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Another Way (Take a tin half the height)
Take a tin, half the height of the required pie, roll the paste of a proper thickness, cut out the top and bottom, and a long piece for the outside. Butter the dish, mould the side, lay on the white of an egg where the bottom is to join the sides, drawing it down over the bottom of the dish. Lay on the bottom, pressing all firm so it may not leak. Fill the pie, put on the cover, and pinch well together. The usual way is to press the paste into a buttered tin form, take the pie carefully out when firm enough, and again put it into the oven to brown.
This is a construction method rather than a formula: it tells you how to build a free-standing raised pie case around a tin, the older alternative to hand-raising the crust over a wooden block. No quantities, times or temperatures are given, so the notes below fill in what a modern cook needs.
- What "a tin" means hereMost likely a straight-sided mould or hoop rather than a shallow modern pie plate; a cake tin, a springform or a tall food ring will serve. "Half the height of the required pie" appears to mean the pastry stands above the rim of the form.
- The paste is hot-water crustThe paste is probably hot-water crust -- The original does not say, but a raised pie of this kind is usually built from hot-water paste: flour worked with lard and boiling water, commonly cited proportions being about 1 lb flour to 5-6 oz fat and 8-10 fl oz hot water. Such paste must be handled while still warm and pliable; once cold it cracks instead of moulding.
- Thickness"A proper thickness" for a raised pie is about a quarter of an inch, thicker than short pastry. Thinner walls slump or split as the filling renders during the bake.
- Egg white as the sealThis is the hinge of the whole method. The white brushed at the junction of base and side glues the seam and, more importantly, waterproofs it so rendered fat and juices cannot escape. Press the joint firmly and check it before filling.
- Removing the formIf you take the pie out of the tin to brown, do it only once the pastry has set — the original says simply "when firm enough" — then return it to the oven until the sides are coloured. Unmoulding too early risks collapsing the walls.
- Temperature and time, which the original omitsThe original gives neither. Modern practice is to start hot to set the case, then drop the heat for the long bake; a large meat pie may want two hours or more, and the filling should be checked to a safe internal temperature (at least 160F for minced or mixed meat) rather than judged by the colour of the crust.
- Steam holeThe instruction to "pinch well together" leaves nothing for steam. Cut a vent in the lid before baking, or the sealed case will push its seams apart.
- YieldDepends entirely on the size of form chosen, which the original leaves open; a small deep case of this kind will take a couple of pounds of filling and serve several, sliced cold.
Raised pies belong to a very old English line of baking in which the pastry was structural first and edible second — the medieval "coffyn" was a stiff flour-and-water case that held meat through a long bake and was not always eaten. By the nineteenth century the paste had become hot-water crust, made with lard, and the pies were the pork, veal-and-ham and game pies of the cold table, decorated with pastry leaves and filled with jelly through the vent hole after baking. Hand-raising over a wooden dolly is the older technique and required practice; forms of the kind described here, along with the hinged decorated moulds sold through the Victorian period, made the thing more manageable in an ordinary household kitchen.