Do you update oldies

[UnConundrum]

Mom and Dad are coming over, and Dad doesn't like to chew much anymore, so my wife suggested sheperd's pie. Haven't made that in 10 years or more, but Mom used to make it all the time. Simply brown some ground beef, put it in a casserole, top with a can of corn, top both with a can of tomato soup, and top that with mashed potatoes.... Hmmmmmm. So yesterday, I stopped at a roadside stand and picked up some fresh corn. Cut it off the cobs and sauted with some onion in grapeseed oil. Today I browned my ground beef (again with some onions and garlic) and then drained off the liquid to reduce the fat. I chilled the liquid to solidify the fat and strained off the liquid which I reduced with a cup of homemade veal stock. Mixed that reduced liquid with the tomato soup...... but otherwise, it was Mom's recipe. Is it still ????

[annecros]

Well, yeah. It is. She would have used those ingredients if she had access to them.

I have found that sometimes, when I update a recipe, that people are disappointed. Something about that "home" taste that is missing when I go and get all fancy.

[Sunny Simmons Steincamp]

I have found that sometimes, when I update a recipe, that people are disappointed. Something about that "home" taste that is missing when I go and get all fancy.

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I have had the same experience with a couple of different dishes. I quit using "cream of ...." soups years ago, and every now and then one of my kids will request jalapeno chicken, pot pies, or some other dish to be made "the old fashioned way," meaning with those condensed soups instead of whatever I've updated it to include instead.

Some of my other attempts at "getting all fancy" with old standby recipes have netted me disappointment from others, too. It's probably kinda like your own Mom's meatloaf vs. some updated "gourmet" recipe... it may be good (even *really* good,) but it's "just not the same." Even for folks with adventurous palates, there's still nothing like good old comfort foods, sometimes!

[Jensen]

Sometimes updating the old stand-bys works out really well though. A couple of years ago, I decided to update shepherd's pie too (well, technically cottage pie).

This is what came of that:

I've since made the same updated pies using chicken (with leeks instead of mushrooms) and leftover lamb shanks (a true shepherd's pie).

[Adam Balic]

My grandmother always made "Shepherd's" pie with cold left-over roast hogget (sheep between lamb and mutton). The meat was put through a mincer with a carrot and onions for moisture, topped with mashed potato and baked. The use of left over meat seems to be the usual practice as can be seen from this older recipe below.

I would have always said that with lamb/hogget/mutton is was "Shepherd's Pie" and with beef "Cottage" pie, but in older recipes this dististinction wasn't made and when you think about it the recipe wasn't likely to have ever been produced by Shepherds (lack of access to an oven) so it is most like just a novelty name for another variation of meat and potato pie.

Shepherd's Pie (1862)

Take cold dressed meat of any kind, roast or boiled,

slice it, break the bones, and put them on with a little

boiling water, and a little salt, boil them until you have

extracted all the strength from them, and reduced it to

very little, and strain it. Season the sliced meat with

pepper and salt, lay it in a baking dish, pour in the sauce

you strained, and add a little mushroom ketchup. Have

some potatoes boiled and nicely mashed, cover the dish

with the potatoes, smooth it on the top with a knife, notch

it round the edge and mark it on the top the same as

paste. Bake it in an oven, or before the fire, until the

potatoes are a nice brown.

As for up-dating oldies, I do it all the time. Make individual portions of make a stack.

If you page down to the bottom of This Discussionyou can see a 18th century chocolate pudding recipe I made recently

Edited August 27, 2007 by Adam Balic (log)