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Gravy for Game Pie
Break the carcases of the birds and put them in a stewpan with the trimmings of the veal and bacon used in the pie, an onion stuck with two cloves, a carrot, sliced, four peppercorns, a few sticks of celery, a bunch of herbs, half a pint of water, and a wine-glassful of Madeira. Set this over a moderate fire, and shake the pan several times; let the liquor reduce to barely half the quantity, but be careful it does not burn. Add a pint and a half of light stock, bring up to boiling point, skim, remove to the side of the fire, and simmer for two hours. Strain the gravy, rinse and wipe the stewpan, and return the liquor to it. Dissolve in it a very little gelatine (about one-eighth of an ounce), and when dissolved pass the gravy through a tamis, put it in a basin and let it cool. When the pie is ready and nearly cold, pour the gravy (only just tepid) into it through a funnel, and put away to set.
A jellied gravy for filling the air gap in a raised game pie after baking. The quantities are imperial and the method assumes a coal range, but nothing here needs changing beyond the vocabulary.
- The hinge: temperatureThe gravy must be only just tepid and the pie nearly cold when you pour. Warm jelly melts the fat and softens the crust from within, and it will find every weak seam in the pastry and leak out.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint of water is 10 fl oz and a pint and a half of stock is 30 fl oz. A wine-glassful is roughly 2 fl oz.
- Moderate fireMedium heat on a burner. The instruction to shake the pan and watch for burning applies to the first reduction, when there is very little liquid against a lot of bone.
- TamisA tammy cloth, a fine woven strainer. A chinois or a sieve lined with damp muslin does the same job; the point is to catch fat globules and fine sediment so the set jelly is clear.
- GelatineAn eighth of an ounce is about 3.5 g, a light set for the quantity of liquid. In modern leaf gelatine that is roughly two sheets, depending on grade. Game bones and veal trimmings give up a good deal of natural gelatine, so this is a top-up, not the whole structure.
- Skimming and degreasingThe recipe skims once, when the stock comes up to the boil. Any fat left behind will set as a pale crust on the finished jelly and taste greasy cold.
- YieldThe recipe gives no finished quantity. Judge by filling the pie until it will take no more through the funnel.
- SubstitutionsIf you have no veal trimmings, a split pig's trotter or a piece of veal knuckle supplies the same body. Madeira can be replaced by a dry sherry, though Madeira is the slightly sweeter of the two.
This is a component recipe rather than a dish, and it belongs to the raised pie: a game pie baked in a stiff hot-water crust, which shrinks as the meat cooks and leaves a void under the lid. That void was filled with a jellied stock poured through the steam hole once the pie had cooled, both to keep the meat moist and to seal it from air, which mattered when a pie might sit out for several days of cold suppers. The frugality is characteristic of the period: the carcases the birds were boned from, and the trimmings of the veal and bacon used in the pie, are simmered back into the same pie they came out of. Madeira was one of the fortified wines commonly called for in English game cookery, and it keeps well once opened; the small addition of gelatine reflects the nineteenth-century availability of reliable commercial gelatine, which spared cooks the older labour of boiling calves' feet for their jelly.