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Baked Meat Pie
Boil the meat, lamb or veal, till tender. Line a deep dish with a crust made with about two-thirds as much shortening as for pies; put in the meat, season it well with salt and pepper, pour in the gravy in which the meat was boiled, put two or three slices of salt pork or a few lumps of butter over it. Cover with a thick upper crust, pierced with holes to let the steam escape, and bake till the crust is done.
— Mrs. Kate Brooks
A plain boiled-meat pie of the sort that turned a Sunday joint into Monday dinner. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how pastry behaves, so the two things left unsaid are the oven and the gravy.
- The crust ratio"Two-thirds as much shortening as for pies" means a deliberately lean paste: if your usual pie dough runs about 1 part fat to 2 parts flour by weight, cut the fat to roughly 1 part to 3. The result is sturdy rather than flaky, which is what a wet filling and a long bake require.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Start at 425F for about 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 350F for another 30 to 40 minutes until the top is well coloured and the gravy bubbles at the vents. The meat is already cooked; you are only baking the crust.
- Thicken the gravyBroth poured in straight from the pot will soak the bottom crust into paste. Reduce it and thicken with a light roux or a flour-and-water slurry to the consistency of pouring cream, and use only enough to come three-quarters up the meat.
- The bottom crustUse a metal or heavy ceramic dish set on a preheated baking sheet on a low rack. Many ovens of the period gave strong heat from below; a modern oven often does not, which may be why these pies can come out damp underneath.
- Salt porkModern salt pork is very salty and sometimes cured with nitrite. Blanch it a minute in boiling water first, and season the gravy only after tasting, or use the butter alternative the receipt already allows.
- Cutting the meatBoil a shoulder of lamb or a piece of veal shoulder or breast until it pulls apart easily, then cool it enough to handle and cut into rough 1-inch pieces. Hot meat piled onto raw pastry melts the fat before the oven can set it.
- VentsThe holes matter more here than in a fruit pie: a sealed lid over hot gravy lifts and splits. Cut several, and do not glaze them shut with egg wash.
- YieldA deep 9-inch dish will take roughly 2 lb of cooked meat and should serve about six. Let it stand 10 minutes before cutting so the gravy settles.
Boiled-then-baked meat pies like this one are the thrifty end of a very old English tradition, in which the pastry often began as a container as much as something to be eaten. In this receipt the crust is clearly meant to be eaten, but its lean proportion of shortening suggests it was still doing structural work. What the instructions record is a household economy: a joint of lamb or veal simmered one day for its meat and its broth, then reassembled under a lid of pastry with a little salt pork for richness. Community cookbooks of this period often carry such second-day dishes, contributed by name and printed without measurements, on the assumption that the reader knew what "two-thirds as much shortening as for pies" meant in her own kitchen.