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Savoury Pie
Butter a pie-dish very thickly, and cover the bottom with a layer of chopped mushrooms. Place upon these two ounces of tapioca which has been soaked for ten minutes in a quarter of a pint of water, and sprinkle over it a moderate-sized onion and two or three sage-leaves chopped small. Add three hard-boiled eggs, also chopped small, and a seasoning of pepper and salt. Lay two ounces or more of butter broken into little pieces here and there on the surface, cover the dish with pastry, and bake in a well-heated oven. When the pastry is done the pie will be cooked enough.
A meatless pie with a single pastry lid, built on tapioca as a binder for mushroom liquor. It works, but the original is thin on both liquid and detail about the oven.
- The hinge: enough liquidTwo ounces of tapioca will absorb far more than the quarter-pint it soaks in, and mushrooms give up less liquor under a sealed crust than in a pan. Add about half a pint (roughly a cup) of well-flavoured vegetable or chicken stock to the filling, or the tapioca will bake into dry beads.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 150 ml or a generous half cup. The old term for it is a gill.
- TapiocaVictorian tapioca was usually sold as pearl or flake, not as the instant granules or the large boba pearls sold now; small pearl is the closest match here. Two ounces is roughly a third of a cup of pearls; instant tapioca is more absorbent and is best used at about half that weight if it is all you have.
- A well-heated ovenThe book gives no temperature. A hot oven of roughly 425F/220C will set and lift the pastry; dropping to about 375F/190C afterwards gives the tapioca and onion time to cook through. On that basis the instruction that the pie is done when the pastry is done should be treated with caution -- check that the filling is hot and the tapioca softened.
- Pastry lid onlyThere is no bottom crust here. Butter the dish thickly as directed, fill it proud of the rim so the lid does not sag, and cut a vent in the centre.
- SageTwo or three fresh sage leaves chopped fine is the right scale; dried rubbed sage is stronger and a half teaspoon is plenty. Sage and onion together will dominate the mushrooms if you are heavy-handed.
- MushroomsField or chestnut mushrooms give the savoury depth the dish depends on; plain white buttons will taste flat. Around 8 oz (225 g) chopped fills a 1-quart dish comfortably.
- YieldA 1 to 1.5 quart pie dish, serving three or four as a main course with potatoes or greens.
Cassell's is a dictionary rather than a menu, and "Savoury Pie" here means simply a pie that is not sweet. What makes this one unusual is that it is meatless without announcing itself as such: mushrooms, onion, sage, hard-boiled egg and butter stand in for the meat and gravy, with tapioca doing the work of a thickened stock. Tapioca, a starch extracted from cassava root and imported through the colonial trade, was cheap by the later nineteenth century and appears often in British cookery of the period, largely in nursery puddings; using it as a savoury binder looks like a thrifty extension of the same habit. Meatless pies of this kind appear in vegetarian and economical cookery of the later nineteenth century, though the book itself makes no such claim for it.