Home › Meat and Poultry Pies › Chicken Potpies
Chicken Potpies
Have several deep dishes about the size of a birdbath for the pies. Cut a young fowl into joints, cover with cold water, and cook until tender, but not until the meat leaves the bones. Lay a piece of light and a piece of dark meat in each dish, add some minced salt pork and slices of potatoes. Put 3 small cubes of pastry into each dish, and 2 very small onions which have parboiled for five minutes. Thicken 2 cupfuls of the liquor the chicken was cooked in with a lump of butter rolled in flour, and season it with paprika and minced parsley. Fill the dishes, cover each with a good crust, make a slit in the middle of each, and bake for thirty minutes. This can be made in one dish.
A late-Victorian pot pie built in individual dishes, with the poaching liquor doing double duty as gravy. Two details govern the result: stopping the simmer while the meat still clings to the bone, and thickening the broth properly before it goes into the dishes.
- Dish sizeThe intent is single-serving deep dishes -- 10 to 12 oz ovenproof bowls or wide ramekins, filled to about three-quarters. The stated comparison is not a usable measure; work from capacity instead. Four such dishes is a reasonable yield from one small bird.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Thirty minutes with a raw top crust over hot filling suggests a fairly hot oven; something in the range of 400-425F is a reasonable modern equivalent. The filling should be ladled in hot so the pastry sets before the liquid cools it.
- A young fowlIn period usage 'fowl' generally meant an older, mature hen for boiling, while a young fowl was a younger and more tender bird. A 3-4 lb chicken stands in directly. Poach at a bare simmer, roughly 35-45 minutes, until a thigh yields to a fork but the meat has not slipped off the bone -- overcooked here and it shreds into the gravy.
- Cubes of pastryThese are small squares of the same crust dough dropped into the filling, where they swell into soft dumplings. Cut them about 1/2 inch and use no more than three per dish or the gravy is absorbed entirely.
- Salt porkSalt pork is fresh side pork cured in dry salt, uncooked and unsmoked; it is sold at some butchers and Southern markets. Thick-cut bacon is the common substitute, though it brings smoke the original did not have. Blanch either one briefly if it is very salty, since the gravy is seasoned separately.
- The potatoesSliced raw potato will not reliably cook through in thirty minutes under a crust. Slice thin -- 1/8 inch -- or drop the slices into the poaching liquor for five minutes first, as the recipe already does for the onions.
- ThickeningA 'lump of butter rolled in flour' is essentially beurre manie: butter kneaded with flour, often in roughly equal weights. About 2 tablespoons of each will lightly thicken 2 cups of stock. Whisk it into the simmering liquor in pieces and let it cook two or three minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- The slitNot decorative. Steam trapped under a sealed crust lifts it off the filling and leaves it slack underneath. Cut the vent before baking, not after.