When my brother-in-regulation and sister-in-regulation are in city, my husband and I like to go out to meal with them. We resolved to go to a community golf club for comfort and ease food items evening. My sister-in-legislation ordered Shepherds Pie, an historic dish created with lamb, vegetables, and mashed potatoes.
But this primary study course did not resemble the historic recipe it experienced been Americanized. “What does it taste like?” I requested.
“It really is meat loaf with mashed potatoes on major,” my sister-in-law replied. “This is excellent, but it’s not Shepherds Pie.” Her remark created me curious about the history of the meal. I realized that Shepherds Pie is not a pie at all, but a meat casserole, or hot dish, as we say in my property state of Minnesota.
In accordance to the Cooks.Com web page, Shepherds Pie is a British dish produced with lamb. Its cousin, Cottage Pie, is created with beef. Opposite to what some imagine, neither just one incorporates cheese. “If you see cheese wherever around a recipe for both,” the internet site says, “place it down to the USA’s obsession to include cheese to nearly anything that moves… “
Mark R. Vogel offers a brief record of the dish in his Foods Reference website report, “The Good Shepherd.” Vogel says the recipe originated in the “heart of the Scottish countryside,” which is lamb nation, and is a common way to use up leftovers. He thinks the recipe goes back again to the 1870s. Though greens are included nowadays, the unique dish was meat, gravy, and potatoes.
Vogel takes advantage of floor lamb for his recipe and adds onions, carrots, and celery. He tells how to make do-it-yourself gravy with beef broth and mashed potatoes with heavy product. Now that’s ease and comfort food!
Paul Merrett’s recipe for the traditional dish is posted on the BBC web site. His recipe phone calls for garlic, new rosemary, parsnips, peas and chopped tomatoes, and is far more of a modern-day pot pie. Some web-sites say the recipe is British and other individuals say it is Scottish. In my search for info about the historic dish I arrived throughout a recipe for Ratatouille Shepherds Pie, which is about as considerably from a meat pie as you can get.
I make Shepherds Pie the aged fashioned way. My rendition is dependent on a recipe in “The Fannie Farmer Cookbook: A Heritage of Very good Cooking for a New Technology of Cooks.” Like so many dishes that are dependent on leftovers, there are no precise measurements. To begin with, I have about 3 cups of cubed lamb. If I am quick on gravy, I saute some meat in a cast iron skillet, take away them, and make a lot more gravy from the juices and meat bits in the pan.
I place the gravy, meat and a box of defrosted carrots and peas into a casserole dish and major the mixture with mashed potatoes. You may perhaps make mashed potatoes from scratch or use dehydrated types. Bake the casserole in a 375 diploma oven for 35-40 minutes. Shepherds Pie — comfort foods at its best — has withstood the test of time and new versions will certainly appear.
Copyright 2010 by Harriet Hodgson.
