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Leicestershire Medley Pie
Take a pound each of cold fat bacon, cold roast beef or pork, and cored apples. Line the edges of a pie-dish with a good crust made of dripping or lard. Fill it with the meat and apples in alternate layers, and season each layer with a little pepper, salt, and powdered ginger. Pour half a pint of ale over all, place the lid on the top, and bake in a good oven. Time to bake, about an hour and a half. Probable cost, 2s. 3d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A leftovers pie: everything but the ale and the pastry is already cooked, so the hour and a half is about melting the bacon fat into the apples and setting the crust, not cooking meat through. Judge it by the pastry and by a knife slipped through the centre coming out hot.
- "Line the edges"This is a lidded pie, not a double-crust one. A strip of pastry is pressed round the moistened rim of the dish so the lid has something to seal against; the filling sits directly on the dish. Keep it that way or the ale will make a soggy base.
- A good ovenIn modern terms something in the region of 400F (200C) is a reasonable equivalent, dropping to 350F (180C) if the crust colours too quickly. The staged handling is a modern suggestion; the recipe specifies only "a good oven" and an hour and a half.
- Half a pint of aleAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. Use a mild brown ale or a bitter that is not aggressively hopped — modern IPAs turn bitter and metallic against the apple. Pour it in before the lid goes on, not through a hole afterwards.
- Cold fat baconNot rashers. This means a chunk of boiled or roasted fat bacon, streaky or belly cut, sliced or diced thick so it renders slowly into the apples. The recipe does not say whether it is smoked or green; smoked bacon will dominate everything else in the dish.
- SaltA pound of cured bacon plus a pound of already-seasoned roast meat carries most of the salt you need. Season the apple layers and leave the meat layers alone.
- The applesCored, and in practice probably peeled and sliced thick. A cooking apple that collapses, such as a Bramley, is what makes this a medley rather than meat with fruit garnish. Firmer dessert apples stay in stubborn cubes.
- GingerPowdered ginger with pork and apple is the whole point of the seasoning, and it needs a firmer hand than "a little" suggests: roughly half a teaspoon spread across the layers.
- Yield and costSix or seven, as stated, with potatoes alongside. The 2s. 3d. is a Victorian price for a dish built from Sunday's cold joint, which is the economy the recipe is selling.
Medley pie belongs to a tradition of English pies that put pork or bacon and apple under one crust; versions are recorded in several counties, and the association with any one of them is loose. The recipe is a working one for using up cold meat, which is the honest reason such pies existed: a joint roasted on Sunday reappeared midweek bulked out with orchard fruit and moistened with ale rather than stock. The powdered ginger reflects an older English habit of sweet-spicing meat, common in medieval and Tudor cookery and by the nineteenth century largely retreating into regional dishes. Attributions of these pies to particular villages are traditional rather than documented; what is certain is that the type was familiar enough for a national dictionary of cookery to record it under a county name.