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Veal Pie, with Sweetbreads
Take a pound and a half of veal and a sweetbread. Cut the veal into pieces an inch and a half square, and season these as in the previous recipes. Soak the sweetbread for an hour, throw it into boiling salted water, and boil for a quarter of an hour. Cut it into slices. Butter the pie-dish, fill it with alternate layers of veal and sweetbread, and intersperse amongst the pieces of meat, oysters, mushrooms, or forcemeat balls. Lay upon the surface three or four hard-boiled yolks of eggs. Pour over the whole a small quantity of gravy made from the bones and trimmings of the veal stewed in cold water till the stock will jelly when cold, and flavoured with lemon, sweet herbs, and ketchup. Have ready some nicely-seasoned gravy to pour into the pie when it is baked. Cover and bake the pie in the usual way for one hour and a half to two hours.
A Victorian raised-crust meat pie of the plainer sort, built in a dish rather than free-standing. The instructions assume a cook who has already read the surrounding pages, so several steps are left implicit.
- The hinge: two graviesOnly a small quantity of jellied stock goes in before baking, so the meat steams rather than boils and the crust does not sink. The second, well-seasoned gravy is poured in hot after the pie comes out of the oven, usually through a vent or hole in the crust, and sets around the meat as it cools. Skipping the second addition gives a dry pie.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, only "the usual way". As a modern equivalent for a covered dish pie, a hot oven to set the pastry and then moderate heat for the long bake works: roughly 425F for the first 15-20 minutes, then 350F for the remainder. Cover the top with foil or paper if it colours before the veal is tender.
- SweetbreadsOrder veal sweetbreads (thymus or pancreas) from a butcher; they are rarely on supermarket shelves. The hour's soak in cold water draws out blood, and the quarter-hour boil firms them enough to slice - that is what the long blanch is for here, not tenderness. Peel away the outer membrane and any gristle after blanching.
- Seasoning "as in the previous recipes"The seasoning is carried over from the preceding recipes in the book, which should be consulted for the exact mixture; Victorian veal seasonings of this kind generally run to salt, pepper and a little mace or nutmeg. Season the cubes generously; a large pie needs more salt than it looks like it should.
- OystersAdd them raw and whole among the meat. Pre-cooked or long-simmered oysters turn to rubber over a two-hour bake, and in a pie of this size they will contribute liquid and salt of their own, so hold back on the salt if you use them.
- The jellying stockVeal bones and trimmings covered in cold water and simmered several hours give a stock that sets firm when chilled - the gelatine comes from the joints and knuckle. Modern powdered gelatine in good stock is a fair substitute if you have no bones, but the flavour of the trimmings is the point.
- KetchupIn Victorian British usage this is mushroom or walnut ketchup, thin, dark and salty - closer to a splash of Worcestershire or soy than to tomato ketchup. A teaspoon or two is enough.
- CrustNo pastry is specified because the book covers it separately. Puff pastry or a plain shortcrust lid, cut with a vent, suits a dish pie; brush with beaten egg for colour.
- YieldA pound and a half of veal plus a sweetbread fills a pie dish of about 1.5 litres and serves four to six, more if it is one dish among several. It is meant to be eaten hot, or cold once the jelly has set.
Veal and sweetbread pies belong to a long English tradition of the enriched meat pie, in which lean, mild veal is padded out with the small luxuries a good butcher's shop supplied - sweetbreads, oysters, forcemeat balls, hard-boiled egg yolks laid on top as much for the cut surface as for flavour. The oysters are a period marker: in the earlier and middle part of the nineteenth century they were cheap and plentiful in Britain, used as a stretcher in beef and veal dishes rather than as a delicacy, with prices already rising as the beds were overfished from the 1860s-70s. The recipe does involve several skills at once: preparing offal, drawing a gelatinous stock from bones, and the two-stage gravy that keeps a covered pie moist without flooding the pastry. The habit of finishing a baked pie with hot seasoned gravy poured through the vent is one of the more useful things the Victorian kitchen worked out, and it survives in modern pork and game pie making.