Home › A Calendar of Dinners › September 22
September 22
Menu: Cream of Barley Soup; Shepherd's Pie; Broiled Tomatoes; Cucumber Salad with Red Peppers; Wine Jelly; Coffee Shepherd's Pie-Chop 1 pound cooked meat, mix in 2 tablespoons breadcrumbs, 1 chopped onion, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 1 cup gravy, salt and pepper to taste, 2 tablespoons Crisco, half teaspoon powdered herbs, and 1 tablespoon tomato catsup. Turn into fireproof dish and cover with thick layer seasoned mashed potatoes. Brush over with beaten egg and dot with pieces of Crisco. Bake 20 minutes.
A leftovers dish from the day-by-day dinner calendar at the back of the Crisco book. The instructions assume you already have cooked meat and gravy on hand, and that the oven is hot.
- The hinge: the filling must go in hotTwenty minutes is only long enough to brown the potato crust. If the meat mixture goes in cold from the refrigerator the centre will still be cool when the top looks done. Warm the meat and gravy together in a pan first, or extend baking to 35-40 minutes.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as the book assumes a range the cook knows. Bake at 400F, hot enough to set the egg wash and colour the potato in the stated time.
- "Fireproof dish"A period term for glass or glazed earthenware made to go into the oven, i.e. any modern ovenproof baking dish. A 1 to 1.5 quart dish suits this quantity.
- CriscoIntroduced as an all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening and the reason this book exists. Modern Crisco has been reformulated and contains far less trans fat than the early product. Butter or a neutral oil substitutes directly in both the filling and the dotting on top.
- Cooked meatTraditionally cold roast lamb or beef, cut fine or run through a mincer, not shredded. Aim for a coarse grind; large chunks will not hold together under the potato.
- "Powdered herbs"A dried mixed-herb blend of the period, which might include thyme, marjoram, savory or sage. Half a teaspoon of dried thyme with a pinch of sage is a fair reading.
- CatsupTomato catsup of this period was often thinner, sharper and more spiced than today's ketchup, though sweetened bottled brands were already widespread by 1913. The tablespoon is there for acid and depth rather than sweetness; a teaspoon of tomato paste plus a splash of vinegar reads closer to the original.
- YieldOne pound of meat makes four modest servings, or three generous ones, with a green vegetable alongside.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that was neither butter nor lard, and its closing "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a menu to every day of the year so that the new shortening would appear in ordinary weekday cooking rather than only in pastry. That is why a thrifty leftovers dish like this one carries Crisco twice, in the filling and dotted over the crust. The dish itself is British: cottage pie is recorded from the late eighteenth century, when the potato had become cheap enough to serve as a poor household's crust, and shepherd's pie appears later, in the second half of the nineteenth century. The distinction now usually drawn, lamb for the shepherd and beef for the cottage, is a modern tidying-up rather than a historical rule; recipes of this era, including this one, simply say "cooked meat" and leave it to whatever the Sunday roast happened to be.