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| Here is my Cottage Pie, not really very good... |
What I grew up calling Shepherd's Pie is not really Shepherd's Pie, it is Cottage Pie; in the UK and Ireland Shepherd's Pie is made with lamb or mutton while our Cottage Pie is made with beef. The French call Shepherd's Pie pâté chinois or pâté à l’anglaise, but they differentiate between the two, as we should. If you live in a cottage and you have a cottage garden then why not make cottage pie for supper? What we call supper some people call dinner; but supper is our last meal of the day, the third meal of three. At supper you sup if you are sipping a bowl of soup, or not, and it comes from the Middle English, mid-1200s AD, to eat. We have three meals a day, breakfast (when the fast of sleep ends), lunch (which some people call dinner or used to call dinner back when we were farmers and needed a large midday meal). And supper. People today have snacks and are referred to as grazing, eating all day and anytime you want like a cow in the field; no wonder we're so fat.
My grandfather, from Blackburn, Lancashire, I am told by my mother, used to eat tongue and other animal parts we wouldn't want to eat. Maybe the words breakfast, lunch, and dinner are a part of my northern English heritage, working class and less trendy than the south of England. But breakfast, lunch, and dinner are, for the most part, what they're called in Canada. When my mother passed away in 2014 I inherited a copy of Mrs. Beeton's Cookery Book (the 1923 edition) from her, it had belonged to her mother who moved to Canada around 1911. I understand that Mrs. Beeton never actually tried out her recipes before publishing them in her cook book, and most of her recipes would not satisfy the taste of people today. Mrs. Beeton's Shepherd's Pie is unlike any recipe for Shepherd's Pie that I have seen, many of the ingredients in today's recipes are absent from Mrs. Beeton's book; they are plain and simple cooking. My copy of her book is well-worn and contains this recipe for Shepherd's Pie:
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| Mrs. Beeton's Cookery Book (1923) |
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| In the left column is Mrs. Beeton's recipe for Shepherd's Pie |
Now, I turn to my Cottage Pie. I don't really know what I've done wrong but it wasn't all that good. I've done better in the past. Where did I get the idea that I should place a layer of frozen peas or corn between the mashed potatoes and the meat? My layer of mashed potatoes was too thin, I ended up with a large slice of meat and very little potato, but I love potato. The ground beef, the leanest variety, came out kind of thick and hard... Overall, a disappointment. Three out of ten.
