around 425F, to colour the mashed top.
- The hinge: liquidThe original treats the cupful of gravy as optional, but with raw sliced potato in the layers it is effectively necessary; without it the interior steams dry and the potato stays chalky. If you have no meat gravy, a cup of well-seasoned stock does the same work.
- MuttonMutton is sheep over about two years old, with a stronger, fattier flavour than lamb, and it is rarely stocked outside halal and specialist butchers. Cold roast lamb shoulder or leg is the direct substitute; trim hard fat, which will not render pleasantly on a second cooking.
- MaceMace is the outer aril of the nutmeg, warmer and less sweet than the nut itself. A blade of mace or an eighth-teaspoon ground is plenty for a family pie; more turns it perfumed.
- "Pile lightly"Take the instruction literally. Mashed potato spread and compacted seals the surface and the pie steams; heaped in loose forkfuls it crisps and takes colour. Brushing the peaks with a little melted butter helps.
- Reheating safelyCooked meat being reheated should reach 165F/74C through the middle. With cold sliced meat under a potato lid this takes longer than it looks — check the centre, not the edge.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. As a working scale, a standard 8-9 inch pie dish with roughly a pound of cold meat and a pound and a half of potatoes will serve four.
Pies built on cold roast meat were a fixture of Victorian and Edwardian household cookery, where a large joint was expected to appear at table three or four times in different guises: hot on Sunday, cold on Monday, minced or in a pie by Tuesday. Mutton was the everyday roasting meat of British kitchens well into the twentieth century, cheaper and more plentiful than beef, and lamb largely displaced it as tastes shifted toward younger, milder meat over the course of the twentieth century, particularly after the Second World War. The mashed-potato lid — the same idea as shepherd's pie, a name first recorded in the 1870s, though the closely related 'cottage pie' appears from the 1790s, as potatoes became a staple of the poorer table — was the thrifty alternative to a pastry crust, needing no fat, no flour and no rolling. Its appearance in a bride's cookbook is telling: these were the recipes a new household was expected to master not for company but for the ordinary business of making a joint of meat stretch through the week.