This recipe goes back to the Middle Ages: the dish was sometimes served like this to travellers arriving at Gloucestershire or Oxfordshire inns when the meat and birds were finished. It was originally, of course, a farmer’s winter supper dish, but at least one Cotswold manor house still makes it, though cut in neater and smaller portions than those served by earlier farmers’ and innkeepers’ wives, and made at table in a chafing dish.