Backbone Pie
Take the small end of the backbone, cut in pieces two or three inches long, wash well and boil in water until done. Have ready a nice pastry; line a baking dish with some of the pastry, lay the bones into this dish with some of the water in which they were boiled. Season to taste with salt and pepper, adding butter and a few pieces of pastry dropped here and there in the pie. Cover the top of the dish with pastry; place in stove; bake nice and brown.
This is a great Southern dish, and delicious when nicely prepared.
A plain pork-backbone pie built on boiled meat and its own broth. Nothing here is unsafe, but the original assumes you can buy pork backbone from a butcher and that you already know how long a pie needs.
- What cut to ask for"Backbone" here is almost certainly fresh pork backbone (sometimes sold as pork neck bones or, in the South, simply backbone), not smoked or cured, though the recipe itself does not name the animal. The "small end" is the narrower tail section. Allow about 4 lb bone-in for four to six servings, since much of the weight is bone.
- Boil until done means tenderSimmer the pieces, covered in water, until the meat pulls easily from the bone — roughly 1.5 to 2 hours at a bare simmer. Boiling hard toughens the meat and clouds the broth you are going to use as gravy.
- Skim and reduce the liquidPork backbone throws a lot of fat. Skim it, then reduce the broth so you are adding concentrated stock rather than water; a pie filled with thin cooking liquid will soak the bottom crust. A tablespoon of flour worked into the butter thickens it usefully, though the original does not call for it.
- Bones in or outThe recipe leaves the pieces whole, to be eaten off the bone. Picking the meat off before it goes into the crust makes a far easier pie to serve and lets you strain out the small vertebral splinters.
- The dropped pastryThe "few pieces of pastry dropped here and there" seem to be meant as dumplings rather than decoration: they swell in the broth and thicken the filling, a trick also found in chicken pies of the period. Cut them small, or the centres may stay raw.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood or coal range. Bake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and colour the crust, then 375F for another 25 to 30 minutes until the filling bubbles at the vent.
- Vent the topA sealed double-crust pie over hot liquid will lift and split. Cut two or three slits before it goes in the oven.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper only, in the original. The broth carries the flavour, so salt the cooking water early rather than trying to correct a bland filling at the end.
Backbone was one of the pieces that came out of a home hog-killing and had to be eaten quickly, since the spine carries little fat to preserve and does not cure well as ham or bacon does. In the pork-raising South, backbone dishes belong to the weeks right after slaughter in cold weather, alongside spareribs, chitterlings and liver pudding -- the fresh-meat feast before the rest of the hog went into salt or smoke. Turning it into a pie stretched a bony cut with pastry and its own broth, and the dumpling-like pieces of dough dropped into the filling are the same economy at work.