I wonder what childhood would have tasted like without frozen veg and ground beef? Grandma’s meatloaf was a Sunday standard, spag bol was permanently on the menu and the only reason home-made burgers weren’t more frequent was because mum knew her floured-and-fried meatballs were a family favourite.
But of all the minced-up memories, the one I can still taste without closing my eyes is her cottage pie. Yes, it was a weekly rotation crop in my field of childhood dreams, but I never, ever bored of it, perhaps because it was always deeply savoury while the rest of her week-day repertoire erred on the safer side of herbs and spice.
It’s what I start dreaming of when the temperature drops and I go down to the cellar to bring up the heaters. Mince has very much become an autumn or winter ingredient in our house, when the weather calls for bear-hug meals that stick to your ribs rather than the grilled and crunchy dishes of summer.
When I decided to recreate the dish, it took a few calls to family to get consensus and although none of us can remember exactly what mum put in hers, there were enough ‘key elements’ to work with, starting with seriously high levels of umami.
Mum got there with Worcestershire sauce and I’m pretty sure she snuck in some tomato sauce when no one was watching, or Marmite or twice the recommended dose of Knorr stock cubes. That, along with plenty of dried herbs, would have had desired effect. So I really try to maximise monosodium deliciousness every step of the way, from beginning to end, just without cheating (sorry mum!).
To get there you start with a soffritto cooked off with a single star anise, to boost meaty flavours. And it all ends with a healthy cloud of microplaned Parmigiano Reggiano rather than yellow cheddar because the ‘king of cheese’ is packed full of glutamic acid aka crack umami.
In between, it’s all about protein vs plant, which was never a fair fight because poor old mum was in constant conflict with my anti-vegetable belief system. Peas (‘little green jobbies’ as dad used to call them) were tolerable at times, but the rest you could keep. So cottage pie was basically a Trojan horse for frozen peas and their best friends, carrots, perfectly uniform and unmistakeably bright.
Ironically, mum turned to them for convenience, but my obsessive tendencies mean I now spend hours at the cutting board dicing carrots into dainty little blocks to mimic their frozen cousins. I’ve turned it into an art form, getting a right-angular shape by carving the inner part into cuboids and finely-chopping the outer rounded offcuts into soffritto. Okay, so maybe it’s more than just a ‘tendency’.
The one thing, perhaps the only thing, I know for sure is how mum got her tater-topping so insanely crisp, because I somehow always walked into the kitchen as she was raking over the surface of the mashed potato with the back of a fork. The scarified surface would hold grated cheese and a scattering of breadcrumbs, that turned into a miniature baked duneland. And yes, I got to lick the fork afterwards, Timing is everything.
This is more than a pie full of nostalgia. Mum was just making sure we got a wholesome meal, but if you buy good quality ingredients and treat them with care, you’ll end up with something that will amaze and delight the pickiest of guests. All you need to complete the evening are some puns from Pops, a lot of laughter, and a generous second helping, making sure to get the crusty, cheesy bits off the side of the dish.
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