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Small Pork Pies (a Devonshire Recipe)
Chop fine ¼ pound beef kidney suet and mix with it an equal quantity of butter. Rub both into a pound of Five Roses flour and set over the fire in a saucepan until the butter and suet are melted and the flour very hot. Knead together then into a stiff paste, cover with the cloth and put it near the fire while you make ready with the meat. There should be about 2 pounds of the neck of pork, and this should be cut into very small pieces, seasoned liberally with salt, pepper and a teaspoon of powdered sage, and cooked gently for 25 minutes before it goes into the pie. The paste must then be divided into as many pieces as you wish to have pies, and these must be made into round shapes-"built up" into the shape of round pies. The way to do this must be studied carefully, for it is a knack in itself. The fist is put into the middle of the piece of dough from which the pie is to be raised, and by working it in a circular fashion the hollow is formed which is to receive the meat.
The process should really be seen to be adequately understood. When the pie is "raised" the meat is put into it, a round of paste laid on the top and its edge pinched to that of the lower crust. It is then baked in a steady, rather slow oven. -The New Home.
This is a hand-raised hot water crust pie of the traditional English sort, scaled down to individual size. The crust is the whole exercise; the filling is simple.
- The missing liquidAs printed, the paste has no water in it — flour, suet and butter heated together will not come to a kneadable dough. A standard hot water crust of this proportion takes roughly ½ to ¾ cup of boiling water stirred in with the melted fat. The omission looks like a printer's or editor's slip rather than a Devonshire secret.
- Work it hotThe hinge of the recipe is temperature. Hot water crust is pliable only while warm and turns crumbly and unraisable as it cools, which is why the dough is kept covered near the fire. Raise one pie at a time and keep the rest of the dough under a cloth in a warm place.
- Beef kidney suetFresh beef kidney suet is a butcher order now, not a supermarket item; packaged shredded suet or plain lard works in the same quantity. Whatever the fat, it must be a hard one — an all-butter crust will not hold a raised wall.
- Neck of porkThe old butcher's neck end is sold today as pork shoulder or, in Britain, pork collar. Buy it with the fat on and hand-chop it rather than grinding; the recipe asks for very small pieces, and the texture of a pork pie depends on visible pieces of meat.
- OvenThe book gives no temperatures; "a steady, rather slow oven" is usually read as somewhere around 300-325F. Small pies of this size need roughly 1¼ to 1½ hours, and the pork should reach 160F at the centre. If the sides colour too fast, wrap a collar of foil around each pie.
- The pre-cookingTwenty-five minutes of gentle cooking before the meat goes in renders some fat and gives the filling a head start. It also means the filling loses juice, so save any liquid from the pan and pour a little into each pie after baking if you cut a vent — the recipe as printed calls for no steam hole.
- SageA teaspoon of powdered sage against two pounds of pork is a firm hand by modern standards but in keeping with the style; sage is the characteristic seasoning of an English pork pie. Rubbed or ground dried sage stands in for the powdered sage of the period.
- YieldA pound of flour and two pounds of meat should make roughly six generous individual pies, or eight modest ones. Pies of this kind were usually eaten cold.
Five Roses was a Canadian flour brand, and its cook book was assembled largely from contributed and reprinted material — this one is credited to The New Home and carries its English origin in the title. Raised pork pies of this kind are often associated with a long English tradition in which a stiff fat-and-flour crust served as both container and cooking vessel for meat that then travelled and kept: the pie was a lunch pail before there were lunch pails. What makes the entry unusual is its honesty about technique. The writer twice admits that raising a pie by fist cannot really be taught on paper — "the process should really be seen to be adequately understood" — which is a fair account of a skill that was said to be picked up by watching rather than from a book, and which the printed cookbook of the period was only beginning to try to replace.