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Woodcock Raised Pie, Hot
Prepare some forcemeat as in the last recipe. Divide four woodcocks into quarters. Line a pie-mould with pastry (see RAISED PIES), and fill it with alternate layers of forcemeat and pieces of woodcock. Cover it, and bake in a moderate oven. Take it out, pour into it some good brown sauce made of the trimmings of the woodcock stewed in beef gravy. Serve hot upon a dish covered with a napkin. If liked, a hollow place may be left in the centre of the pie, into which a piece of the crumb of bread, covered with fat bacon, may be put, whilst the pie is being baked. When done enough, this hollow may be filled with sliced truffles mixed in brown sauce.
A raised game pie of the old sort: a free-standing hot-water crust used as its own baking dish, filled with layered forcemeat and jointed birds, then flooded with sauce through the vent after baking. The sauce poured in at the end is the point, not an afterthought.
- The missing forcemeat"As in the last recipe" refers to the preceding entry in the book, which is not reproduced here; game forcemeats of this period are commonly built on the birds' livers and trail with fat bacon, breadcrumbs and seasoning, but the exact formula cannot be recovered from this page. Any well-seasoned pork-and-liver farce of the same character will do; it needs to be fine enough to spread in thin layers between the joints.
- Sourcing the birdsWoodcock is legal game in season in Britain and Ireland and appears at game dealers; in the United States it is a migratory bird that may be hunted under licence but not bought or sold. Quail, snipe or squab substitute reasonably, though none has the strong liver note woodcock is prized for. Four woodcock yield only about 1 lb of meat, so this is a pie for four at most.
- Trail and gizzardWoodcock are conventionally cooked undrawn apart from the gizzard, and the trail is what flavours the forcemeat. If your birds arrive drawn, expect a milder pie and lean harder on the liver in the farce.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read today as around 325-350F, though the book gives no temperature and no time. Judge by the crust: it should be firm and dry to the knuckle before you take it out, and a pie of this size will take a good while for the pastry to set through.
- The pie-mouldA hinged raised-pie mould or a loose-bottomed deep cake tin, lined with hot-water crust, is what is meant. The crust here is structural: it must stand on its own once the mould comes away, so it is deliberately stiffer and less tender than shortcrust.
- Sauce through the ventSauce after baking -- the recipe simply says to take the pie out and pour the sauce into it; in practice that means an opening in the lid, so cut one before baking and add the sauce while the pie is still hot, so it is absorbed rather than sitting in a pool. Stew the woodcock trimmings in beef gravy while the pie bakes.
- The bread-and-bacon plugThe block of crumb wrapped in fat bacon is a baking blank. It holds a cavity open and keeps it from collapsing, and is removed and discarded once the pie is done, its place taken by truffles in sauce. Truffles are optional; sauteed mushrooms in the same sauce give a similar effect without the expense.
- Serving on a napkinA folded napkin under the dish is standard Victorian service for hot raised pies. Whatever the original reasoning, it does absorb stray juices and keeps the pie from sliding, so it is worth doing.
Raised pies are among the oldest surviving forms of English pastry cookery, descended from the medieval "coffin" in which a stiff flour-and-water crust served as a cooking vessel rather than as something to eat; it is often said, though not well documented, that such crusts were used more than once. By the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the later nineteenth century the crust had become edible but kept its architectural job, and game pies of this kind were a set piece of the shooting-season table. Woodcock held a particular place in that hierarchy: a small migratory wader, hard to shoot, traditionally cooked with its trail intact because the bird's diet of earthworms was thought to leave no offensive residue, and generally served whole on toast so nothing of the juices was lost. Turning four of them into a pie was the extravagant version of the same reverence, using the trimmings for the sauce and the trail for the forcemeat so that no part of an expensive bird was wasted. The truffle-filled cavity marks the recipe as belonging to the grander end of the book, written for households with a cook, a game dealer and a pie-mould in the batterie.