Meat Pie
Beef, lamb, veal, or chicken may be used in this dish. A medium-sized chicken, or three pounds of the other meat, should be purchased. Cut the meat in pieces suitable for serving, dust it with salt and pepper, roll it in flour, and then fry until slightly browned in sufficient Snowdrift to keep it from sticking. Add a bit of bay-leaf, one and a half teaspoonfuls of salt and three cupfuls of boiling water, and simmer until tender, about two hours. Then remove the bay-leaf, add lemon juice to taste, and one and a half cupfuls of diced, raw potatoes. Stir in a cupful of cooked peas, diced string beans, or-with chicken-diced asparagus; thicken with a third cupful of flour creamed with three tablespoonfuls of Snowdrift, and bring to boiling-point. Transfer to an open casserole, or meat-pie dish, cover with biscuits made of flaky biscuit crust, set in a hot oven, 375 degrees F., and bake from twenty to twenty-five minutes.
A stewed-and-topped meat pie of the sort American cookbooks called a "pot pie" once biscuits replaced pastry. Two details decide whether it works: the size of the raw potato dice and the thickness of the gravy going into the dish.
- SnowdriftSnowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening (hydrogenated in its later form), sold by the same concern behind Wesson oil and heavily promoted through books like this one. Any solid vegetable shortening or lard works for the browning and the roux; for the biscuit topping use shortening or cold butter.
- The potatoes are the hingeThey go in raw and get only the 20-25 minutes under the biscuits plus a brief boil. Cut them no larger than half an inch, or give the filling ten minutes of simmering after they go in — otherwise the crust browns over hard potato.
- Oven temperatureThe book helpfully gives its own number: 375F. That is lower than a modern drop-biscuit oven (425F), so expect a paler top; if your biscuit recipe calls for 425F, bake at that and check the filling is bubbling at the edges.
- "Open casserole"Here it means a shallow baking dish without a lid, not a lidded French casserole and not the saucepan. A 2- to 3-quart baking dish or a deep 10-inch skillet suits the quantity.
- ThickeningA third cup of flour creamed with three tablespoons of fat is a fairly stiff paste; whisk it into the simmering liquid in small lumps and let it come to a full boil to cook out the raw flour. The filling should be gravy-thick before the biscuits go on, or they will sink and steam rather than bake.
- Meat and simmeringTwo hours suits beef or lamb shoulder and a stewing fowl. A supermarket chicken is far younger than the "medium-sized chicken" this book assumes and will be falling apart in 45 minutes to an hour; cut back accordingly and add the vegetables at the end.
- Lemon juiceAdded to taste at the end, after the bay-leaf comes out. Start with a tablespoon and taste; it lifts the flour-thickened gravy noticeably.
- YieldThree pounds of meat with vegetables and a biscuit crust feeds six generously, or eight alongside a salad.
This comes from a manufacturer's cookbook, one of hundreds issued in the early twentieth century to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Snowdrift, a cottonseed-oil shortening from the Southern Cotton Oil Company, was competing directly against lard and butter, and the strategy in these books tends to run the same way: put the brand name into every step, including ones where any fat would do. The dish itself is older than the shortening. A biscuit-topped stew of this kind is generally said to have been common in American home cooking before 1900, and the shift from a bottom-and-top pastry crust to a batch of baking-powder biscuits laid over hot filling belongs to the same period as chemical leavening becoming cheap and reliable. The instruction to buy "a medium-sized chicken, or three pounds of the other meat" reflects a market where cuts were less standardized than now he butbutcher had and judge.