Home › The Principles of Cookery › SEA PIE (another way)
SEA PIE (another way)
Take some uncooked meat cut into slices, and put it in a saucepan; peel some onions and swedes (or turnips, if preferred to swedes), cut them into slices, and put them in with the meat, and sufficient water barely to cover the whole, then season pleasantly with salt and pepper. Potatoes may also be added. Stew gently till the crust is ready. Make a stiff paste of suet or dripping; roll it to the size of the saucepan. Lay it on the meat, put the lid on the pan, and simmer gently for an hour and a half. Serve meat and vegetables on a dish, lay the crust on them, and pour the gravy over all.
A one-pot stew with a suet crust steamed on top rather than baked. The technique hinges on keeping the pan barely at a tremble, since the crust cooks in trapped steam and a hard boil will both toughen the meat and waterlog the pastry.
- The crust is steamed, not bakedThe paste sits directly on the meat with the lid clamped over it, so it comes out pale, soft and dumpling-like rather than browned. Do not lift the lid during the hour and a half; the escaping steam is what cooks it.
- SwedesSwede is rutabaga in North America — the yellow-fleshed, purple-shouldered root, not a white turnip. Turnip is offered as a substitute in the original and behaves the same way, though it cooks faster and tastes milder.
- Making the pasteA standard stiff suet paste is about 8 oz self-raising or plain flour to 4 oz shredded suet, a good pinch of salt and cold water to bind — roughly 5 fl oz. Beef dripping can replace suet, rubbed in cold. It should be firm enough to lift in one piece.
- "Sufficient water barely to cover"Take this literally. The vegetables give up liquid and little evaporates under a tight lid, so a generous hand here produces thin gravy and a soggy underside to the crust.
- Choice of meatSlices of chuck, shin or skirt suit this best; anything lean will be dry after two hours of stewing. Cut roughly 1/2 inch thick so the slices cook through in the time given.
- Order and timing"Stew gently till the crust is ready" means the meat gets a head start only while you mix and roll the paste — perhaps 15 to 20 minutes. Total cooking is therefore under two hours, which is adequate for sliced stewing beef but not for large chunks.
- PotatoesIf you add them, use waxy potatoes in thick slices and put them in with the rest. Floury varieties will disintegrate over ninety minutes and thicken the gravy into paste.
- Pan and heatA heavy pan with a well-fitting lid, on the lowest burner setting or a heat diffuser. If your smallest flame still bubbles the liquid, a covered pan in a low oven (around 300F) will hold a steadier heat.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities; on the scale of paste suggested above, about 1 1/2 lb of meat with the vegetables would serve four.
Sea pie is ship's food by name and by nature: a way of getting meat, roots and pastry out of one pot on a galley stove where oven space did not exist. Sailors' versions were reckoned by the number of pastry layers — a two-decker or three-decker sea pie had crust interleaved through the meat, and this simplified single lid is the domestic descendant. The dish is associated with British and French fishing fleets in the North Atlantic, and the Quebec cipaille or cipâte, a layered meat pie, is often traced to the same source, though whether the French name came from the English or the reverse is still argued. Its appearance in a late-Victorian dictionary of cookery, among the plain economical entries, reflects how far ship's cooking had come ashore into the ordinary British kitchen, where a suet crust steamed over a stew asked nothing of the household but one pan and a tight lid.