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Squab Pie
This is a favourite popular dish in the West of England. It is generally made of mutton, though in the Midland counties beef and fat bacon are sometimes used. Take a deep dish, and fill it with layers of mutton chops, apples cut as for other pies, and finely-shredded onions. Season the layers with pepper and salt, and sweeten the apples with sugar. Cover the pie with a thick crust, and bake in a well-heated oven. Time to bake, two to three hours, according to size.
SQUAB PIE (another way). (See DEVONSHIRE SQUAB PIE.)
Cassell's gives no quantities at all, so this is a method rather than a formula: meat, apple and onion layered in a deep dish under a lid of pastry. The one thing that decides whether it works is the oven — a full three hours at the "well-heated" temperature the book implies will scorch the crust long before the mutton is tender.
- Start hot, then drop the heatThe book says only "well-heated oven" and gives no temperature. In a modern oven, something like 425F for the first 20 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then reduced to about 325F for the remainder, suits the long bake. If the crust is browning too fast, lay a sheet of foil loosely over it.
- There are no squabs in itDespite the name, no pigeon is involved, and none should be added. The recipe is mutton, apple and onion, and that is the whole of it.
- MuttonTrue mutton is hard to buy outside specialist butchers. Lamb shoulder chops or diced shoulder are the practical substitute; they have the fat and connective tissue the long bake needs. Leg or loin chops will go dry.
- Proportions, since none are givenFor a deep 2-quart dish, roughly 2 lb of chops, 1 lb of peeled sliced apple and 2 medium onions fills it sensibly. That is guidance, not the book's instruction — Cassell's leaves the ratio entirely to the cook.
- Apples"Cut as for other pies" is most naturally read as peeled, cored and sliced. A tart cooking apple that collapses, such as Bramley, is best, since a firm eating apple stays in distinct wedges and never joins the gravy. Sugar sparingly; a tablespoon or two is enough to take the edge off, and this is not a sweet pie.
- LiquidThe recipe adds none, relying on the apples and onions to make their own. Half a cup of stock poured in before the crust goes on is insurance against a dry filling, and the pastry lid will hold the steam in.
- "A thick crust"In a Victorian meat pie this would ordinarily be a sturdy shortcrust or suet paste, rolled thicker than you would for a fruit pie. Cut a vent so steam escapes (the book does not say to). Puff pastry will not survive two to three hours.
- Doneness and yieldGo by the meat rather than the clock: a skewer should meet no resistance in the chops. Two hours is usually ample for a dish this size. Serves four to six.
Squab pie is a West Country dish, recorded in English cookery from the eighteenth century onward, and its name is one of the standing puzzles of the English kitchen — the pie contains mutton, not the young pigeons that "squab" otherwise denotes. One frequently repeated explanation is that squabs were the original filling and mutton a later economy; another is that "squab" carried a broader sense of something small, plump or squashed together. Neither is settled. What is well documented is the combination itself: apple with mutton or pork, sweetened lightly and seasoned with onion, belonged to a long English tradition of fruit in meat pies that had largely retreated from fashionable cooking by the time Cassell's was compiled, surviving in regional dishes like this one. The entry itself notes that in the Midland counties beef and fat bacon are sometimes used, and refers the reader on to a separate entry for Devonshire squab pie.