That’s what the image is – Eye Pie – (as opposed to eye-candy).The pie itself is intended for the hungry stomach.
For me, it’s comfort food. Maybe because I served up so many in the days at Paddy’s Irish Restaurant I thought everybody knew what a Shepherd’s Pie was, and ordered one regularly for good health, vigor, and shiny hair. (Or just because they taste good…) Sure, the recipe may vary from place to place, but it has basically the same ingredients: Meat, potatoes, cheese.
McHuston-style is similar to that served up at Paddy’s back in the day: a heaping helping of Irish Stew topped with fresh, mashed-by-hand potatoes and grated cheddar cheese. A bit o’ stew gravy over the spuds. We used to melt the cheddar but it seemed to me that caused all the cheese to come off in a single bite.
There is another version in Broken Arrow that consists of a slice of meatloaf topped with mash and cheddar. I’ve seen it cooked up in a casserole dish with a mixed vegetables covered with a thick layer of mashed potatoes and topped with cheese, then baked to a lasagna-like consistency.
The baking process adds a crispiness to the top of the potatoes and melts in the cheese, and probably is closer to a pie – from which it originated. Personally, I like my mashed potatoes fluffy rather than crispy, so I leave out the baking step. The stew and taters are already cooked anyway… In the 1700s, the potato was finally becoming accepted as an inexpensive and widely available food source in Europe (after being grown for centuries in other parts of the world…). The term cottage pie came to describe a meat pie made from leftover roasted meat and cooked in a pan lined with potatoes.
Of course, there are no leftovers in the Shepherd’s Pie here, since the roast is prepared especially for the stew. And while the term Shepherd’s Pie can indicate the dish contains mutton, that doesn’t necessarily hold true in the US. This is beef country, and we all know it.
My stew and mashed potato cooking is better than my photography, but I took a cell phone shot of the Shepherd’s Pie to include in some of the little table-topper signs.
At least it will give those unfamiliar with this humble (but tasty!) dish an idea of what they’ll find in front of them should they decide to give it a try!
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