Shepherd’s pie

There is a great deal of rubbish talked about this excellent dish. It is not a rustic invention, but part of the post-industrial nostalgia for the countryside, which was already raising its head in Victorian times, a sentimentality for a non-existent world as later manifested by green wellies and four-wheel drives among urban dwellers and an aversion to field sports.

Shepherd’s pie came into the English cuisine after the Industrial Revolution, when metal grinders for mincing became