Chicken Pie
Cut up two young chickens, place in hot water enough to cover, (as it boils away add more so as to have enough for the pie and for gravy to serve with it), boil until tender; line the sides of a four or six quart pan with a rich baking-powder or soda-biscuit dough quarter of an inch thick, put in part of the chicken, season with salt, pepper and butter, lay in a few thin strips or squares of dough, add the rest of chicken and season as before; some add five or six fresh eggs or a few new potatoes in their season, season liquor in which the chickens were boiled, with butter, salt and pepper, add a part of it to the pie, cover with crust a quarter of an inch thick, with a hole in the center the size of a tea-cup. Keep adding the chicken-liquor as needed, since the fault of most chicken pies is that they are too dry. There can scarcely be too much gravy. Bake one hour in a moderate oven. To make a gravy, add to the liquor left in pot (if not enough add hot water) a table-spoon of butter mixed to a paste with flour, and seasoned with pepper and salt. This should be stirred, a little at a time, into the liquor; let boil up once and serve.
A deep-dish family pie with a biscuit crust rather than pastry, built in stages so the meat is layered with dough. The whole thing hinges on liquid: the book says so outright, and it is right.
- Keep it wetThe instruction to keep adding chicken liquor is the one that matters. Fill the pie until the broth is visible at the vent hole before it goes in the oven, and top it up through the hole partway through baking. Biscuit dough drinks liquid as it cooks, and a pie that looked moist going in will be dry coming out.
- Moderate ovenThe book's own term. In period usage this is generally taken as somewhere around 350 to 375F. At that heat an hour should be enough to cook the crust through and set the interior, since the chicken is already tender from boiling.
- Two young chickensPeriod "young chickens" were small by modern standards, probably in the neighborhood of 2 to 3 lb each. Two supermarket birds at 3 1/2 to 4 lb will give more meat than the pan needs; one whole chicken plus a few extra thighs is closer to the original scale. Bone the meat after boiling and before layering.
- The panA four to six quart pan is a large roaster or Dutch oven, not a pie plate. Expect to serve 8 to 10. Line only the sides with dough, as directed — a bottom crust in a pie this wet turns to paste.
- Soda-biscuit doughA plain rolled biscuit dough, leavened with baking powder or with baking soda against sour milk or buttermilk. Roll it a scant quarter inch; thicker dough will not cook through in the steam of the filling.
- The eggs"Five or six fresh eggs" is ambiguous in the original. Many nineteenth-century chicken pies used hard-cooked eggs, peeled and halved among the layers, and that is the safer reading here; raw eggs broken into a pie of this depth may not reach a set temperature reliably.
- New potatoesSmall waxy potatoes, added whole or halved. Parboil them until barely tender first — an hour in a crowded, liquid-heavy pie will not cook raw potato evenly.
- The separate gravyThe butter-and-flour paste is a beurre manié, stirred into the simmering broth a little at a time as directed. A tablespoon of each will only lightly thicken a cup or so of liquid, so scale it to the amount of broth left in the pot; let it boil up once, as the recipe says, which cooks out the raw flour taste.
Chicken pie as Buckeye Cookery has it meant this: a deep pan, a biscuit crust, and a great deal of gravy, quite unlike the pastry-cased pies of English cookery. Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio from contributed household receipts, and the recipe reads like one — the parenthetical asides, the "some add," the flat verdict that "the fault of most chicken pies is that they are too dry" all sound like a cook correcting a neighbor. The use of baking-powder or soda-biscuit dough is generally taken to place it after chemical leavening had become cheap and reliable in American kitchens; earlier versions of the same dish are often said to have leaned on suet or lard pastry. Boiling the birds first served two purposes in a wood-stove kitchen: it guaranteed tender meat from a bird of uncertain age, and it produced the broth that the pie, and then the gravy boat, depended on.