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Leicester Pie
Take three pounds of pork, fat and lean together. Cut it into pieces two inches long and an inch and a half wide, season these with pepper and salt and powdered sage, and put them aside. Mix a tea-spoonful of salt with a pound of flour. Stir into it four ounces of lard, dissolved in half a pint of hot water, roll the paste out, line a greased tin mould with part of it, put in the pieces of pork, place the lid on the top, and fasten the edges securely. Bake in a moderate oven. The greatest expedition should be used, as this pie should be put into the oven while it is still warm. Time to bake, an hour and three-quarters. Probable cost, 2s. 10d., Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A raised pork pie in miniature: hot-water crust, coarse-cut seasoned pork, long slow bake. Almost everything that can go wrong happens at the pastry stage.
- Work the pastry warmThe instruction about expedition is the hinge of the recipe. Hot-water crust is only pliable while it holds its heat; once the lard sets the dough cracks as you line the mould and the pie leaks in the oven. Mix, knead briefly, and shape it all within about ten minutes, keeping the reserved lid dough covered in a warm place.
- Imperial measuresThis is a British book, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Four ounces of lard is half a cup, and a pound of flour is roughly 3½ cups — weigh it if you can, since hot-water crust is sensitive to the flour-to-fat ratio.
- Moderate oven350F/175C. At an hour and three-quarters the pork will be well past done; the long time is there to cook a thick raw filling inside an insulating crust and to set the pastry hard. A thermometer through the steam hole should read 160F/71C at the centre.
- The mouldA "tin mould" here means a plain deep tin or a hinged raised-pie mould, not a shallow pie plate. A 6-inch springform or a loose-bottomed cake tin works; the point is straight sides tall enough to hold three pounds of meat.
- Cut, do not minceThe two-inch pieces are deliberate. Coarse hand-cut pork with its fat left in gives the sliceable, mosaic texture of a proper pork pie; ground pork compacts into a dense loaf and renders out badly.
- Steam hole and jellyCassell's omits both. Cut a hole in the lid before baking or the pastry will dome and split. Traditionally a well-reduced pork or trotter stock is poured in through that hole once the pie has cooled a little, filling the gap left as the meat shrinks and setting to jelly.
- Cool before cuttingLet it go completely cold, several hours at least, before slicing. Cut warm, the filling collapses and the crust crumbles. Yield of six or seven is accurate as a cold cut with pickle or salad.
The raised pie — meat enclosed in a stiff paste of flour, lard and boiling water — is one of the oldest surviving English forms, descended from the medieval "coffyn", where the crust began as a baking vessel rather than something anyone expected to eat. By the nineteenth century the pastry had become rich enough to eat and the pie had settled into a regional identity across the East Midlands, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire above all, with Melton Mowbray the name that carried furthest. Cassell's gives the plainest possible version: pork, pepper, salt and sage, with no jelly and no chopped fine work. Sage with pork is the standard English pairing of the period.