Home › The Principles of Cookery › Veal Pie, Superlative
Veal Pie, Superlative
Butter a dish, and fill it with alternate layers of lean veal cut into neat pieces and seasoned with pepper, salt, and pounded mace, lean ham sliced, sweetbread, and chopped truffles. Place little pieces of butter here and there in the pie. Cover the dish with rich pastry, and bake till done. After the pie is taken from the oven, pour into it through the hole in the centre some gravy made of strong, highly-seasoned veal stock mixed with a glassful of champagne.
A late-Victorian raised-flavour veal pie that assumes a cook who already knows how to handle sweetbreads and how long a covered pie needs. The gaps are worth filling.
- Sweetbreads need preparation firstThe recipe treats them as a pantry item, but veal sweetbreads should be soaked in several changes of cold water for a few hours, blanched briefly, then cooled, pressed and trimmed of membrane before slicing. Raw untrimmed sweetbreads layered straight into a pie will be spongy and grey.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; cooks of the period judged the oven by hand and experience rather than a dial. Start at 425F for 15-20 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 325-350F for a further 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours, covering the top with foil if it colours too fast. The veal wants slow cooking to be tender.
- "A glassful of champagne"The recipe says only "a glassful", which is not a fixed measure; period equivalents for a wineglassful are usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so read this as a small glass rather than a tumbler. Any dry sparkling wine does the same job; the point is acidity and lift in a stock-heavy gravy, not the label.
- Pounded maceBlade mace crushed in a mortar, which is more floral and less sharp than ground nutmeg. Ground mace from a jar is a fair substitute at about half a teaspoon for a large pie; it fades fast, so buy it in small quantities.
- TrufflesChopped black truffle was expensive but obtainable in a Victorian town kitchen, sold fresh in season and also preserved in tins or bottles. A tablespoon of finely chopped preserved truffle, or a small quantity of dried porcini soaked and chopped, gives the earthy note without the outlay. Truffle oil does not behave the same way under an hour of baking.
- The gravy is the hingeIt goes in after baking, through the steam hole, and it must be hot and well reduced. Cold or thin stock poured into a hot pie will slacken the filling and soften the underside of the crust. Pour it in slowly with a funnel and let the pie stand ten minutes before cutting.
- "Rich pastry"Most likely a butter-rich short paste or puff paste for a dish pie rather than a hot-water crust. Cut a vent in the centre before baking and keep it open with a small roll of foil or a pie funnel, or there will be nowhere for the gravy to go.
- Ham and saltLean ham plus a strong reduced veal stock brings plenty of salt. Season the veal lightly and correct the gravy at the end rather than salting each layer generously.
- YieldA pie made in a 2-quart dish with about 2 lb veal, 1/2 lb ham and a pair of sweetbreads serves six as a main course.
The "superlative" in the title distinguishes this from the plain veal-and-ham pie found in many English household books of the period; the difference is the sweetbreads, the truffles and the champagne, which move it from cold-larder food to a dish for a dinner table. Veal was associated with better-off kitchens, mild enough to carry seasoning and costly enough to be worth dressing up, and it was commonly paired with ham. The trick of pouring hot seasoned gravy in through the vent hole after baking is older than this book and is associated with the tradition of raised pies, where the crust served largely as a container; here it survives in a dish pie, where its purpose is to keep the filling moist without turning the pastry to paste. Champagne in a savoury gravy suggests the Francophile leaning of much English cookery writing in the second half of the nineteenth century.