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English Chicken Pie
1 chicken, 1/2 pound veal fillet, 4 ounces bacon, 3 hard-cooked eggs, 1/4 pound mushrooms, 2 tablespoons Crisco, pepper and salt to taste, chopped parsley, puff-pastry, stock, and 1 egg.
Cut fowl into small joints, season these with salt and pepper. Slice veal thinly, line bottom of fireproof dish with this, place on top a layer of chicken. Chop mushrooms finely, saute them in Crisco in small stewpan; sprinkle half of this over pieces of chicken, then layer of hard-cooked eggs, over that thin slices bacon and chopped parsley. Continue in this way until all ingredients are used up and the fireproof dish is full; fill dish three parts full with stock. Put a strip of pastry round the edge of dish, wet this lightly with water, cover the pie with puff-pastry rolled out to the proper size and thickness; press down the paste on to the wet edge of paste, trim round. Decorate the paste at the edge according to taste; brush over pie with beaten egg, make a slit in the center of the lid, and place a circle of pastry leaves round it. Put pie in moderate oven, and bake about 1 1/2 hours. Pour in a little stock before serving.
A raised-crust meat pie in the English style, built raw in the dish and cooked in one long bake. The layering is not decoration: the veal on the bottom protects the chicken from the direct heat, and the bacon bastes everything above it.
- The hinge: fill only three-quarters with stockThe hinge: fill only about three-quarters with stock -- the dish must not be brimming, or the liquid boils up into the pastry and the lid goes to paste underneath. The slit in the centre acts as a steam vent, and the recipe has you pour in a little more stock before serving to moisten the pie.
- CriscoThis book was issued to promote it, so it appears everywhere. Here it is only the fat for sweating the mushrooms; butter or oil does the same job in the same quantity.
- Moderate ovenNo temperature is given; "moderate" is conventionally taken as 350-375F. At that heat 1 1/2 hours is right for raw jointed chicken under a lid of pastry. If the crust colours before the hour mark, tent it loosely with foil.
- Chicken and veal"1 chicken" here (the recipe calls it a fowl) would have been a whole bird of a few pounds, jointed small and left on the bone. Veal fillet is usually the leg cut, sliced thin; a thin-cut veal cutlet or pork loin scallop stands in. Boneless chicken thighs work if you would rather not eat around bones, but reduce the bake to about an hour.
- Check the centreA pie this deep can look finished while the middle joints are not. Test through the vent slit for 165F at the thickest piece of chicken before you take it out.
- Fireproof dishA deep ovenproof pie dish, ideally with a rim wide enough to take the strip of pastry that anchors the lid. Roughly 2 quarts; anything shallower will not hold all the layers.
- Puff pastryAbout 1 lb of all-butter frozen puff, rolled to 1/4 inch. The strip round the wet rim is what keeps the lid from shrinking off as it rises.
- BaconPeriod bacon was generally saltier and often more heavily smoked than much modern supermarket bacon. Use it unsmoked or lightly smoked if you want the chicken and veal to read through, and do not add much salt to the seasoning.
- YieldSix to eight servings. It is good hot, and better cold the next day once the stock has set to jelly.
Cold-cut, layered pies of poultry, veal, bacon and hard-cooked egg are an old English form, close cousins to the raised pork pie and to the eighteenth-century "chicken pye" of country house cookery, where the point is often said to have been as much preservation as dinner: meat sealed under crust and set in its own jellied stock kept for days in a cool larder. What makes this version distinctly of its moment is the Crisco. A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to find uses for the hydrogenated vegetable shortening they had introduced in 1911, so the fat turns up even in a dish that barely needs it.