Home › The Principles of Cookery › PILCHARD AND LEEK PIE (a Devonshire dish)
PILCHARD AND LEEK PIE (a Devonshire dish)
Trim off the coarser leaves from four or five large leeks. Cut the white part only into equal lengths, and scald these in salted water. Lay them in a pie-dish, the edges of which are lined with plain pastry, put on top of the leeks some salted pilchards which have been laid in cold water the previous day to soak, then another layer of leeks on top of the pilchards, and put on the cover. Bake in a moderate oven. When the pie is done enough, lift up the cover, drain off the gravy, and put in its place a cupful of boiling cream. Time to bake the pie, forty minutes or more. Probable cost, uncertain. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A West Country salt-fish pie that depends almost entirely on how well the fish is desalted before it goes near the dish. Everything else is straightforward.
- Soak the fish properlySalted pilchards are hard-cured and will be inedible if the overnight soak is skimped. Cover generously with cold water, refrigerate, and change the water two or three times over 24 hours; taste a scrap of the flesh before you build the pie. Beyond the salted water the recipe specifies for scalding the leeks, add no further salt.
- What a pilchard isA pilchard is a mature sardine (Sardina pilchardus). Salted whole pilchards in barrels are now hard to come by; salt-packed sardines or good salted anchovies, rinsed and boned, stand in. Fresh sardines will work but produce a different, milder pie and need no soaking.
- Moderate oven350F/175C. Forty minutes gets the pastry lid coloured and the leeks tender; a deeper dish may want an hour.
- Lined edges onlyThe instruction to line the edges of the pie-dish with pastry means a rim of shortcrust to seal the lid to, not a bottom crust — a common arrangement for a deep pie-dish of this kind.
- Scalding the leeksTwo or three minutes in salted boiling water, then drain well. This is to soften them and take off the raw edge, not to cook them through, and draining matters because leeks carry a lot of water into the pie.
- A cupful of creamAbout 8 fl oz/240 ml, heated to boiling before it goes in. Tip the pie to drain off the salty fish gravy first, or the cream will be too seasoned to be pleasant. Use double or heavy cream; single cream can split against the hot dish.
- YieldFive or six as written, with potatoes alongside. Four or five large leeks gives perhaps a pound of trimmed white once the green is discarded.
Pilchards were the great commercial fish of the Cornish and south Devon coast, caught in vast seine-net shoals through late summer and preserved in salt for months or shipped abroad o to to Catholic Mediterranean markets were known as fumados, often said to have been corrupted locally into "fair maids," though that derivation is folk tradition rather than established etymology. A household that ate pilchards in winter ate them salted, and pies of this kind, pairing the cured fish with whatever allium and pastry were to hand, were everyday food rather than anything ceremonial; the better-known stargazy pie of Mousehole is a cousin with the heads left protruding. The finishing cupful of cream is the Devon signature, and the reason for draining the fish gravy first: the point is to replace a hard salty liquor with a rich one. Cassell's flags the dish as regional \ to a London reader \ and prices it at "cost, uncertain."