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A Nice Breakfast Dish
Harriet N. Jenks.
Mince cold beef or lamb; if beef put in a pinch of pulverized cloves; if lamb, a pinch of summer savoury to season it, very little pepper and some salt, and put it in a baking dish; mash potatoes and mix them with cream and butter and a little salt, and spread them over the meat; beat up an egg with cream or milk, a very little; spread it over the potatoes, and bake it a short time, sufficient to warm it through and brown the potatoes.
This is a cottage pie built from Sunday's leftover roast, written for a cook who already knew what the dish should look like. Two things are left unsaid: the oven and the proportions.
- Oven and time"Bake a short time" implies an oven hot enough to brown the top without drying the meat; in a modern oven something around 375-400F for 25-30 minutes should serve, until the surface is speckled brown and the edges bubble. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so you are reheating and glazing, not baking.
- Mince means chopped"Mince" here means knife work: cold roast cut small on a board rather than run through a grinder, which would have been the ordinary household method in this period even though mechanical meat choppers were coming into use. Hand-chopped meat keeps some texture; a food processor turns cold roast to paste in seconds.
- ProportionsNo quantities are given. A workable starting point is about 1 lb of chopped cooked meat under 2 lb of potatoes mashed with cream and butter, in a dish of about 8 by 8 inches. That serves four.
- The meat needs moistureCold roast reheated dry is the failure point of this dish. A few tablespoons of leftover gravy or stock stirred into the seasoned meat before the potatoes go on keeps it from turning to sawdust — though the recipe as written calls for no added liquid in the meat layer.
- Summer savouryA peppery, thyme-adjacent herb that was a kitchen-garden staple and is now mostly sold dried. A pinch of dried thyme with a little marjoram is the closest common substitute for the lamb version.
- Pulverized clovesGround cloves, and the pinch is meant literally — an eighth of a teaspoon for a pound of beef. Clove with beef reads as old-fashioned rather than odd, but it dominates fast.
- The egg glazeOne egg beaten with a tablespoon or two of cream, brushed over the potato, is what gives the browned top. Spread it thin; a puddle of egg sets into a rubbery skin.
- Reheating cooked meatThe dish only works with meat that has been properly chilled since it was cooked. Bring the centre to steaming hot, not merely warm — "sufficient to warm it through" was written before refrigeration set the expectations we now have.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the first great wave of North American charitable cookbooks, compiled from recipes signed by named contributors — here Harriet N. Jenks — and sold to raise money for a good cause. That format explains the shorthand: Jenks was writing for neighbours who cooked as she did, so she specifies the clove and the savoury and leaves the oven, the quantities and the dish size to common knowledge. The dish itself is the English cottage pie, a way of turning the cold remains of a roast into a second hot meal, and the practice of naming it by the meat — shepherd's for lamb, cottage for beef — is a later tidiness that this recipe cheerfully ignores by covering both in one paragraph. Its placement under a breakfast heading is a reminder that the nineteenth-century breakfast table carried meat as a matter of course, and that reheated roast beef at nine in the morning raised no eyebrows.