Sharon Duce 💙

Customer: "Do you do bones? I've been told to make broth for the collagen." Butcher: "Who told you?" Customer: "The woman in the health shop. She's just sold me a tub of the powder as well. Twenty-eight quid." Butcher: "What's it say on the tub?" Customer: "Bovine collagen. Hydrolysed." Butcher: "What's bovine?" Customer: "...Cow." Butcher: "Which bit of the cow?" Customer: "It doesn't say." Butcher: "The hide. They take the skin off him, boil it down, dry it to a powder and sell it back to you by the gram. That's the whole industry. It's him, in a tub, at about forty times what I'd get for the skin." Customer: "So it does work?" Butcher: "It's gelatine. Same as a trifle. Your grandmother got it off the Sunday joint and called it gravy that set." Customer: "What should I buy, then?" Butcher: "Shin. Oxtail. A trotter if you're brave. The bits with the gristle in, that's the collagen you've just paid £28 for. Three hours, lid on, and the pan sets solid in the fridge overnight." Customer: "Solid?" Butcher: "Like a jelly. That's the test. If the broth doesn't set, there was no collagen in it. The pouches in the supermarket don't set. Half of them have gelatine added so they look like they did." Customer: "And the tub?" Butcher: "The tub's a trotter that went to university. Keep it if you like. I'll do you a kilo of shin for a fiver and you can have the bones for nothing, same as my dad gave them to the dog."

Shepherd's pie began as the Sunday joint being passed through a mincer on Monday, and the reason the potato lid was crisp is that it was spread with the dripping from the same roast. The mincer was cast iron, clamped to the edge of the kitchen table with a screw, and the cold remains of Sunday's leg of lamb or mutton went through it with the fat and the gristle, because the fat was what made Monday's dinner taste of Sunday's. The mince went into a dish with an onion, the gravy from the roasting tin that had set overnight into jelly, and a shake of Worcester sauce, and the mashed potato went over the top in a thick lid, forked into ridges, dotted with dripping, and baked until the ridges browned. The first printed version was 1791, as cottage pie, and the word shepherd's arrived later for the mutton version, which is the proper one. Beef makes a cottage pie. A shepherd minds sheep. It was dinner on Monday in every house that had roasted on Sunday, which was every house that could. The joint fed the family on Sunday, the pie on Monday, and the bone made the soup on Tuesday, and a leg of mutton was three dinners from one animal with nothing bought in but a few potatoes and an onion. A good one cuts clean, with the mince dark and wet underneath and the potato forming a crust that peels back from the dish, and the first forkful has the lid and the meat together. Peas, if there were peas. The one in the supermarket chiller is made with lean minced lamb that has never seen a roasting tin, a sauce thickened with starch, and a potato topping made with semi-skimmed milk and a spread, which is why it comes out of the oven the same colour it went in. The dripping was what made it Sunday twice.