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Potato Crust
An excellent crust is made with potatoes. Peel, boil and pass through a sieve, twelve potatoes. The other ingredients are: A gill of cream, two heaping tablespoonfuls of butter, a teaspoonful of salt, and enough flour to form the paste.
XX. Ingredients for Meat Pies.
For meat pies take a dozen slices of fried pork cut in pieces, together with the beef, veal or chicken, and stew all together in only water enough to form the gravy. Peel and slice potatoes and add them to the stew. Let the crust form the bottom, top and sides of the dish. Then form alternate layers of meat and crust, until the whole is finished, seasoning each layer of meat properly. Then pour on the liquor the meat was cooked in, until it just covers all; put on the top crust, and bake until the bottom crust is done and the top brown. If the liquor dries down, more must be added, or else water, in either case, boiling hot.
Two recipes run together here: a potato pastry, and the meat pie it was meant to line. Both are workable, but the quantities are given in the loose nineteenth-century manner and need pinning down.
- A gillA gill is half a cup, 4 fluid ounces, in American measure (a British gill runs to 5 fl oz). "Cream" in a book of this date is unspecified; a rich cream is the likelier reading, but the text does not say.
- Twelve potatoesNo size is given. Reckon on medium potatoes of about 6 oz each, so roughly 4 to 4 1/2 lb before peeling. A floury baking potato gives a drier mash and takes less flour to bind.
- Pass through a sieveThis means what a ricer or food mill does now. Do not use a food processor: it develops the starch and the crust turns gluey rather than short.
- Enough flour to form the pasteThe hinge of the recipe. Work the flour in while the potato is still warm and stop as soon as the dough holds together. The recipe gives no quantity and the amount will depend entirely on how wet the potatoes are; go by feel. Too much flour and the crust is tough; too little and it slumps into the gravy.
- The fried porkSalt pork or streaky bacon is the likely intended article, and it is the seasoning as much as the fat. Taste the stewing liquor before seasoning the layers of meat, as the recipe directs.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book does not use an oven-heat vocabulary here. Something in the region of 350 to 375F for an hour or more will suit a pie of this depth; the instruction to bake "until the bottom crust is done" is the real test.
- Topping up the liquorThe warning to add only boiling liquid is sound and still worth following. Cold stock poured into a part-baked pie drops the temperature of the whole dish and leaves the interior crust layers sodden.
- YieldThe crust as written is a large quantity, enough to line, layer and cover a deep dish. The recipe gives no dish size and no yield.
Potato pastry belongs to a family of thrift crusts that show up across British and American kitchens wherever wheat flour cost more than what grew in the garden. Stretching flour with cooked potato was a common enough practice in bread as well as pastry, and the same dough survives in the Irish potato apple cake and in the fadge and farls of the north. What is unusual here is the second half of the entry: instead of a single lid, the crust is built into the pie in alternating layers with the meat, so that the sheets of pastry cook in the gravy and thicken it. That construction is close kin to the layered sea pies and pot pies of the American northeast, where a suet or potato paste was dropped in strata over stewing meat in a covered pot. Its appearance in a general-purpose household volume is the point: this is a way to turn a small amount of beef, veal or chicken and a dozen slices of pork into dinner for a household.