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VEAL POT PIE (economical family dish)
Take two pounds of the breast or scrag of veal, or, if preferred, two pounds of cold cooked veal. Cut it into small pieces convenient for serving, and with it half a pound of pickled pork. Put these into a saucepan, cover with cold water, and let them simmer gently till tender. If the veal has been cooked, only the bones and trimmings of the meat ought to be stewed. Put the meat into a dish, and let it cool. Line the edges of a large pie-dish with good plain pastry or with bread dough rolled to the thickness of half an inch. Put in the meat with six or eight potatoes, and dredge a table-spoonful of flour over all, with a tea-spoonful of pepper. Strain the gravy over it, adding water, if necessary, to make the quantity up to one quart. Cut off as much pastry as is required to cover the dish, and lay the remainder in slices upon the meat. Put some skewers across to support the pastry, and place the cover on the top. Press the edges securely, make a slit in the centre that the steam may escape, and bake the pie in a well-heated oven. When serving turn the pastry on a dish, place the meat upon it, and pour the gravy over all. Wholesome pastry may be made as follows. Put two pounds of flour into a bowl, mix with it a tea-spoonful of salt, make a hole in the centre, and stir into it a tea-spoonful of powdered saleratus dissolved in a cupful of water. Make it into soft dough with sour milk.
A two-stage dish: the meat is stewed first, then baked under a soda-raised crust that steams as much as it bakes. The crust is the part most likely to go wrong, so read the pastry note before starting.
- The hinge: support the crustThe pie holds a full quart of liquid, and without the skewers laid across the dish the top crust sinks into the gravy and turns to paste. Metal skewers, or an inverted pie funnel plus a couple of skewers, keep it clear so it bakes rather than boils.
- SaleratusThe period leavener, potassium or (later) sodium bicarbonate, effectively the ancestor of baking soda. A single teaspoon to two pounds of flour is a light hand by modern proportions, so expect only a modest rise. It needs the acid in the sour milk to work, so use buttermilk or milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup; fresh milk will leave a soapy taste.
- The pastry is not shortcrustNote there is no fat at all in it. This is a soft soda dough, closer to a large dumpling or biscuit topping than to pie pastry. The recipe offers bread dough as an alternative, and the finished pie is turned out onto a dish rather than cut in wedges.
- Two pounds of flour is a bulk figureMore than a single dish needs, though note the dough is not just a lid: it also lines the edges of the dish and is laid in slices over the meat. For one large pie-dish, scale down to roughly a pound of flour with about half a teaspoon of soda and enough sour milk to make a soft dough.
- Scrag and breastScrag is the neck end, sold now as veal neck or stewing veal; breast is still available from a butcher, usually bone-in. Both are gelatinous cuts that want the long gentle simmer specified, about 1.5 to 2 hours until the meat gives way easily.
- Pickled porkSalt pork or a piece of unsmoked green bacon is the closest thing. It is the seasoning of the dish, so hold back on salt in the gravy until you have tasted it; a very salty piece can be blanched first.
- "Well-heated oven"Read as a hot oven, roughly 400 to 425F. Note the recipe has you cool the meat before assembly, and the potatoes go in raw, so the bake has to cook the potatoes as well as the crust: allow longer than a crust alone would need, and test that the potatoes are tender as well as the top being risen, dry and browned.
- The potatoesSix or eight whole potatoes will not cook through in the time the crust takes. Cut them into 1.5-inch chunks, or parboil them, or the pie comes out with hard centres.
- YieldTwo pounds of veal plus pork and potatoes feeds five or six as a main course.
Pot pie in nineteenth-century usage meant a stew baked or steamed under a dough lid, not the pastry-cased pie the phrase suggests now, and it belongs to the same family as the American "pot pie" of squares of dough dropped into broth. It reads as economical family cookery for good reason: it stretches the cheapest veal cuts, or yesterday's roast, with potatoes and a fat-free flour crust, and the pickled pork does the work that a stock cube or a spoonful of extract would do in a later recipe. Saleratus, the leavener called for here, was among the common chemical raising agents of the middle decades of the century, sold as a potassium or sodium bicarbonate, and is generally said to have given way to branded baking powders towards the end of the century; its survival in this recipe, paired with sour milk, is a mark of how long household formulas persisted.