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Chicken-and-Ham Pie
Cut up a young fowl into joints, cover with cold water, and stew until tender. Have ready 4 slices of cold, boiled corned ham, cut into strips. Put a layer of ham in the bottom of a buttered baking-dish, season with parsley, chopped mushrooms, salt, and pepper. Now turn in some white sauce made from the liquor the chicken was cooked in, then arrange the pieces of chicken and the yolks of hard-boiled eggs. Repeat the sauce and seasoning, lay a few strips of ham on top, cover with a good crust, and bake for an hour and a half. Mushroom catsup may be substituted for the fresh mushroom.
A raised-pie filling of poached chicken, cured ham and egg yolks bound in a velouté made from the cooking liquor. Everything in the dish is cooked before it goes under the crust, so the bake is about the pastry and the setting of the sauce.
- The fowlA "young fowl" would usually be a smallish bird, of the order of 3-4 lb. Simmer it gently rather than at a rolling boil, about 45-60 minutes, until the meat pulls from the bone; the liquor is the entire basis of the sauce, so salt it lightly and add an onion, a bay leaf and a few peppercorns.
- Corned hamBrine-cured ham, boiled and cooled -- not the dry-cured, salt-heavy kind. Any good cooked ham off the bone works. Because both ham and stock carry salt, hold back on seasoning until the sauce is made and tasted.
- The sauce is the hingeMake a blond roux of 2 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp flour, then whisk in about 2 cups of the strained, skimmed chicken liquor and cook it out for several minutes. It should be thick enough to coat a spoon heavily; a thin sauce will boil up under the crust and flood it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 400F for the first 20 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then drop to 350F. Cut a vent in the crust.
- An hour and a half is too longAn hour and a half is long -- With a fully cooked filling, 40-50 minutes is enough for a puff or short crust to brown through; the longer bake risks drying the chicken and darkening the sauce.
- Egg yolksHard-boil the eggs 9-10 minutes, cool, and use the yolks whole, tucked between the chicken pieces. The recipe calls for the yolks only; keep the whites for a salad.
- Mushroom catsupThe old mushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty extract, not the tomato condiment. A tablespoon of it, or of a good dark soy or Worcestershire, gives the same savoury depth if fresh mushrooms are not used. Adjust salt accordingly.
- Dish and yieldA 2-quart baking dish is about right; the layering wants depth. Serves 6, and it cuts more cleanly if allowed to stand 15 minutes out of the oven.
Chicken-and-ham pie sits between the cold raised pie and the hot family dinner: the ham supplies salt and colour, the eggs bulk and a decorative cross-section, and the sauce makes the whole thing sliceable. Layering a mild meat with a cured one and setting hard-boiled eggs into the middle is an old habit in English pastry cookery, familiar from veal-and-ham pies of the nineteenth century. The option of substituting mushroom catsup for fresh mushrooms is characteristic of the period: mushroom ketchup was a common pantry bottle when fresh mushrooms were seasonal and dear, and it turns up as a stand-in in compilations of this kind.