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Shepherd's Pie or Scalloped Meat
2 cups chopped, cooked meat. 1/8 teaspoon pepper. 1/8 teaspoon paprika. 2 cups chopped, cooked 2 cups left-over gravy meat 1 teaspoon salt 2 cups mashed potato teaspoon pepper teaspoon paprika 1 teaspoon onion juice 1 or 2 tablespoons butter It is unnecessary to follow above proportions. Use available amounts of meat and potato, and gravy, and season to taste. Line bottom of buttered baking dish with well beaten mashed potato (either hot or leftover.) Add thick layer of meat and gravy, then layer of potato, until dish is full. Make the top crust of potato. Dot with bits of butter. Or, meat and gravy may be placed in lower part of baking dish with single thick layer of mashed potato for the crust. Stiffly beaten egg white may be folded into mashed potatoes before adding to meat, if desired. Bake in hot oven till potatoes are brown, or if cold potatoes have been used, till thoroughly heated and browned. Crumbs, macaroni or rice may be substituted for potatoes. 4
A frugal assembly rather than a recipe, and the book says as much. The text has been scrambled by column-setting, so read the ingredient list as two columns run together.
- The garbled ingredient listIt reads as two columns collapsed into one. The intended list is 2 cups chopped cooked meat, 2 cups left-over gravy, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 cups mashed potato, a fraction of a teaspoon each of pepper and paprika, 1 teaspoon onion juice, and 1 or 2 tablespoons butter. The fractions before pepper and paprika have dropped out in printing; a quarter teaspoon of each is in keeping with the salt.
- Hot ovenRead as 400-425F. You are browning a top crust and heating cooked food through, not cooking anything raw. Twenty-five to thirty-five minutes covers it with hot components; closer to forty-five if everything went in cold.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut: onion grated on the fine side of a box grater and the liquid pressed out, giving onion flavour without visible pieces. A tablespoon of very finely grated onion, or a small onion softened in butter, does the same work.
- The gravy is the hingeTwo cups of gravy to two cups of meat sounds generous, and it should be. Left-over roast meat is dry and reheats badly; the gravy is what keeps it edible. If your gravy is thin, reduce it or thicken it slightly, or the potato crust will sit on a puddle.
- Beaten egg white in the potatoAn optional lightener that works. Fold one stiffly beaten white into the mashed potato just before spreading; it puffs slightly and browns more readily. Skip it if the potato is cold and stiff, as it will not fold in cleanly.
- Getting the top brownRough the potato surface with a fork and dot the butter over the ridges. A minute or two under the broiler at the end does more for colour than extra oven time, which mainly dries the filling.
- The substitutionsCrumbs, macaroni or rice in place of potato all work, but crumbs need more butter to brown properly and rice needs the gravy to be loose enough to keep it from setting hard.
- YieldThe stray "4" at the end is most likely the serving count: four generous portions from the quantities given.
Shepherd's pie in its English sense means minced mutton or lamb under a potato crust, but American household books of this period often used the name loosely for any left-over meat baked under mashed potato, which would account for the alternative title "or Scalloped Meat." "Scalloped" in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American usage generally meant food baked in a dish with a sauce and a browned top, and that is broadly what the instructions describe. The explicit permission to ignore the proportions is characteristic of the genre: the measured list exists to satisfy a reader who wants one, while the real instruction is to use what is in the cold cupboard.