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Veal Pie, Raised
Take a pound and a half of lean veal and a pound of ham. Cut three parts of the veal into neat pieces, and season these with pepper and chopped mushrooms. Mince the remainder of the veal with an equal quantity of fat bacon, pound the mixture in a mortar, and season with salt and cayenne. A small piece of onion, herbs, and spices may be added to the forcemeat, if liked. Line a mould with pastry in the usual way. Cover the bottom with forcemeat, and fill the pie with alternate layers of thinly-sliced ham, veal, and forcemeat. Lay thin slices of fat bacon on the top of the meat, put a bay-leaf on that, and finish and bake the pie (see RAISED PIES). Half an hour after it is taken from the oven pour into it, through a pointed strainer placed in the hole at the top, a little highly-seasoned gravy which will form a strong jelly when cold. This gravy may be made by stewing in stock or water for a couple of hours a calf's foot and the bones and trimmings of the veal with an onion stuck with two cloves, a small bunch of herbs, and a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. When the pie is sufficiently baked, a skewer will pierce it easily. If liked, the pieces of veal in the pie may be larded. Time to bake the pie, two hours or more. (See also VEAL PIES, RAISED, SMALL.)
A raised pie of the standard Victorian type: hot-water crust standing on its own, layered veal and ham, and a savoury jelly poured in after baking to fill the gap left as the meat shrinks. The book assumes you have read its RAISED PIES entry, which supplies the crust and the moulding.
- The hinge is the jellyPouring the gravy in half an hour after the pie leaves the oven is not a flourish. The meat contracts as it cooks, and warm liquid gelatine will run into the void left behind and fill it; poured cold or too late it will not spread, and an air pocket is left in the pie.
- Oven heatA raised pie of this size wants a hot oven at first to set the crust, roughly 425F for the first 20 minutes, then a moderate 325-350F for the remainder. Two hours is realistic for a pie holding two and a half pounds of meat; the skewer test in the original is sound, but 160-165F at the centre is the reliable check.
- Pastry"Pastry in the usual way" for a raised pie means hot-water crust: flour worked with boiling water and lard, moulded while warm and firm enough to stand. Shortcrust and puff will slump. If you use a hinged raised-pie mould rather than moulding by hand, line it warm and let it cool before filling.
- Calf's foot and the gelatine questionThe calf's foot is the setting agent, and butchers will still order one. Otherwise reduce two cups of good veal or chicken stock with the veal bones and trimmings and check the set by chilling a spoonful; if it stays liquid, soften two teaspoons of powdered gelatine per cup of stock into it. The jelly should taste distinctly over-seasoned when warm, since cold blunts salt and pepper.
- Ham and saltA pound of ham, plus salt in the forcemeat, plus salted gravy adds up quickly. Hams vary widely in saltiness; season the forcemeat lightly, taste a fried nugget of it, and hold back on salting the jelly until the ham is chosen.
- ForcemeatHalf a pound or so of veal pounded with an equal weight of fat bacon is a fine-textured farce. A food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar did in fifteen minutes, but keep everything cold and pulse rather than run it, or the fat smears and the forcemeat goes greasy in the oven.
- LardingLarding the veal pieces means threading strips of chilled back fat through them with a larding needle. Lean veal dries out over two hours, so it is worth doing; if you have no needle, the sheet of fat bacon over the top and generous forcemeat between layers serve much the same purpose.
- The steam holeCut and keep open a hole in the lid, propped with a roll of foil or a small funnel, or the crust lifts and cracks. The "pointed strainer" is a conical strainer, which filters the gravy and directs it into the hole at the top.
- Serving and yieldThis makes a pie for eight to ten as a cold cut. Chill it overnight so the jelly sets hard before cutting, serve at cool room temperature, and eat within three or four days from the refrigerator.
The raised pie is one of the oldest surviving forms of English cookery, descended from the medieval "coffyn" in which a stiff flour-and-water crust is often said to have served first as a cooking vessel and only later as something worth eating, though that account is disputed. By the time Cassell's dictionary appeared "" its date is not something the recipe text itself establishes "" the crust had become properly rich with lard and was firmly part of the dish, but the logic was unchanged: a self-supporting case that could be carried, kept, and cut cold. Veal and ham was the classic pairing for it, the mild meat set against the cured one, and the calf's-foot jelly did double duty as flavour and as a preservative seal against air. Cassell's cross-references to RAISED PIES and to a small-format version of the same pie show how the Victorian household book worked: one master method for the crust, then variation after variation on the filling, on the assumption that a cook would learn the technique once and apply it for the rest of her working life.