Shepherd's Pie
Grease a baking dish; cover the bottom with mashed potatoes. Add a layer of cooked minced meat or fish seasoned well and mixed with meat stock or gravy. Cover with mashed potatoes.
Bake long enough to heat through-20 or 30 minutes.
A leftovers recipe rather than a project, and the instructions assume you already have cooked meat, gravy and mashed potato on hand. A few points make the difference between a dry casserole and a good one.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, around 375F, uncovered, for the 20 to 30 minutes specified will heat the dish through without drying the filling.
- The hinge: keep the filling wetMinced cooked meat has already given up its juice, so the stock or gravy is not optional seasoning but the whole structure of the dish. Aim for a loose, spoonable filling — roughly half a cup of gravy per pound of meat — since it will tighten in the oven.
- "Minced" meatIn this period minced means finely chopped or run through a hand mincer, not raw ground beef. Cold roast lamb, beef or a boiled fowl all work; if you start with raw ground meat, brown it and cook it through before it goes in the dish.
- Potato layersThe recipe lines the dish as well as covering the top, and that bottom layer will go soft and gravy-soaked, which is the point. Make the mash stiffer than you would for serving on its own, or it will slump into the meat.
- The fish versionCooked flaked white fish or salmon with a white sauce in place of gravy makes what later books call fish pie. Fish needs only the heating-through time, so stay at the short end of the range.
- Browning the topFork ridges across the surface and dot with butter, or run the finished pie under the broiler for two or three minutes. Nothing in the recipe browns on its own at this temperature.
- Quantity and yieldNo amounts are given anywhere. About a pound of cooked meat and two pounds of potatoes fills a standard 8-inch square dish and serves four.
- Cold starting pointIf the meat and potatoes come straight from the refrigerator, 30 minutes is a minimum, not a maximum. The center should reach 165F.
Shepherd's pie belongs to the nineteenth-century economy of leftovers, made possible by the ordinary household's Sunday joint and the cheap potato: cottage pie and shepherd's pie both appear in English cookery writing, the names said to have been used more or less interchangeably at first, with the later distinction between beef and lamb generally traced to a twentieth-century tidying-up. That this version admits fish as freely as meat shows what the dish really was — a method for using up whatever was cold in the larder rather than a fixed formula. Books aimed at new housekeepers leaned hard on made-over dishes, since managing the remains of one meal into the next was considered a basic test of thrift.