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Pot-Pie of Fowl
A pie may be made of chicken or wild fowl. The yolks of six hard-boiled eggs to each fowl may be stirred in. Chicken Pie with Rice. This may be made with or without crust. If without crust, line the dish with slices of boiled ham; cut up the boiled chicken, pour over it the gravy or melted butter, and fill in the interstices with boiled rice. Cover the top thickly with the same. Bake about three-quarters of an hour.
This entry is really two fragments: a note on enriching a fowl pot-pie with hard-boiled yolks, and a fuller method for a crustless chicken-and-rice pie. Neither gives a temperature, and both assume you already have a boiled fowl and its broth on hand.
- Start with a poached birdThe rice version specifies "boiled chicken" and gravy, so it assumes a fowl already simmered until tender; the opening fragment says only "chicken or wild fowl". A 4-5 lb chicken poached with aromatics for about 90 minutes gives you the meat and a gravy base.
- "Fowl" is not a broilerA nineteenth-century fowl was a mature laying hen, tough and deeply flavoured, which is why it is boiled first. A supermarket chicken reaches tenderness far sooner; check at an hour rather than boiling it to rags.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. The filling is all pre-cooked, so the bake only has to heat through and brown the top; a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable choice for the stated three-quarters of an hour.
- The six yolksThe recipe allows the yolks of six hard-boiled eggs per bird to be stirred in; broken up, they enrich and lightly thicken the mixture without a flour roux.
- Ham as the crustLining the dish with slices of boiled ham stands in for pastry when the pie is made without crust. Overlap the slices up the sides of a deep dish and let them hang over the rim; the salt seasons the whole pie, so go easy elsewhere.
- RiceCook the rice in the chicken broth and stop it slightly short of done, since it absorbs more liquid in the oven. Long-grain holds its shape better than short here.
- Keep it moistGravy or melted butter is the only liquid. Rice and ham both drink it up, so be generous, and cover the dish for the first half hour if the top is browning before the centre is hot.
- YieldOne 4-5 lb chicken with rice will serve roughly six to eight, though the recipe gives no quantities or dish size.
Pot-pie in American cookbooks of this period covered a wide family of dishes: a deep dish of stewed meat under pastry, under biscuit dough, or under nothing at all, since the term originally described what was cooked in the pot rather than the oven. In the rice variant here, rice, not pastry, absorbs the gravy, and the ham lining is a thrifty way to get a firm, savoury casing without a cook having to make crust. Enriching a sauce with mashed hard-boiled yolks is much older than either, a survival of medieval and early-modern practice that persisted in English and American kitchens long after flour thickening became standard. The entry's clipped, assume-nothing-explains-itself style is typical of such compendia, which expected a reader who already knew how to boil a fowl and only needed the idea.