Squirrel Pie
Carefully skin and clean a pair of squirrels, cut in small pieces, put in a stewpan and cook, adding two slices of salt pork, with sufficient water to stew them about half done. Season and thicken the gravy. Put into a deep dish, cover with a nice pie crust and bake in a moderate oven until done.
A stew finished under a crust, which is the older sense of "pie" — one lid of pastry over a deep dish, no bottom crust. The hinge is the pre-stewing: squirrel is lean, sinewy muscle and the oven alone will not soften it.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F. The filling goes in only half-stewed, so the bake both colours the crust and finishes the meat; 40 to 50 minutes is usually enough.
- "Stew them about half done"Older squirrels want 45 to 60 minutes of gentle simmering before they go in the dish; young ones 25 to 30. The meat should be yielding but still gripping the bone, since it will cook again in the oven.
- SourcingSquirrel is a licensed game animal in most places and is not sold in supermarkets. In practice it comes from a hunter or a game dealer, and seasons and bag limits apply. Rabbit is the usual substitute and behaves almost identically in this recipe.
- Handling raw gameWild squirrels and rabbits can carry tularemia, which is contracted through cuts and skin contact during skinning rather than from eating cooked meat. Use gloves for the butchery and wash hands, board and knives before anything else touches them.
- Salt porkTwo slices means about 2 to 3 oz of fatty cured pork, which supplies the fat the squirrel lacks. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or pancetta works; taste before adding salt, as the pork carries most of it.
- ThickeningRoughly a tablespoon of flour per cup of stewing liquid, worked into a little of the salt-pork fat and whisked in. Thicken it slightly further than seems right — it loosens in the oven and a thin gravy will boil up through the crust.
- SeasonThe book assumes salt, pepper and probably an onion in the stewpan. Thyme, a bay leaf and a splash of cider or dry sherry in the stewing liquid are all in period and improve it.
- Crust and ventingAny short pastry or a lard crust suits it. Cut two or three vents, and set the dish on a sheet pan, because a deep dish of thickened gravy under pastry will find a way out.
- YieldA pair of squirrels gives roughly a pound of picked meat — four modest servings, or three generous ones.
Squirrel was standard American meat well into the twentieth century, especially in the upland South and the Midwest, where it was the most reliably available small game and cost nothing but a cartridge. It is the traditional foundation of Brunswick stew, and it turns up in nineteenth-century household books alongside rabbit and pigeon without comment or apology — the terse, unfussy tone here reflects that a reader would already know how to skin one. Its disappearance from cookbooks tracks urbanisation and the rise of cheap commercial chicken rather than any change in taste; by mid-century the game chapters of general cookbooks were shrinking to venison and wildfowl. Covering a stew with a single sheet of pastry, as here, is the more economical form of the meat pie, saving both flour and fat over a fully lined dish.