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Pork and Apple Pie
Cut the pork in thin slices, and season these with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Fill a pie-dish with alternate layers of these, and of apples which have been pared, cored, and sliced. Add a little sugar for sweetening, and as much white wine as will moisten the contents of the dish, and place two or three good-sized lumps of butter upon the top. Cover the whole with a good crust, and bake in a hot oven. Time to bake a moderate-sized pie, one hour and a half.
A plain layered pie of raw pork and apple baked under a single top crust. The main adjustment is the oven: an hour and a half at a Victorian "hot oven" will scorch a modern pastry lid long before the middle is done.
- Oven temperature"Hot" in Victorian usage is generally taken to mean somewhere around 425-450F (220-230C), though the book gives no figures. Give it 20 minutes at that heat to set and colour the crust, then drop to 325-350F (165-175C) for the remainder, covering the top with foil if it darkens. The filling is raw meat and needs the long, gentler stretch.
- The cut of porkThin slices from the shoulder or a boned loin end work best; anything very lean dries out over ninety minutes. Slice no thicker than about a quarter inch so the layers cook through evenly, and trim but do not remove all the fat, which is doing the basting here.
- DonenessPork is safely cooked at 145F (63C) at the centre with a short rest. A probe pushed through a vent hole into the middle layer is the only reliable check, since the crust hides everything.
- ApplesUse a cooking apple; Granny Smith and Northern Spy hold their shape, while a Bramley will cook down to a purée. Sweet dessert varieties collapse into sauce and flood the dish. The "little sugar" is probably a tablespoon or two, depending on the apples' sharpness.
- The wine"As much as will moisten" suggests something like half a cup for a standard 9-inch dish; a dry white or a hard cider. It should pool in the bottom, not submerge the layers, or the pie floods when cut.
- Crust"A good crust" here is a shortcrust or suet paste laid over the top only -- the recipe says to cover the whole of a filled pie-dish -- with the rim sealed and a vent cut. A pie funnel or an inverted eggcup in the centre keeps the lid from sagging into the filling.
- Butter on topTwo or three "good-sized lumps" is about 2 oz (55g), dotted over the last layer under the pastry, not on the crust itself.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. For a moderate-sized dish of roughly 9 inches and 2 pints, something on the order of 1.5 lb of pork and three or four apples would serve four to six. Serve hot.
Pork and apple belong together in the kitchen for the same reason they belonged together on the farm: pigs were killed in autumn, when apples were coming in, and the acid of the fruit cuts the richness of fresh pork. Layered raw-meat pies of this kind are much older than Cassell's, descending from the medieval and Tudor habit of baking spiced meat with dried or fresh fruit and sweetening under a coffin of pastry, and the nutmeg and sugar here are a survival of that taste rather than a Victorian innovation. Versions of the dish are often associated with the West Country and with Cheshire, where a comparable pie is often made with cider in place of wine. Its appearance in a general dictionary of cookery marks it as everyday food -- a cheap cut, a bushel fruit and a flour crust, assembled raw and left to the oven to do the work.