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New Meat Pie
Line a baking dish with biscuit dough rolled thin. Put in the chopped meat and thickened gravy hot. Instead of covering with a top paste, fill in the top with tiny biscuits about 1 inch in diameter. Cook 15 or 20 minutes.
A leftovers dish disguised as a pie: everything in the filling is already cooked, and the oven's only job is to bake the biscuit crust. That single fact governs how you handle it.
- Everything goes in hotThe instruction to add the meat and gravy "hot" is the hinge. In 15 to 20 minutes the biscuit topping will brown but a cold filling will not heat through, and the bottom crust will turn to paste. Have the gravy at a simmer when it goes into the dish.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, and the recipe uses no oven term; treat it as a hot biscuit bake, in modern terms roughly 425-450F. Bake on a lower rack or a preheated sheet so the lined base sets before the filling soaks it.
- Biscuit doughThis means baking-powder biscuit dough, not pastry. Roughly 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 4 tablespoons fat and about ¾ cup milk gives enough for a thin lining plus the small rounds on top. Handle it as little as possible.
- The tiny biscuitsCut them about 1 inch across and set them touching or nearly so; they spread and join into a cobbled lid while letting steam escape. Brush with milk if you want colour.
- The chopped meatCooked roast beef, lamb, veal or chicken, cut small rather than minced to a paste. Allow roughly 2 to 3 cups meat to 1½ cups gravy - enough to bind, not enough to flood the crust.
- Thickened gravyThe recipe says only "thickened gravy"; a flour-and-fat thickening of about 2 tablespoons each per cup of stock gives the right consistency. It should coat a spoon; anything thinner will boil up through the biscuit lid.
- Dish and yieldA 9-inch pie plate or a 1½-quart baking dish serves four to five. A deeper dish needs longer, and the biscuits will overbrown before the centre is hot.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its Five Roses flour to Canadian households, and its recipes were presented as contributions from women who used the brand - which may be why so many entries are this terse, assuming the reader already knows what biscuit dough is and how hot to bake it. The title's "new" is unexplained in the book itself; the only departure from an ordinary meat pie is the topping, a scattering of small cut biscuits in place of a rolled top crust - the same construction found in the American cobbler and in savoury biscuit-topped casseroles. The dish itself is older than the trick - meat pies built on Monday from Sunday's roast and its gravy were a fixture of British and colonial kitchens long before baking powder made a quick crust possible.