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Potato Pie (Skin some potatoes cut them)
767. Skin some potatoes, cut them into slices, and season them; also some mutton, beef, pork, or veal. Put layers of them and of the meat. Cover with short crust.
Another.-Put hashed veal or meat of any kind into a pie-dish with a good gravy, seasoned with pepper and salt; over this add a layer of mashed potatoes, and brown it in the oven.
Two dishes in one entry: a raw-meat-and-potato pie under pastry, and a quicker mashed-potato-topped dish made from leftovers. The original assumes you know how long meat takes to cook, so the timings below are the main thing to supply.
- The hinge: liquidNeither version will work dry. For the pastry-topped pie, pour in enough stock or water to come about two-thirds up the filling before the crust goes on; potatoes and lean meat will otherwise scorch and stay hard. The second version already calls for "a good gravy" and needs it loose enough to bubble at the edges.
- Raw meat, long cookingThe first pie uses uncooked mutton, beef, pork or veal, so it needs roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Start at 425F for 20 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 325F for the rest, covering the crust with foil if it colours too fast. Cut the meat into small pieces, no larger than a walnut.
- Potato thicknessSlice about 1/8 inch, no thicker. Waxy potatoes hold their shape in slices; floury ones will collapse into the gravy, which is not a disaster but changes the dish.
- "Season them"Salt and pepper is what is meant, and it should go on both the potato and the meat layers, not just the meat. A little chopped onion between the layers is entirely in keeping with the period and improves both versions.
- Short crustA plain shortcrust of 8 oz flour to 4 oz fat covers a 2-pint pie dish. Cut a vent; a sealed crust over a wet filling will lift and split.
- The second versionThis is a mashed-potato-topped dish of the shepherd's pie type, made from meat already cooked. It only needs heating through and browning: 400F for 25 to 30 minutes, until the gravy bubbles at the sides and the top has colour. Rough up the mash with a fork for better browning.
- MuttonRarely sold now. Shoulder or leg of lamb behaves similarly but cooks faster and tastes milder; if you use it, check at the 1 1/4 hour mark.
- YieldA 2-pint dish with about 1 lb of meat and 1 1/2 lb of potatoes serves four.
Potato pie of this kind is associated with the north of England, Lancashire above all, where it was cheap everyday food and is still sold with pickled red cabbage. The book it comes from, The British Cookery Book, was compiled in the late 1850s from receipts gathered from contributors around the country, which may be part of why so many entries are terse and offer an "Another" variant rather than a single authoritative method. The second version here, cooked meat under a mashed potato crust, belongs to the same family as what we now separate into cottage pie and shepherd's pie, a distinction by meat that only became fixed much later. Both depend on the potato having moved, over the eighteenth century, from suspicion to staple in British kitchens.