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STAR-GAZY PIE (a favourite Cornish dish.)
This pie is thus named because the heads of the fish are usually placed mouth uppermost in the center of the lid of the crust, as pigeon's legs are in a pigeon pie, and therefore the fish are supposed to be gazing at the sky or the stars. Take as many fresh herrings or mackerel as will fill a moderate-sized dish. Scale, empty, and open them, and remove the bones. Lay the fish flat on the table, season the inside of each with salt, cayenne, and chopped parsley, and roll them up neatly. Butter the pie-dish, and sprinkle upon it a thick layer of finely-grated bread-crumbs, lay in some of the fish, and fill the dish with alternate layers of fish and bread-crumbs. Cover the contents of the pie with a few slices of fat bacon or the fat of a cooked ham, and pour over all six eggs beaten up with two table-spoonfuls of tarragon vinegar, or, if preferred, one-eighth of a pint of cream. Cover the dish with a good crust, and bake the pie in a well-heated oven. Arrange the heads of the fish in the centre of the pastry; when the pie is baked put a piece of parsley into the mouth of each fish, and serve. Time, one hour to an hour and a half.
A Cornish fish pie built like a savoury custard, with the heads breaking through the lid. Most of the work is in the boning; the rest is straightforward.
- The heads go in before bakingThe heads and the baking order -- The verbatim text is ambiguous: it says to bake the pie, then to arrange the heads, then to add parsley once baked. In most versions of the dish the heads are set into the raw pastry so they are held in place as the crust bakes; the parsley sprig goes into each mouth only at the end.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no temperatures; "a well-heated oven" indicates a hot oven, and a modern equivalent of about 400F is the usual reading. Since the filling is egg-thickened, some cooks prefer to start hot to set the pastry and then lower the heat for the remainder of the stated hour to hour and a half.
- The fishHerring and mackerel are both named here, though the dish is historically associated with pilchards, sold today as Cornish sardines. In many versions the fish are filleted with the heads left attached; this recipe instead bones and rolls the fish and arranges the heads separately on the crust.
- One-eighth of a pintOn the imperial pint of 20 fluid ounces, that is 2.5 fl oz of cream, roughly a third of a US cup. The recipe offers it as an alternative to the two tablespoons of tarragon vinegar ("or, if preferred"), not an addition; the vinegar version is the sharper of the two.
- Six eggs is a great dealFor the "moderate-sized dish" specified, six whole eggs with the optional 2.5 fl oz of cream gives a dense, firm set. Four eggs will still bind the layers if you prefer something lighter.
- Breadcrumbs"Finely-grated bread-crumbs" means dry crumbs from stale bread, not soft fresh ones and certainly not the sandy commercial kind. They are there to absorb the oil the fish release, so do not skimp on the layer against the buttered dish.
- The baconThe recipe calls for fat bacon or the fat of a cooked ham, laid on to baste the fish from above. A heavily smoked modern bacon will dominate the herring or mackerel; an unsmoked cut or pancetta keeps the fish forward.
- Crust and yieldCrust -- "A good crust" is not specified further; a shortcrust works well, though a flaky paste is equally plausible for the period. If the heads brown too fast, cover them loosely with foil.
Star-gazy pie belongs to the pilchard fishery that sustained the south Cornish coast for centuries, and the upturned heads are often said to have a practical logic behind the joke: the oil in the heads is supposed to drain down into the pie rather than being wasted, while the bones stay outside the crust — an explanation frequently repeated, though not documented. The dish is most closely associated with Mousehole and with Tom Bawcock's Eve, kept on 23 December, when a star-gazy pie is carried through the village; the story attached to it, of a fisherman who put to sea in a storm and brought back enough fish to save the village from famine, is folklore rather than documented history and the festival's origins are not securely dated. Cassell's includes it as regional colour, which is itself telling — by the late nineteenth century British cookery dictionaries were beginning to record local dishes as curiosities to be explained to a national readership, rather than as everyday food a Cornish household would need written down.