Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Veal and Ham Pie
Veal and Ham Pie
1 1/2 pounds veal, 2 hard-cooked eggs, few grains red pepper, dust of powdered mace, 1/2 teaspoon grated lemon rind, 1/2 pound ham, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 6 whole peppers, powdered sweet herbs, and pastry. Cut veal and ham into very thin pieces; mix on a plate, flour, salt, pepper, sweet herbs, lemon rind, red pepper, and mace, roll in this seasoning each piece of veal, and lay in a pie dish, alternately, layers of veal, ham, and egg, cut in slices; pile this in center of dish, add 1/2 cup water; line edge of dish, cover and decorate with Crisco Flake Pastry; when baked add a little very good seasoned stock, which should become a jelly when the pie is cold, or a little gelatine may be added; garnish with parsley if served cold. Halibut, a la Poulette Slice of halibut, weighing 2 pounds, 1/4 cup melted Crisco, 2 teaspoons lemon juice, few drops onion juice, pepper and salt to taste. Clean fish and cut into neat fillets. Add seasonings to melted Crisco, and put dish containing Crisco in saucepan of hot water to keep Crisco melted. Take up each fillet separately with a fork, dip in Crisco, roll and fasten with small wooden skewer. Put in shallow pan, dredge with flour, and bake 12 minutes in hot oven. Remove skewers, arrange on platter for serving, pour around 1 1/2 cups white sauce, and garnish with yolks of 2 hard-cooked eggs rubbed through a strainer, whites of hard-cooked eggs cut in strips, lemon cut fan-shaped, and parsley.
Spinach, a la Creme 2 pounds spinach, pepper, salt, and nutmeg to taste, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 cup thick cream, and 1 teaspoon sugar.
Wash and pick spinach, throw it into a pan of boiling water containing a little salt and soda; boil until tender, 10 to 15 minutes; pour on to a wire sieve, and squeeze out all the water; rub through the sieve with a wooden spoon; put spinach into a saucepan, with seasoning, butter, and cream. The spinach may be prepared as above and mixed with white sauce instead of cream; garnish with fried croutons.
Three courses of one dinner printed as a single block, all built around the then-new shortening the book was written to sell. The pie is the substantial dish; the halibut and spinach are quick work once it is in the oven.
- Crisco is the pointThis book was published to promote hydrogenated vegetable shortening, so Crisco appears where an English cook would have used butter, lard or suet. Any solid shortening or lard works in the pastry; melted butter is better for dipping the halibut fillets.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given for the pie. A veal and ham pie of this size will want something in the region of 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the pastry, then 350F for around an hour and a half, covering the crust with foil if it colours too fast. A "hot oven" in books of this date is generally read as somewhere around 400-450F.
- The six whole peppersSix whole peppercorns are listed, and the method calls for "pepper" among the seasonings mixed on the plate without saying whether they are ground first or left whole. Grind them, tuck them among the layers of meat, or leave them out and rely on the red pepper.
- Sweet herbsA standing mixture of dried thyme, marjoram, summer savory and parsley, sometimes with sage. About a teaspoon of a dried mixed-herb blend covers it.
- The jelly is the hingeThe stock goes in after baking and is left to set as the pie cools; the recipe does not say how it is introduced, though a hole in the crust is the usual route. Modern gelatine at roughly a teaspoon of powder per cup of stock will give a soft set if your stock is not naturally gelatinous.
- Slicing the meat"Very thin pieces" means slices no thicker than a coin, cut across the grain. Veal shoulder or leg escalope works; thick chunks will not become tender in the time the pastry can stand.
- Soda in the spinach waterBicarbonate was added to keep spinach green. It also destroys vitamin C and turns the leaves slimy. Skip it, and cut the boil from 10-15 minutes to two or three; sieving the leaves is optional if you prefer them chopped.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve. A few drops is all the halibut wants.
- Fish donenessTwelve minutes at 450F suits fillets rolled from a two-pound steak. Check at 145F internal; halibut is lean and goes chalky within a minute or two of being done.
- YieldThe pie serves six as a main course, more if it is cut cold for a buffet. The halibut and spinach serve four to six each.
The veal and ham pie is a British standby that crossed into American cookbooks largely unchanged: seasoned veal layered with cured ham and hard-cooked egg, baked under pastry, and flooded with jellied stock so it can be eaten cold. The egg is not decoration but structure and economy, giving a clean pale ring in every slice and stretching expensive meat. Cold pies of this kind belonged to the picnic, the shooting lunch and the cold supper table, which is why the recipe ends with instructions for serving it cold and garnished with parsley. Its appearance here, alongside halibut and creamed spinach, reflects the book's purpose: it was issued by Procter and Gamble in the years after Crisco's 1911 introduction, reworking familiar dishes so the new shortening stood in for butter and lard at every turn. The spinach method, with its pinch of soda and its long boil and sieving, is pure late-Victorian practice and the part of the page that modern cooking has most decisively abandoned.