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Raised, or Melton Mowbray, Pork Pies
Put 2½ pounds of Five Roses flour in a bread pan. Set on stove in a saucepan ¾ 3/4 pint cold spring water containing ½ pound good lard.
When the water boils, make a hole or bay in the middle of the flour, and pour in the water and lard by degrees.
When well mixed, knead with the hands, and roll out into sheets about ¼ inch thick. Line circular dishes or tins with the paste and then proceed with the filling. This should consist of lean and raw pork chopped up into dice, seasoned with pepper and salt. Roll out the covers, after wetting around tops of pies, and pinch covers and tops together with finger and thumb.
Bake 1½ hours. -Mrs. A. Aspdin, Victoria, B.C.
A hot-water crust is the one pastry that wants to be handled hot and firmly, which is the opposite of everything else in this chapter. The original gives no oven temperature and no internal doneness cue, so both need supplying.
- Flour and fat by weight2 lb of flour is about 7 cups, and ½ lb of lard is 1 cup. Weigh both if you can — hot-water crust is unforgiving about the fat-to-flour ratio, and volume-measured flour drifts by a cup easily.
- The water measurement is ambiguousA ¾ pint in a 1913 Canadian book almost certainly means the imperial pint of 20 fl oz, giving about 1⅞ cups. Read as a US pint it would be 1½ cups. Start at 1½ cups, add more of the boiling lard-water until the dough comes together as a smooth, slightly tacky mass, and disregard "spring" water — any tap water does the same job.
- Work the dough hotThis is the hinge. The pastry must be kneaded, rolled and moulded while it is still uncomfortably warm; once it cools the fat sets and it cracks instead of stretching. Keep the bowl covered and near the stove and line the tins in one continuous session.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 400F for the first 20 minutes to set the walls, then drop to 350F for the remainder.
- "Bake 1 hours"The stray plural is in the original; one hour is right only for small pies in circular tins. A deep pie holding 2 lb of diced pork needs 1½ to 2 hours, and the filling should reach 160F at the centre — check with a thermometer through the steam hole rather than trusting the clock.
- The porkStrictly lean pork gives a dry, crumbly filling. Use shoulder or hand with roughly a fifth of its weight as fat, hand-chopped to rough dice rather than ground. How much meat this quantity of pastry takes depends on the depth of the tins. Season assertively: pepper, salt, and a little mace or sage if you like, though Melton pies are traditionally seasoned plainly.
- Cut a steam holeNot mentioned, but essential. Pierce the lid before baking so steam escapes; otherwise the crust lifts off the meat and the seam bursts.
- Jelly, and coolingTraditional Melton Mowbray pies are filled through the steam hole with a well-reduced pork-bone stock as they come from the oven, which sets to jelly and fills the gap left by shrinking meat. Cool the pie completely before cutting, then refrigerate.
- YieldDepends entirely on the size and depth of the tins used; the quantity is generous, and the pies are eaten cold.
Raised pies are the older English tradition of pastry as architecture: before tins were cheap, a stiff hot-water crust moulded around a jar or a turned wooden block served as both container and cooking vessel, and the earliest "coffins" are often said not to have been meant to be eaten at all. Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire is generally traced to the late eighteenth century as a centre for the pork pie, its fortunes tied to the local hunting season and to the whey-fed pigs kept alongside Stilton cheesemaking; the name now carries a protected designation in the UK, restricted to pies made in a defined area with uncured pork and a hand-formed crust. That a Manitoba flour mill printed the recipe in 1913 — contributed by a reader in Victoria, British Columbia — shows how completely British provincial baking travelled with its cooks. Five Roses was a hard-wheat Manitoba flour, stronger than soft English flour, which makes for a tougher, more resilient wall than the crumbling original but a rather less tender one.