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Veal Pie, with Oysters
Take a pound and a half of veal cutlet half an inch thick. Flatten the meat with a cutlet-bat, sprinkle over it a seasoning of pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, and cut it into neat pieces. Spread upon these a thin covering of lean ham minced and pounded, and roll them up. Place them at the bottom of a pie-dish, and put a layer of oysters upon them. Repeat until the dish is full. Stew the bones and trimmings of the veal in stock or water, thicken the liquor with flour and butter, and add the oyster liquor. Pour the strained gravy over the meat, and keep back a portion to put into the pie when it is baked. Cover the pie with pastry, and bake in the usual way. Time to bake the pie, an hour and a half to two hours.
A raised-flavour veal pie of the late Victorian kind: rolled, ham-lined collops layered with oysters under a pastry lid. Most of the decisions the original leaves unstated are about the crust and the oysters.
- The oysters are the hingeNinety minutes to two hours in a hot dish reduces oysters to grey erasers. If you want them recognisable, use large ones, bury them in the middle layers where the heat is gentlest, and consider adding a second handful through the crust hole with the reserved gravy at the end.
- "Bake in the usual way"The book gives no temperature. For a covered pie-dish of raw meat, a hot oven to set and colour the pastry followed by a drop to finish the filling works well: roughly 425F for the first 20 minutes, then 325-350F for the remainder. Shield the crust with foil if it browns before the time is up.
- Cutlet-batA flat, heavy meat bat with a smooth face, used to spread the cutlet thin without shredding it. The flat side of a meat mallet or the bottom of a small pan does the same work; do not use the toothed face.
- Veal cutletHere a boneless slice about half an inch thick, most likely from the leg or shoulder, rather than a rib chop. Ask for veal leg steaks or escalopes cut thick; boneless pork loin or turkey breast substitutes acceptably, though it will not gel the gravy the same way.
- The bones and trimmingsThe stewed bones add gelatine, which is what makes the gravy set when the pie is cold. If you buy boneless veal, ask for a few bones or add a split veal or chicken foot to the stock.
- Oyster liquorThe liquid in the shells or the tub. Strain it through muslin to catch grit, and taste before salting the gravy — it is already saline, and the minced ham brings more salt again.
- Reserved gravyKeep back about half a cup, warm it, and pour it in through a hole in the crust as soon as the pie leaves the oven. It refills the space left as the meat shrinks and stops the filling drying.
- Dish and yieldA pound and a half of veal plus oysters will fill a pie-dish of roughly 1.5 to 2 quarts and serves four to six. The dish should be filled to the rim so the pastry has something to rest on.
Veal and oysters were a standard Victorian pairing: oysters were cheap and abundant in Britain until beds were fished out and disease thinned them in the later 1800s, and they were routinely used to stretch and season beefsteak puddings, veal pies and stuffings. The technique here — thin collops spread with pounded ham and rolled — is the same one that produces veal olives and beef roulades. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, first issued in the 1870s and reprinted in expanded form for decades, leaves instructions like "bake in the usual way" to pass without comment: the pastry and the oven were assumed knowledge, and only the assembly needed writing down.