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Windsor Veal Pie
Fill a dish with alternate layers of lean veal cut into slices half an inch thick, and thin slices of lean ham, and season each layer with powdered mace and white pepper. Place a dish with a weight over the meat, and press it for half an hour. Pour upon it as much strong veal gravy (that will jelly when cold) as will cover it, and add a slice of fresh butter. Cover the dish with good pastry, and bake till done enough. Serve cold. Time to bake a moderate-sized pie, one hour and a half. Probable cost, fillet of veal, 1s. a pound.
A cold raised-style pie in a dish rather than a crust of its own: veal and ham layered, set in a stock that gels as it cools. Almost everything depends on the gravy.
- The hinge: gravy that jellies"Strong veal gravy (that will jelly when cold)" means stock reduced from gelatinous cuts — knuckle, split calf's foot, veal bones — until a spoonful sets firm on a cold saucer. Modern commercial stock will not set; either reduce your own hard or reinforce it with a sachet of powdered gelatine (about 1 tsp per cup of liquid), or the pie will be dry and loose when cut.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe specifies none, only "bake till done enough" and a time of an hour and a half. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits the job: the pastry lid needs colour, but the filling should come up slowly. Whole veal slices are safely cooked at 145F in the centre, which should be reached well inside the stated time for a medium dish.
- QuantitiesThe recipe gives none. For a 2-quart dish, figure roughly 2 lb lean veal (leg or shoulder) sliced half an inch thick, 8 oz thinly sliced unsmoked ham or gammon, 1 tsp ground mace, 1 tsp white pepper, and 2-3 cups of stock. Serves eight cold.
- The pressingHalf an hour under a weighted plate compacts the layers so the pie holds its shape when sliced cold. Do it before adding any liquid, and salt lightly — the ham brings plenty.
- MaceGround mace, the lacy outer coat of the nutmeg, was a common seasoning for pale meats in period cookery and is still sold ground. Nutmeg can stand in at about two-thirds the quantity, though the flavour is warmer and sweeter rather than identical.
- Topping up the jellyCut a vent in the lid before baking. Some liquid always escapes or evaporates; pour warm liquid stock in through the vent using a small funnel once the pie is out of the oven and beginning to cool, then chill overnight so the jelly sets around the meat.
- Pastry"Good pastry" here means a sturdy one that survives slicing cold — a hot-water crust or a firm shortcrust, not puff, which goes soft and soggy once the jelly is in.
- ServingServe straight from the fridge with mustard and pickles. Once cut, eat within two or three days.
Cold veal-and-ham pie was a fixture of the Victorian sideboard, breakfast table and picnic hamper — a dish designed to be made a day ahead and eaten at room temperature, which suited households where cold luncheons were a regular institution. The "Windsor" tag was applied freely in nineteenth-century cookery books to dishes given a genteel or courtly association rather than to anything with a documented royal origin, and it appears attached to soups, puddings and pies alike. The real technology of the recipe is the jelly: before commercial gelatine was cheap, setting power had to come from long-simmered veal bones and calves' feet, and a stock's ability to set could be tested by cooling a spoonful — the same knowledge that underpinned aspics, glazes and the whole cold-larder repertoire. Cassell's habit of quoting a price, here a shilling a pound for fillet of veal, marks the book as a manual for a middle-class household budgeting a week's meals rather than a chef's reference.