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Chicken Pie
Have a chicken of about 4 pounds.
Remove all the fat, cut up and put into boiling water. Add a little pepper and salt to season. Cook until the meat can be picked from the bones quite easily. Skim out of the water, pick into small pieces and remove all the bones. There should be left about 3 cups of liquid for gravy.
Leave this in the kettle and add Five Roses flour enough to make a thick gravy..
Add about 1 tablespoon of butter, or more if required very rich. Pour over chicken and let cool.
The instructions stop at the filling: like many recipes in a flour-company book, it assumes you already have a pastry recipe from elsewhere in the same section. What follows fills in the gaps and flags the one step that decides whether the pie holds together.
- The hinge: cool the filling completelyThe final instruction — "pour over chicken and let cool" — is the whole reason this pie works. Warm gravy melts the fat in the pastry before the oven can set it, giving a greasy, sodden bottom crust. Chill the filling until the gravy is set enough to mound on a spoon.
- The birdA 4 lb bird in the period this book comes from may well have been a mature fowl or stewing hen rather than a young bird; such birds yield more gelatin and flavour than a modern supermarket broiler of the same weight. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken works; if you can find a stewing hen, use it and allow closer to 2 hours of simmering.
- "Cook until the meat can be picked from the bones"Roughly 60-75 minutes at a bare simmer for a modern chicken. Keep it below a rolling boil or the breast shreds dry. The meat should be fully cooked to 165F throughout, since the second bake only warms it.
- KettleHere simply the stew pot or large saucepan the chicken cooked in, not a tea kettle. The gravy is built in the same pot to keep the cooking liquid.
- Thickening ratioFor 3 cups of liquid, about 6 tablespoons of flour gives a gravy thick enough not to boil out of the crust. Slake the flour in cold water or milk first, or work it into the butter as a beurre manié, then simmer 2-3 minutes to cook out the raw taste.
- Seasoning"A little pepper and salt" in the poaching water is thin seasoning by current taste. Salt the cooking liquid properly, and taste the finished gravy again once it is thickened, since flour mutes salt.
- The crust and the bakeUse any standard double-crust pastry, roughly 2 1/2 cups flour to 3/4 cup fat, in a 9-inch deep dish. Cut vents. Bake at 425F for 15 minutes to set the pastry, then reduce to 350F for another 30-35 minutes until the crust is browned and the filling bubbles at the vents.
- YieldA 4 lb chicken plus 3 cups of gravy fills a 9-inch deep pie and serves six. A cup of cooked peas, carrots or diced potato can be folded in without adjusting the gravy.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal in the 1910s and given away or sold cheaply to promote Five Roses flour, which is why the branded name appears mid-sentence where any other book would simply say "flour." Promotional cookbooks like this one were often said to be among the most widely owned kitchen books in Canada, and their recipes tend to assume a reader who already knows the basics — hence a chicken pie with no crust and no oven temperature, since the pastry chapter sits a few pages away. The dish itself is squarely in the British tradition of boiled fowl under a pastry lid, a thrifty way to stretch an older laying hen past its useful life; the recipe asks only that the bird be cooked until the meat can be picked from the bones quite easily.