Chilli Cottage Pie

Too often, the cottage pie (and its bleating cousin, the shepherd’s pie) is a mean sort of lunch, made with small, rubbery pellets of cheap mince, a splash of ketchup and lumpy mashed potato. Even worse, people insist on using the leftovers from Sunday’s roast. I’m all for using up chicken bones and the like, but to chop up yesterday’s beef for a pie not only gives an inferior filling – it robs me of roast beef sandwiches too. My great-grandfather, food writer and polemicist P Morto