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Chicken Pie Paste
3 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 teaspoon soda ¼ cup butter ¼ cup lard Pinch of fine salt Sweet milk to wet.
Sift flour, salt, cream of tartar and soda together. Rub in the butter and lard very fine, then wet with the milk to a dough like biscuit dough. Line a deep dish (a large pan does very well) with the cold mixture and cover with half the dough. Make some large holes in top crust for air. Bake 1 hour.
This is a biscuit-style crust rather than a flaky pastry, leavened with the cream of tartar and soda pairing that preceded reliable commercial baking powder. The recipe assumes you already have cooked chicken and gravy waiting, and that you know your own oven.
- Sweet milkMeans plain fresh milk, as opposed to the sour milk or buttermilk called for elsewhere in the book. Whole milk is the closest modern equivalent. Expect to need roughly 1 cup to bring 3 cups of flour to a soft biscuit dough; add it in stages, as flour absorbency varies.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether these act as the leavening; 2 teaspoons cream of tartar with 1 teaspoon soda is broadly equivalent to about 4 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder. The difference is that this version reacts as soon as the milk goes in, so get the dough into the dish and into the oven without delay.
- No oven temperature givenCookbooks of this vintage assumed a wood or coal range and a cook who judged by hand. A biscuit-crust pie of this size wants a moderately hot oven, around 400F, for the first 20 minutes to set and lift the crust, then 375F for the balance of the hour.
- "The cold mixture"This phrase is ambiguous in the original. It may mean the cooled, already-cooked chicken and gravy filling, or the cold paste itself, with half lining the dish and half forming the lid. Either way, cold filling matters, because hot filling melts the fat in the raw crust and produces a heavy bottom layer.
- Cooked filling, not rawAn hour at moderate heat is calculated to bake the crust, not to cook poultry from raw. Stew or roast the chicken first and thicken its liquid into a gravy; the pie is an assembly.
- LardLard is still sold in many supermarkets, though leaf lard, which gives the tenderest result, usually has to come from a butcher. Vegetable shortening substitutes at equal volume; using all butter makes a firmer, more savoury crust that browns faster, so check it at 45 minutes.
- Steam holesThe instruction to cut large holes is not decorative. A biscuit lid seals tightly and a chicken pie throws off a great deal of steam, which will lift the crust off the filling or blow out the edges if it has nowhere to go.
- YieldRoughly enough crust for one deep dish in the region of 9 by 13 inches, or a 3-quart baking dish; the recipe specifies only "a deep dish" or "a large pan," so treat serving numbers as an estimate.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to Canadian households who bought its flour, with recipes largely contributed by the women who used it. That origin explains a paste like this one: it is a farm crust, not a pastry-cook's, built from a biscuit dough that goes together fast and forgives rough handling. The cream of tartar and soda combination belongs to a period when packaged baking powder was available but the separate acid and alkali were still commonly kept and combined at home. Chicken pie under a biscuit lid rather than short pastry is a long-standing North American habit, and the note that "a large pan does very well" in place of a deep dish is the plainest evidence of who the book was written for.