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Vegetable Pie
Scald some Windsor beans. Cut into small neat pieces some young carrots, turnips, artichoke bottoms, lettuces, mushrooms, celery, and parsley, with green peas. Onions and a small quantity of spinach may be added if liked, but any of these may be omitted. The proportions should be regulated by taste and convenience. Partially stew the vegetables in gravy, and season with pepper and salt. Trim the edges of a dish with pastry, put in the vegetables, pour the gravy over them, and place the cover on the top. Bake the pie in a moderate oven. If a maigre dish is wanted, cream, or milk slightly thickened with flour and butter, may be used instead of gravy.
A loose framework rather than a fixed recipe: the vegetables are whatever the garden and the season offer, bound in gravy under a pastry lid. Two words carry most of the meaning — Windsor and maigre.
- Windsor beansThese are broad beans, sold now as fava beans. Scalding means a brief blanch in boiling water so the leathery outer skin slips off each bean; older beans are much better for it, young ones can be left whole.
- Artichoke bottomsThe fleshy base of a globe artichoke with leaves and choke removed, not Jerusalem artichokes. Good-quality jarred or frozen bottoms are the practical substitute and need no pre-cooking beyond a rinse.
- "Gravy" in this book"Gravy" here -- In Victorian cookery writing this generally means a well-flavoured brown meat stock rather than thickened pan drippings, sometimes lightly bound. A concentrated stock reduced until it coats a spoon gives the intended body.
- MaigreA lean or fast-day dish, containing no meat. The cream or flour-and-butter-thickened milk given as the alternative turns this into what would now be called a vegetarian pie, though the pastry of the period was frequently made with lard or suet.
- Partially stewThe hinge of the recipe. The vegetables must go into the dish underdone, since they carry on cooking under the crust; fully softened carrots and turnips will collapse to mush by the time the pastry has coloured. Cut everything to a similar size so it cooks evenly.
- Cool the fillingHot filling steams the underside of the pastry lid and softens it before the oven can set it. Let the stewed vegetables and gravy come down to lukewarm before covering.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally read today as somewhere around 350F / 175C, and the pie is done when the crust has coloured and the filling bubbles. Puff or short paste both suit; the trimmed edge is a strip of pastry pressed round the dish rim to give the lid something to seal against.
- Liquid levelThe recipe says to pour the gravy over the vegetables, but in practice it is safer not to flood them: a pie with too much liquid boils over at the vent and lifts the lid away from the rim.
- YieldAs a rough guide, a standard 9-inch pie dish will take about 2 lb of prepared vegetables, enough for four to six servings.
Vegetable pies of this kind belong to the long English tradition of the covered pie as a way of serving a mixed stew at table without a tureen, and the entry sits in Cassell's among a run of pastry-covered dishes assembled from whatever the kitchen garden was yielding. The explicit provision for a maigre version is the telling detail: French terminology had been absorbed wholesale into Victorian English cookery writing, and maigre days -- Fridays, Lent, and the ember days -- still shaped what a good many households ate, so a book aiming at general usefulness gave both versions of a dish rather than two recipes. Windsor beans, said to take their name from Windsor, were then a common table bean; the name faded through the twentieth century in favour of broad bean, and more recently fava. The instruction that any of the vegetables "may be omitted" and the proportions "regulated by taste and convenience" is characteristic of the period's household manuals, which assumed a cook who could judge a dish rather than one who needed it specified.