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POTATO PIE (another way) (Butter a shallow pie-dish)
Butter a shallow pie-dish rather thickly. Line the edges with a good crust, and then fill the pie with mashed potatoes seasoned with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Lay over them some marrow, together with small lumps of butter, hard-boiled eggs, blanched almonds, sliced dates, sliced lemon and candied peel. Cover the dish with pastry, and bake the pie in a well-heated oven for half an hour or more, according to the size of the pie. Probable cost, 1s. or 1s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A late-Victorian survival of the old sweet-and-savoury pie, built on mashed potato rather than fruit or meat. Most of what needs translating is the oven, the marrow and the moisture of the filling.
- "A well-heated oven"Probably somewhere around 400-425F (200-220C), though the book gives no figures. Most of the filling is already cooked, so the heat is chiefly there to set and colour the pastry within the half hour given.
- MarrowBeef bone marrow, ordered from a butcher as cut marrowbones or already scooped. Push the raw marrow out of the split bones, or warm the bones briefly until it loosens, then cut it into rough pieces and dot them over the potato as you would the butter. It melts into the filling and is the main source of richness.
- Keep the mash stiffThis is the hinge. A wet, milky mash will steam under the lid and soak the crust. Mash the potatoes dry, season firmly with pepper, salt and nutmeg, and let them cool before filling so the pastry edges do not slump.
- Lining only the edgesThe instruction looks deliberate: a band of pastry around the rim of the buttered dish gives the lid something to seal to, with no base crust underneath the filling. This was a common way of building a Victorian pie-dish, not an omission.
- Candied peelVictorian candied peel was often sold as whole candied halves of citron, orange or lemon, cut into strips at home. Modern chopped mixed peel works, but use a light hand -- perhaps 1 oz for a pie this size, or the sugar overwhelms the nutmeg and marrow.
- Sliced lemonWhole slices of lemon, pith and all, will read as bitter to a modern palate. Thin slices with the pips removed, or the pared zest, give the same lift the original was after.
- Cost and quantity1s. to 1s. 6d. is a shilling to eighteen pence, useful mainly as a rough signal of what the dish was reckoned to cost. The recipe gives no quantities; for four or five people a shallow dish of about 8-9 inches, roughly 1 1/2 lb potatoes, 3 hard-boiled eggs, 2 oz almonds and 2-3 oz dates would suit.
- ServingThe book does not say whether this is a savoury course or a sweet. It sits between the two; treat it as a supper dish and serve it hot, cut in wedges, on its own.
Sweet-savoury pies of this kind are the tail end of a much older English tradition, in which dried fruit, spice, candied peel, almonds and meat or marrow went into the same crust as a matter of course -- the same logic that produced mincemeat, which kept its suet long after it lost its mutton. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century, that combination had largely retreated into Christmas baking, and a recipe like this one reads as a survival rather than a fashion. Its base is the newer element: potatoes had become the cheap bulk of the British kitchen, and a dictionary of cookery aimed at middle-class households was expected to show a dozen ways to dress them. What the pie really demonstrates is the Victorian habit of building a substantial dish from a penny's worth of potato and then dignifying it with marrow, almonds and candied peel -- the cost note of a shilling or so making the economy of the thing explicit.