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Shepherd's Pie
Minced roast beef Mashed potatoes Salt and pepper Butter (mashed with potatoes) Roast beef gravy Put beef and potatoes in layers in a buttered baking - dish, having potatoes at the bottom.
Moisten meat layers generously with gravy. Season to taste. Have top layer potatoes; dot over with bits of butter, and brown. This dish requires much rich gravy.
Roast Lamb or Beef Re-heated In warming up a leg of lamb or standing ribroast of beef heap up the cavity left after carving with mashed potato. Brush over with melted butter and brown in oven.
A proportion recipe rather than a measured one: the amounts depend entirely on how much roast beef you have left. The single instruction that matters is the last line — the dish needs far more gravy than seems reasonable, because minced roast beef has already given up its juices once and will drink whatever you give it.
- Working quantitiesAbout 1 lb of minced cooked beef and 2 lb of potatoes (mashed with butter and a little hot milk) fills a 9-inch baking dish and serves four. Figure on at least 1 1/2 cups of gravy for that amount, more if the meat is well-done edges rather than rare centre.
- "Minced" means choppedIn this period minced means cut fine with a knife or run through a hand mincer to a coarse crumb, not ground to paste. Cold roast beef chops cleanly; a food processor will turn it to sawdust in three pulses, so pulse briefly or chop by hand.
- If you have no gravyThe recipe assumes a roast made the day before and its pan juices with it. Without them, build a quick brown gravy from beef stock thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, and season it more assertively than you would for a roast — it is carrying the whole dish.
- Oven and browningThe recipe only says to brown it. A moderately hot oven, around 400F for 25 to 30 minutes, will colour the top and bring the gravy to a bubble at the edges; a few minutes under the broiler at the end gives a darker crust.
- Reheating leftover meatCooked beef that has been refrigerated should come back up to 165F throughout. A hot oven and visibly bubbling gravy at the sides gets you there; a lukewarm centre does not.
- Potatoes top and bottomThe bottom layer is not decorative — it soaks up gravy that would otherwise pool and turn the dish soupy. Keep it thin, and press the top layer to the edges of the dish so the meat is sealed in and does not dry out.
- The second methodHeaping mashed potato into the carved cavity of a leg of lamb or a standing rib works, but only for a joint still substantially intact. Brush with butter and reheat at 350F until the meat is hot through and the potato crust has taken colour, roughly 30 to 40 minutes depending on the size of what is left.
Shepherd's pie belongs to the economy of the roast: a large joint on Sunday, cold cuts on Monday, and the last of it minced under potato by midweek. The name is often traced to the spread of cheap potatoes in the British Isles in the earlier nineteenth century, when mashed potato is said to have replaced pastry as the covering for a dish of chopped meat; the modern insistence that shepherd's pie must be lamb and cottage pie beef is a later tidying-up, and books of this era, including this one, use the term freely for beef. Its appearance in a volume devoted entirely to left-overs is the point -- before reliable refrigeration a joint had to be used within a few days. The instruction to fill a carved rib roast's cavity with potato and brown it belongs to the same thrift, with the added advantage that the dish came back to the table looking like a roast rather than a remnant.