Cooking Off the Cuff: What To Do With Leftover Leftover Shepherd’s Pie

Leftover leftover shepherd's pie makes terrific patties/rissoles. Photo by Edward Schneider

When Jackie or I order shepherd’s pie in a restaurant - as we occasionally do at London’s The Ivy - we get a nicely composed portion with neat tiers of well-sauced meat filling and potato topping, sometimes in an individual baking dish. When I make it at home for several people, it is baked in a large oven pan or gratin dish and scooped out onto each diner’s plate, making something of a mess. I don’t care much about the way it looks; what has long annoyed me is that once you broach the pie the under-layer - the meat, vegetables and sauce - oozes out from under the potatoes, undermining the whole construction. Eventually, especially after a second meal of leftovers, this leaves Jackie and me to face a collapsing stratum of mashed potatoes with a little bit of under-gravied filling clinging to its nether surface.

We would usually shove this into the refrigerator or freezer half-hoping that we’d forget about it. But the other day I made a nice shepherd’s pie using Felicity Cloake’s good recipe and another mushroom one for a non-meat-eating guest. We served and enjoyed them with our friends, and served and enjoyed them again the next day with a different friend, then finally were confronted with a tub of mashed potatoes enriched with chopped lamb, vegetables and mushrooms. Staring at this unpromising mass, I realized that if potato croquettes could be made from old mashed potatoes bound with eggs and cheese, then something even more flavorful could be made of this lamb-and-mushroom-enhanced mishmash.

Something like a patty or rissole that would make a fine dinner for two.

It was a cinch: Using one hand (the other I kept as clean as I could), I gently kneaded the leftovers (which measured about 2-1/2 cups - 600 ml - by volume) into an almost homogeneous mixture, leaving occasional pockets of potato and of pie filling. I incorporated a big egg (a double-yolker, as it happened) and a fistful of plain breadcrumbs from the freezer. Of this I made four patties almost an inch (2.5 cm) thick, which I refrigerated until it was time to cook them.

I suppose I could have simply fried them as they were, but as the remaining lamb and mushroom sauce heated through it would liquefy and I’d have had a hard time keeping the four patties from merging into one. So I breaded them using the same breadcrumbs I’d used as a binder (no egg wash was needed; they adhered to the patties perfectly well). This would not prevent the patties from getting very soft as they warmed, but it would provide a crisp surface I’d be able to slide my spatula under to turn the discs.

I pan fried them in a good 1/4 inch (7 mm) of neutral oil, starting with medium heat, and turning it down to medium-low immediately to slowly crisp the coating while warming the patties through. After about 6 minutes, I carefully turned them, fried for another 4 or 5 minutes, then turned them again for just another minute. I drained them on a rack then served them on warmed plates, to be adorned with a little sauce. Many sauces would do (ketchup, steak sauce / brown sauce, tonkatsu sauce), but we used our favorite Momofuku Ssäm sauce, which had the sweet-tart virtues of those other sauces plus sufficient chili to keep us on our toes.

This wasn’t merely better than hiding the leftovers in the freezer; it was a fine lightish dinner on its own terms, with just enough lamb and mushroom flavor to remind us where it had come from.