Shepherd's pie a mashed potato crust on top. Other potato-topped pies include: Shepherd's pie Shepherd's pie or cottage pie is a meat pie with a crust or topping of mashed potato. The recipe has many variations, but the defining ingredients are minced red meat (commonly, "cottage pie" refers to beef and "shepherd's pie" to lamb), cooked in a gravy or sauce with onions and sometimes other vegetables, such as peas, celery or carrots, and topped with a layer of mashed potato before it is baked. The pie is sometimes also topped with grated cheese to create a layer of melted cheese on
Game pie 15th-century cookbook gives a bake mete recipe for a pear custard pie. Describing the franklin in the 14th-century classic "The Canterbury Tales", Chaucer said: ""Withoute bake mete was nevere his hous, Of fissh and flessh, and that so plentvous"". The best meat might be reserved for the wealthy, while their servants ate inferior pies made of the left-over "umbles" – liver, heart, tripes, and other offal, hence the term "eating humble pie". In medieval times, birds that might be found in a game pie included heron, crane, crow, swan, stork, cormorant, and bittern as well as smaller birds trapped by