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Chicken Pie with Oysters
Boil the chicken-a year old is best-until tender, drain off liquor from a quart of oysters, boil, skim, line the sides of a dish with a rich crust, put in a layer of chicken, then a layer of raw oysters, and repeat until dish is filled, seasoning each layer with pepper, salt, and bits of butter, and adding the oyster liquor and a part of the chicken liquor until the liquid is even with the top layer; now cover loosely with a crust having an opening in the center to allow steam to escape. If the liquor cooks away, add chicken gravy or hot water. Bake forty minutes in a moderate oven. Make gravy by adding to chicken liquor left in pot (one quart or more) two tablespoons flour, rubbed smooth with two tablespoons butter, and seasoned highly with pepper; let cook until there is no raw taste of flour and salt to taste and serve.
A two-crust pie built in layers, with the oysters going in raw so they cook only in the pie's own steam. The recipe assumes a stewing hen and a cook who is comfortable judging liquid by eye.
- The hinge: raw oysters, not cookedThe oysters are layered in raw and finish in the 40 minutes of baking; only the drained liquor is boiled and skimmed. Pre-cooking them, or extending the bake to be safe, turns them to erasers.
- A year-old chickenThat means a stewing hen, not a broiler. A supermarket bird will be tender in 45 minutes to an hour of gentle simmering rather than the two-plus hours an old hen wants, and it will yield a much weaker broth, so consider fortifying the cooking liquor with stock.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350F, though the recipe gives no temperature. If the top crust is browning before 40 minutes are up, tent it with foil rather than dropping the heat, since the filling needs the time to set.
- A quart of oystersAbout 2 lb shucked, sold in tubs with their liquor; the count runs roughly 25 to 50 depending on size. Drain and reserve the liquor; that is what the recipe boils and skims to remove the grey scum.
- Two tablespoons flour to a quartThat is a thin, pouring gravy by modern habit rather than a coating sauce. Increase to three or four tablespoons of each if you want it to nap the meat, and give it a full five minutes of simmering to lose the raw flour taste.
- Lining the sides onlyThe crust goes up the sides of a deep dish, not across the bottom, which is why the filling can sit in liquid without going to paste. Use a deep casserole or a 9-inch souffle dish and cut a vent hole in the lid.
- Butter "bits"Figure a tablespoon per layer, three or four in total, which with the oyster liquor is what makes the gravy inside the pie.
- YieldA full deep dish of this feeds eight to ten as a main course, with the extra gravy served in a boat alongside.
Chicken pie enriched with oysters was standard company food in nineteenth-century America, and it depended on a fact easy to forget now: oysters were cheap. Barrels of Chesapeake and Long Island Sound oysters moved inland by rail through the 1870s and 1880s, so a Midwestern household like the Ohio ones behind Buckeye Cookery (1877) could treat them as a seasoning for something more expensive, which was the hen. The pairing of fowl and shellfish in one crust reads as extravagant today but was then simply a way of stretching a bird and making the gravy taste of more than itself. The instruction to use a chicken "a year old" is the practical heart of the entry: a laying hen past her best went into the pot, and long boiling was the only thing that would make her edible, with the resulting liquor doing double duty as the pie's liquid and the sauce at table.