Shepherd's Pie



Submitter's Introductory Rant:

Before we start, let's be clear and let's get it right: Shepherd's pie is made with lamb; cottage pie is made with beef. Never in the history of the British Isles has cheese ever come close to either. If you see cheese anywhere near a recipe for either, put it down to the USA's obsession with adding cheese to anything that moves. It doesn't generally belong with meat, unless you desire lead in your stomach, this said.

Yields:

several meals' worth for a typical family

Time Required:

about an hr. of preparation
about 2 hrs. 30 mins. of cooking



Ingredients:

For the meat layer:

For the potato layer:

Preparation:

Let's get this right, and the best way: Add minced lamb into a casserole dish. Add onion, carrot, celery, beef stock, corn starch, and salt & pepper, to taste, and stir.

Cook in a slow oven, say 275°F for 2 hours. You can do all this on stovetop for about 20 mins, but the flavor is never the same.

When complete, drain off gravy and reserve.

Boil and mash potatoes with milk, butter, salt, and pepper. However , do not make it into a wet paste. It should be firm and almost chunky.

Add back enough gravy to the meat to make it moist. Gently add the potato to the top, and build up. Spread with a fork, finally making fork marks both up and down and across, to form a basket-like pattern.

Preheat oven to 400°F, then bake until potato is crispy and golden on the peaks, about 30 mins.

Serve with remaining gravy and steamed cabbage (preferably Savoy5, if you can get it). No cheese, please.

Submitted by: Neil - a Brit.

Cook's Notes:

To be honest, this is really just a competent and serviceable recipe for traditional, UK-style shepherd's pie, but I cherish it for its ranty assault on American food philistinism, and (as an American unloved by lactose) think he has a good point about the cheese fetish.

Neil's other point of outrage is his traditionalist's contention that it's shepherd's pie only if based on lamb, as shepherds are not known for managing cows. To a stickler, the beef variant, as Neil says, is properly named "cottage pie" (though any connection between cows and cottages is loose at best).

Whatever happened to domestic lamb here in the USA? Through the 1980s, I swear it was both common in markets and price-competitive. Now (2020s), domestically ranched lamb's unfindable in (at least) ordinary grocery stores, though sheep still dot my native California's hillsides. Odd. I assume this is globalisation at work, and tribute to the excellence of New Zealand and Australia lamb, which now own the market. How strange, to those of us with long memories, to consider that a beef version of this dish is almost certainly cheaper. Times, they do change.


1 Go ahead and swap in beef (or pork) for Neil's lamb. I'll never tell, and it works great, too.

2 Unless you happen to have beef stock handy, you might substitute Summit Hill Foods's "Better Than Bouillon Base" paste (reconstituted with warm water). It's fairly high quality, available in large 8 oz. jars, and (the main point) a heck of a lot better than any bouillon cube. Flavours (that Summit Foods offers) include roasted chicken, roasted beef, turkey, ham, and vegetable.

3 Neil's original recipe listed, as alternative to 2 tsp. corn starch, "2 tsp. Bisto (if you know what it is) and 1 tsp. corn starch". I rarely see that product (Bisto) imported to the USA (from the UK or Ireland), but remember it from Londoner days: Frankly, don't bother. It's a highly processed brand of thickener for gravies ("potato starch, maltodextrin, palm fat, salt, wheat flour, artificial colour, sugar, artificial flavouring, flavour enhancers, soya lecithin emulsifier, black pepper extract, rosemary extract, onion oil"), in either granule or powder form, and frankly even less food-like than a bouillon cube. (In my opinion, if you want variety in thickeners beyond corn starch, for Ghu's sake, use potato starch, or tapioca. If you want spices, add spices.)

4 A local premium supermarket (Draeger's Market) offers consistently superb fresh mashed potatoes, and the flavour secret appears to be adding a stick of butter (as Neil does, here), but also, quoting the full ingredients label: "potatoes, cream cheese (pasteurized milk, salt, carob bean gum, cheese culture), heavy whipping cream (cream, carageenan), butter (cream, salt), green onion, salt, spices, cayenne pepper." My wife Deirdre informs me that Draeger's ingredients label formerly omitted cream cheese (FWIW, I much prefer sour cream), but at the time included horseradish. Consider doing something similar.

Some credible online sources claim that, for mashing, you should favour your older potatoes over newer ones, as new ones are more likely to make the "wet paste" Neil warns against. In any event, like a typical Scandinavian, I gravitate towards red potatoes, and personally think they do best.

5 Savoy cabbage, also known as Milan cabbage (cavolo di Milano) or Lombard cabbage (cavolo lombardo), which Neil also recommends, seems (I think?) relatively obscure here in the USA, yet findable. It is indeed reputedly a very nice, crunch, winter-vegetable cabbage variety.



Collected and re-published at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/recipes/shepherds-pie.html by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> on Nov. 23, 2024. Individual recipes are free from copyright. Share and enjoy!

Taken from: https://www.cooks.com/recipe/5h5tt81t/shepherds-pie-british.html. And, by the way, the sputterings by outraged American readers at the cooks.com site are hilarious, particularly as almost all of them could not either spell or punctuate "Shepherd's Pie" correctly.

(If I have any copyright title in my own very minor contributions to this page — not my intention — they were created in 2024 by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> and licensed for use under CC0. I have thereby waived all copyright, compilation copyright, and related or neighbouring rights to this work. This work is published from: United States of America.)