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Devonshire Squab Pie
Take two pounds of chops from a neck of mutton. Cut them short, and pare away some of the fat. Peel, core, and slice about two pounds of well-flavoured sour apples. Put a layer of them in the bottom of a pie-dish with a little sugar, and a sprinkling of ground allspice. Place the chops next, and season with salt, pepper, and finely-chopped onion. Continue with alternate layers of apples and meat till all be used up. Make an ordinary meat crust, line the edges of the dish, and cover over the top, adding a quarter of a pint of gravy or water. Bake in a moderate oven one hour and a half. Probable cost, 2s. 2d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A straightforward layered pie, but two things in the original will trip up a modern cook: the meat is a slow-cooking cut given a fairly short bake, and the pastry named is not one most kitchens still keep in their heads.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F (180C, gas 4). If you extend the cooking time, drop to 325F and cover the crust with foil once it has coloured.
- Neck of muttonTrue mutton is rare outside specialist butchers; lamb neck chops or scrag end are the direct substitute. Trim the fat as instructed but leave a little, as it carries the apple and allspice.
- The timing is the weak pointNeck is a working muscle full of connective tissue. An hour and a half at 350F will cook it through but may leave it chewy, especially with lamb rather than long-hung mutton; two to two and a half hours at a lower heat gives the gelatinous texture the dish wants.
- Sour applesBramley is the obvious choice, or any firm cooking apple that collapses to a puree. Dessert apples will stay in slices and turn the pie sweet, which is not the balance intended.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 5 fl oz, roughly two-thirds of a US cup. Use stock rather than water if you have it; the apples give off a good deal of liquid of their own.
- Meat crustGenerally a plain short paste made with a proportion of suet or lard rather than all butter, sturdy enough to hold a wet filling. A shortcrust at half fat to flour works, or a hot-water crust if you want the Victorian sturdiness.
- Sugar and allspiceNo quantities are given. With sour apples, about a tablespoon of sugar over the whole pie and a quarter-teaspoon of ground allspice per layer is a sensible starting point; the seasoning should read as savoury with a sweet edge.
- Yield and costSix or seven portions is optimistic by modern appetites; four to six is realistic. The 2s 2d is a period price note, useful mainly as a reminder that this was framed as economical family cooking.
There are no squabs in a squab pie, and there is no settled explanation for the name. It appears in West Country cookery from at least the eighteenth century as a pie of mutton and apples, sometimes with onion, sometimes with a little cream stirred in at the end; Devon and Cornwall have argued over it for as long as it has been written down. One traditional account holds that the pie was originally made with young pigeon and that the mutton displaced it while the name stayed, though this is repeated more often than it is evidenced. What the combination really reflects is an older English tolerance for fruit with meat, common in medieval and Tudor cooking and steadily pushed to the margins through the nineteenth century until it survived mainly in regional dishes like this one and in the surviving habit of apple sauce with pork.