Home › Left-Over Lamb and Mutton › Old Homestead Pie
Old Homestead Pie
Cut the remnants of any cold boiled mutton into very thin slices, seasoning each slice with salt, pepper, and a little paprika. Arrange them in layers in a suitable baking-dish. Heat any leftover caper sauce, and if necessary add enough fresh sauce to well cover each layer of meat. Have ready two cups of well-seasoned, hot mashed potato and turnip, using one and one-half cups of mashed potato to one-half cup of mashed turnip.
Be careful to have them well seasoned and well beaten, and then press through a ricer (or coarse sieve), letting the mixture fall lightly over the top of the pie as a cover. Brush the top with egg yolk beaten lightly with a little water, Brown lightly in the oven. Serve currant jelly with this dish.
Mutton or Lamb Croquettes 2 cups finely chopped meat 1 tablespoonful chopped capers cup cooked rice 1 tablespoonful lemonjuice Salt and paprika 1 cup white sauce No. 2 (see page 68) Mix all together and set away to get cold. When ready to form, take up by full tablespoonfuls and shape into cylinders. Roll gently in finely sifted white bread-crumbs, then in egg (slightly beaten with one tablespoonful of cold water), being careful that every part of the croquette is covered with egg, and then again in crumbs. Put in a fryingbasket and brown lightly in smoking-hot fat. They will brown very quickly.
A shepherd's pie built from cold boiled mutton rather than minced raw meat, with a potato-and-turnip crust. The page also carries a second recipe for croquettes; both assume you already have leftover meat and a jug of caper sauce on hand.
- The hinge: slice thin, sauce generouslyCold boiled mutton reheats badly if left in thick pieces — it dries and turns woolly. Very thin slices, each layer well covered with sauce, is the whole point of the method. If the caper sauce runs short, thin it with stock rather than leaving any layer dry.
- Caper sauceCaper sauce is a white sauce (butter, flour, milk or mutton broth) with drained capers and a spoonful of their vinegar stirred in at the end. The book's "white sauce No. 2" is not reproduced on this page; if it follows the usual numbering it is a medium sauce, on the order of 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to a cup of liquid.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no oven temperature — only "brown lightly in the oven." Everything in the dish is already cooked, so you are reheating and glazing, not baking: a hot oven until the top has colour and the filling is hot through.
- The turnipThree parts potato to one part turnip. "Turnip" here could be either white turnip or swede/rutabaga; the recipe does not specify, and American books of the period often called the latter "yellow turnip." Either works; drain and dry the mash well or the topping slumps.
- Ricing the toppingPressing the mash through a ricer straight onto the pie gives a loose, craggy surface that browns in ridges. It will not spread like piped or spooned potato, so cover the whole surface as you go.
- MuttonGenuine mutton — sheep over two years — is sold by few butchers now. Leftover leg or shoulder of lamb behaves the same way here, though it is milder and needs a firmer hand with the pepper and paprika.
- Croquettes: an ambiguous measureThe line "cup cooked rice" appears to have lost its fraction in printing; the original figure cannot be recovered from the page, but something around half a cup to two cups of meat and one cup of sauce gives a mixture that holds its shape. Chill the mixture thoroughly before shaping — a warm mixture will not form.
- Frying the croquettes"Smoking-hot fat" corresponds to roughly 375-390F in modern terms. Below that the crumb coat absorbs oil; much above it the outside colours before the centre warms. Fry in small batches, a minute or two, and drain on paper.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity of meat and no yield — it is sized to whatever is left over. Currant jelly alongside is not optional garnish: the sweet-sharp jelly against caper vinegar is the intended balance.
Left-over cookery was a genre of its own in the early twentieth century, when a large joint was the normal centre of a household's week and the cook was judged on what she made of it on Tuesday and Wednesday. Boiled mutton with caper sauce is often said to lie behind this page as a Sunday dinner dish, and the pie simply reassembles the same three flavours — sheep, capers, root vegetable — in a form that hides the fact of reheating. The name "Old Homestead" seems decorative rather than geographic, though the origin of the title is not documented here. The potato-and-turnip topping is a straightforward transplant of British shepherd's pie practice, and the currant jelly served alongside descends from the long tradition of pairing sharp fruit preserves with mutton and lamb.