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Pot Pie, Chicken
Joint a fowl into small convenient pieces. Boil in enough water to cover them, until almost tender. Put a table-spoonful of salt into the water when the meat is half done. Make a crust by mixing a quart of flour with a pint of milk, two table-spoonfuls of butter, two tea-spoonfuls of baking-powder, and a salt-spoonful of salt. Roll lightly, and line a well-buttered pudding-basin with it. Put in a layer of the chicken, season it with salt and pepper, dredge with a little flour, then put in other layers of chicken until the basin is full. Cover with the crust, tie a cloth over the top, and boil slowly for an hour. Probable cost, 3s. 6d.
This is a boiled pudding rather than a baked pie: the crust lines a basin, the basin goes into a pan of simmering water, and the whole thing steams for an hour. A few of the quantities and vessels need translating before it will work.
- The hinge: keep the cooking liquorThe recipe never tells you to add liquid to the filled basin, and a pudding built from drained meat alone will come out dry. Ladle in enough of the seasoned poaching broth to come most of the way up the layers of chicken; the flour dredged between them thickens it into gravy as it steams.
- Pudding-basinA one to two quart heatproof bowl with a rim, not a modern pie dish. Butter it heavily, and stand it on a trivet or folded cloth in the pan so the base is off the metal, with water coming halfway up the sides.
- The clothA floured cloth tied under the rim is the period method; pleat it across the middle so the crust has room to rise. Buttered foil and string, or a lidded plastic pudding basin, does the same job with less fuss. Top up the pan with boiling water as it evaporates.
- Quart of flour, pint of milkMeasured by volume: about 4 cups (roughly 1 lb 2 oz) flour to an imperial pint, 20 fl oz, of milk. American cooks working from a 16 fl oz pint will get a stiffer dough; add milk until it just comes together, since it should be soft enough to roll but firm enough to line the basin.
- Salt-spoonfulThe small spoon of a Victorian condiment set, about a quarter teaspoon.
- Baking-powderTwo teaspoons to a quart of flour is light by current standards, and older powders were often weaker and single-acting. Four teaspoons to 4 cups of flour gives a crust closer to what the book intends.
- Boiling the fowl"Until almost tender" meant a good hour or more for a mature bird. A supermarket chicken jointed small is nearly done in 25 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer, and it then steams for an hour longer, so stop well short of tender or the meat will shred away.
- Yield and servingA two-quart basin feeds four to six. Let it stand five minutes, run a knife round the crust, and turn it out onto a deep dish so the gravy is caught.
- The cost line3s. 6d. is the estimated price in late-Victorian shillings and pence, printed for the household accountant rather than the cook, and carries no information about the method.
Boiled pastry puddings of this kind were the everyday form of the English pie for households without a reliable oven or without one to spare: a basin, a cloth and a pot over the fire would do the whole job. Cassell's places the recipe among a run of pot pies in a dictionary aimed at the middle-class kitchen of the 1870s onward, when a stewing fowl was cheap and tough, which is why the bird is boiled almost tender before it ever meets the crust. The name "pot pie" is often said to derive from exactly this arrangement, a pie made in the pot rather than the oven, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented; the term appears to have persisted in American usage even as the boiled version gave way to the baked dish now sold under the same name.