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Chicken and Ham Pie
Take a cooked chicken or the remains of one, and four ounces of ham. Cut into rather small pieces, and put it into a saucepan with a little white stock or water; add a bunch of parsley, and pepper and salt. Boil until the chicken is tender, take out the parsley, and turn out into a pie-dish. Take two hard-boiled eggs, cut each into four pieces, and lay on top of the chicken; cover with a good puff-paste, and bake in a quick oven. Probable cost, 4s.
A Victorian way of using up a roast bird: the meat is already cooked, so the pie is really about the gravy, the eggs and the pastry. A few points make it work in a modern kitchen.
- "A quick oven"Bake at 425-450F (220-230C). Puff pastry needs the initial blast to lift; a slower oven gives a flat, greasy lid. Roughly 25-30 minutes, until the top is deep gold and set underneath.
- The filling should be barely wet"A little white stock" means just enough to moisten and glaze, perhaps 1/2 to 3/4 cup for a whole bird's worth of meat. Too much liquid steams the underside of the pastry and boils over the rim.
- Do not boil cooked chickenThe instruction to "boil until the chicken is tender" reads oddly when the bird is already cooked; whatever the original reasoning, meat from a modern roast chicken only needs about 5 minutes in the hot stock to warm through and take up the parsley flavour. Longer and it shreds.
- The hamFour ounces is about 115 g of cooked, fairly salty ham cut into dice. It is doing the seasoning work, so hold back on the salt until you have tasted the stock with the ham in it.
- Bunch of parsleyA tied bundle of stalks, removed before the pie is filled, in the manner of a bouquet garni. Stalks carry more flavour than the leaves and are easier to fish out.
- Pie-dish and pastryUse a deep dish of about 1 to 1.5 pints and fill it nearly to the top, or the pastry will sink into the gap as it bakes. A pie funnel or a slit in the lid lets the steam out. All-butter shop-bought puff is a fair substitute for "good puff-paste".
- Let it cool before cuttingThe stock sets to a light jelly as it cools, which is what holds the slices together. Ten to fifteen minutes out of the oven makes the difference between a slice and a spill.
- Yield and costServes four generously. The "probable cost, 4s." is a shilling price for the whole pie and is of no use as a modern guide, though it does indicate a dish of some expense — the bird accounts for most of it.
This version is squarely a leftovers recipe: Cassell's assumes a household that roasts a fowl, carves it at table, and expects the cook to turn "the remains of one" into a second meal the next day. Hard-boiled eggs quartered over the meat are a long-standing feature of English meat pies, though the usual explanations for them — bulking out the filling, giving a pattern to the cut slice — are inference rather than documented intent. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, like its rivals in the late nineteenth century, gives a "probable cost" for most dishes. The distinction drawn here between "white stock" and plain water is standard for the period: white stock was made from veal or poultry bones without browning, and period cookery books assume a kitchen keeps some on hand.