SQUAB PIE
Trim a deep dish with paste as for chicken pie, put in a layer of sliced sour apples, season with sugar and spice; add a layer of fresh, rather lean pork, sliced thin, seasoned with salt and pepper; and thus place alternate layers of apple and pork until the dish is nearly full; put in a little water and cover with paste; bake slowly until thoroughly done.
A layered pork-and-apple pie under a single crust, baked long and low. The name is misleading and the method is simpler than it looks, but the temperature and the choice of pork decide whether it comes out juicy or dry.
- No squab in itDespite the title there is no pigeon, and none is intended. The name travelled with the dish; the filling is pork and apple.
- "Paste"Nineteenth-century shorthand for pastry. A plain lard or butter shortcrust is right here, not puff. "As for chicken pie" means a lining in the dish as well as a lid, so plan on roughly double a single-crust quantity.
- Bake slowlyThe book gives no temperature; a slow oven is roughly 300-325F by modern reckoning. Reckon on 1½ to 2 hours for a deep dish, with foil over the crust once it colours. The pork is sliced raw into the pie and needs the full time to become tender rather than merely done.
- The pork"Fresh, rather lean" rules out cured or salt pork, which would make the pie brutally salty. Shoulder or loin sliced about ¼ inch thick works; a little fat is welcome, since very lean modern pork dries in a long bake.
- Sour applesA firm tart variety that holds its shape - Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Sweet dessert apples collapse into sauce and leave the pie watery.
- Season with sugar and spiceUnspecified, as usual. Around 2-3 tablespoons sugar and a teaspoon total of cinnamon, nutmeg and a little clove suits a 2 lb pie; sage or thyme with the pork is a period-appropriate addition.
- "A little water"A quarter cup is enough. The apples and pork give up plenty of liquid, and more water than that produces a pie that floods when cut.
- Vent the lidCut a steam hole or two before baking. With a sealed top crust the trapped steam lifts the pastry off the filling and leaves a hollow dome.
- YieldA deep 9-inch dish built this way serves six, and is better warm than hot straight from the oven - it slices more cleanly once it has settled twenty minutes.
Squab pie is a West Country English dish, generally traced to Devon and Cornwall, and the absence of squab is its standing joke: the usual explanation offered is that the layered mutton or pork chops sat in the dish like nestling birds, though this is folk etymology rather than documented fact. Early versions used mutton with apple and onion; the American form recorded in Buckeye Cookery (1877) has settled on fresh pork and on sour apples. Sweet-and-savoury meat pies of this kind were commonplace in English cooking before the eighteenth century and gradually retreated to a few regional survivals.