Giblet Pie
An English Recipe The giblets of 1 goose or 2 ducks; 1 pound of tender beefsteak; 2 small onions; thyme and parsley; salt and pepper.
Wash the giblets and put them with the steak, cut in pieces, in a stewpan with cold water enough to cover, and as soon as the water begins to boil add the sliced onion and the herbs, salt, and pepper.
Simmer gently for an hour and a half or two hours, remove the herbs and let the giblets cool. Line the sides of a pie-dish with a good paste, lay in the giblets and steak, add more salt and pepper if needed, pour over enough of the gravy in which the meat was stewed to fill the dish about 3/4 full. Add bits of butter, and cover with the crust. Brush the top with butter and bake three-fourths of an hour in a hot oven.
A Victorian meat pie built on the parts of the bird that come tucked inside it. The filling is fully cooked before it goes under the crust, so the bake is only about setting and browning the pastry.
- What the giblets areHeart, gizzard, neck and (in the older sense) the pinions and feet; the liver was often kept back for gravy or forcemeat, and it can turn bitter and grainy in a long simmer. One goose or two ducks yields very little, so buy a tub of mixed poultry giblets or supplement with chicken hearts and gizzards to reach roughly 1 lb.
- Hot oven425-450F. At that heat a three-quarter-hour bake will over-brown a covered pie; start at 425F for 20 minutes to set and lift the pastry, then drop to 375F for the remainder.
- Good pasteA short crust made with butter or a half-butter, half-lard mix. The recipe lines only the sides of the dish, not the base, which is standard for a wet-filled meat pie: a bottom crust would go to paste under the gravy.
- StewpanA heavy saucepan or small Dutch oven with a lid. The 90-minute to 2-hour simmer is not padding, since gizzard is dense working muscle and needs that long to become sliceable.
- The steak"Tender beefsteak" is probably best read here as a cut that will stand a long simmer rather than a grilling steak; chuck or skirt suits the method. Cut in pieces of about 1 inch so it finishes in the same time as the giblets.
- Cut a ventThe recipe does not ask for one, but with the dish three-quarters full of gravy a hole or slit in the lid lets steam escape rather than pushing the crust up off the filling.
- Cool before coveringLetting the filling cool, as directed, is what keeps the pastry from slumping and going greasy while you work. Fill and cover cold, then bake.
- GravyThe stewing liquid is used unthickened. If you want it to hold rather than run when cut, reduce it by a third or slacken a spoonful of flour into it before pouring.
- YieldFills a pie dish of roughly 1.5 quarts and serves about four with a potato and a green vegetable. Leftover stewing liquid keeps as poultry stock.
Giblet pie belongs to the older English habit of treating no part of a bird as waste: the giblets left when a goose was roasted for the table were stretched into a separate dish with a pound of stewing beef and a crust. Goose was the traditional Michaelmas and Christmas bird in England, so giblets would have been plentiful at those seasons. American compilations of the late nineteenth century carried English recipes, sometimes under headings like "An English Recipe," and the economy of the dish needed no argument in an ordinary household. The technique -- stew the tough parts long and slow, then bake them briefly under pastry -- recurs across British meat pies that begin on the stove.