Making Shepherd’s Pie from an 1894 Recipe - Beef or Lamb?

TL;DR

Historically, shepherd's pie used either beef or lamb interchangeably — the beef-vs-lamb rule is a modern invention from the last 50 years.

Key Points

• 1.The 1894 recipe explicitly allows "minced beef or lamb," seasoning beef with cloves and lamb with summer savory, topped with cream-mashed potatoes brushed with egg wash and baked at 400°F.
• 2.The beef/lamb distinction between shepherd's pie and cottage pie is largely a post-1970s internet myth; 19th-century recipes for both dishes allowed any leftover meat, including chicken, rabbit, and corned beef.
• 3.The first known mention of "cottage pie" appears in Reverend James Woodforde's English diary on March 8, 1799, though his vague descriptions ("made of veal etc.") make it impossible to confirm what it actually was.
• 4.The earliest printed book recipe using the name "shepherd's pie" comes from Edinburgh in the 1850s, and an 1872 Irish newspaper article explicitly lists shepherd's pie alongside haggis as a Scottish national dish.
• 5.Earlier cookbook versions used different names entirely — Maria Rundell's 1806 "New System of Domestic Cookery" called it "sanders," and Eliza Acton's 1845 cookbook called it "saunders," both allowing beef or mutton.
• 6.Irish recipes rarely used lamb because sheep were kept for wool and slaughtered old, producing tough mutton — a fact memorialized in an 1924 Irish joke about cottage pie being "a bit of the door."
• 7.Max made the dish with 1 lb roast beef, added a tablespoon of mushroom ketchup (from the earliest known 1850s shepherd's pie recipe), and used 4 lbs of golden potatoes with cream and butter — keeping the historical ratio of roughly 1/3 meat to 2/3 potato.