Humbled by a meat pie

There’s this thing about cooking, if you get a few things right, you start believing you’re invincible in the kitchen. I did. I hadn’t messed up a recipe yet. So, naturally, I was super confident when I came across a recipe for a meat and corn pie.

It looked really good on paper: a layer of meat topped with a layer of tomatoes, onions, peas, corn, a layer of beaten eggs, another layer of meat, and finally, crusty bread, baked to a “golden brown”.

I followed the recipe, using near-exact measurements of the ingredients, even making a few additions like adding chilli. I was impressed with myself. Multitasking, I’d managed to get the pie ready for the oven in 30 minutes.

After baking it for an hour, I pulled out the dish to taste the pie, which my husband and I were already drooling over. He took a bite and promptly spat it out. The meat was undercooked, the eggs hadn’t blended with the bread or the meat, and the peas, corn and bread were over-done. I removed a few burnt peas and bits of the toast and put it back in the oven for 30 minutes, checking the progress every 5 minutes or so. But it was beyond repair. With a heavy heart, I threw out the entire dish.

Humbled, but not willing to give up yet, I picked out another recipe — Shepherd’s Pie. This one I was familiar with. I’d seen my mother make this countless times, but never attempted to make one of my own. Why bother? I’d never be able to hold a candle to my mom’s version. But after the crushing defeat with the other recipe, I had to make a decent comeback, to salvage my self-esteem.

It was late. I had no ingredients. Desperately, I called the butcher, imploring him to give me half a kilo of minced meat, like an addict calling a dealer for a fix. “Kal subah aana, sister,” he said. I hung up and poured myself a glass of wine instead.

The toughest part of making the Shepherd’s Pie, I realised, was waking up early. Fighting for gas-space with my maid (I asked her to cook something, just in case I botched another experiment), I set about boiling potatoes while my husband went out to get the meat. Though I knew the preparation from watching my mother make it over the years, I had a recipe handy, just in case I missed something in my sleep-deprived state.

Here’s what I used:
Minced meat - 500g
Potatoes - 5 (medium sized)
Onions - 2 (large)
Garlic - 4 cloves
Tomato puree - 2 tablespoons
Worcestershire sauce - 2-3 tablespoons
Tabasco sauce - 1 tablespoon
Red chilli powder - 1 teaspoon
Cream - 1 teaspoon
Olive oil - 1 tablespoon
Butter (to grease the pie dish)
Mustard paste - 1 teaspoon
Salt and pepper to taste

Start by boiling and peeling the potatoes. Mash them and add salt, pepper, cream and mustard. In a pressure cooker, heat olive oil. Add onions and garlic and stir till they are golden-brown. Add the minced meat and cook for 10 minutes or so on medium flame. Add three-fourths of a cup of water, Worcestershire sauce and cover the cooker. After about 4-5 whistles, place the cooker under a running tap to get rid of excess steam.

Put the cooker back on the stove and add the tomato puree, Tabasco, salt and pepper. Cook till excess water evaporates. Keep stirring so that the meat doesn’t stick to the base of the vessel. Also, taste it to see if the proportions are alright.

Now, preheat oven to 200 degrees Celsius. In a greased pie dish, put a thin layer of the mashed potato, covering the base and sides of the dish. Use only half of the potato for this. Add the minced meat on the potato base. Cover the meat with a layer of potato. (I used a fork to ripple the potato topping.) Place it in the oven and bake for 30 minutes.

Once the dish was out of the oven, I referred to the cook book to check if I’d done everything right. Turns out, I did miss a few ingredients, not because I was sleepy, but because I’m almost allergic to vegetables. According to the recipe, I should have added carrots and peas along with the tomato puree.

The pie wasn’t perfect. The recipe doesn’t include cream when mashing the potatoes, so layering the pie became too delicate a task. But luckily, this time the husband didn’t complain, finishing off an entire slice of the pie before he looked up to tell me it was good. As for me, I still prefer mother’s version.