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Chicken and Sweetbread Pie
Line a deep pie-dish with a good crust, and spread a layer of forcemeat on it. Put over this alternate layers of chicken cut into neat joints, and sweetbread cut into small pieces, both seasoned with salt and cayenne; sprinkle over each layer a few mushrooms or truffles chopped small. When the dish is nearly full, put some slices of hard-boiled egg over the top, pour a little gravy over the meat, cover the dish with the same crust that it was lined with, brush it over with beaten egg, and bake it in a good oven. Just before serving, make a hole in the top and pour in some good gravy. Time to bake, one hour and a half. Probable cost, chickens, 2s. 6d. each. A pie made with two chickens sufficient for six persons.
A late-Victorian raised-crust meat pie that assumes you can joint a chicken and buy veal sweetbreads. Both assumptions need a little help now.
- Oven temperature"A good oven" is not a number. In a modern oven, something in the region of 400F to start and colour the pastry, then dropped to around 350F, is a reasonable reading; a full hour and a half at high heat risks scorching the lid before the chicken is done.
- SweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads (thymus and pancreas) must be ordered from a butcher. Soak them in several changes of cold water for a few hours, blanch briefly, then peel off the membrane before cutting into pieces; skipping this leaves them tough and faintly bitter.
- ForcemeatThe usual Victorian forcemeat of this type is minced veal or pork with breadcrumbs, suet, herbs, lemon zest and egg to bind. A well-seasoned sausagemeat loosened with breadcrumbs and a beaten egg does the same job.
- Which chickenVictorian chickens were smaller than a modern supermarket bird, so the recipe's two birds are roughly one large chicken today. One 3.5-4 lb chicken, jointed and boned into neat pieces, fills a deep dish for six. Bone-in joints will cook through in the time given but make the pie awkward to serve.
- The gravy, twiceThe hinge of the recipe. Only a little liquid goes in before baking, or the pastry base turns to paste; the pie is filled properly through a hole in the lid at the end. Have well-reduced, strongly flavoured stock hot when you pour it, and let the pie stand ten minutes so it is absorbed rather than running out.
- Crust"A good crust" is unspecified, and the lid is the same paste as the lining. A firm shortcrust or hot-water paste suits a deep dish that must hold a lining and an hour and a half in the oven. Cut a steam vent before baking and reopen it for the final gravy.
- Mushrooms and trufflesChestnut or button mushrooms chopped small are the practical choice; cook off their water in a little butter first so they do not dilute the filling. Truffle is optional and a small amount of good truffle-scented oil added to the finishing gravy carries further than a shaved fresh one.
- SeasoningCayenne is used as the pepper here, not as heat. A pinch per layer alongside the salt is enough; the pie should taste of chicken and stock.
- Cost note"2s. 6d." is two shillings and sixpence per bird, so five shillings for the pie's chickens alone -- on the order of a labourer's daily wage at the time, which tells you this was not a weekday supper.
Sweetbreads were among the most prized items on a Victorian table, delicate, pale and expensive, and pairing them with chicken in a pie was a standard way of stretching a luxury while making it look like an even greater one. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was the later revised edition of the Dictionary of Cookery compiled in the 1870s, and it was written for the servant-keeping middle-class household, where the priced entries let a mistress cost a dish before ordering it. The two-stage gravy keeps a long-baked pie from either drying out or drowning its own crust. Offal of this kind is often said to have fallen out of general English cooking after the Second World War, and sweetbreads have never entirely returned to the domestic kitchen.