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Venison Pie
Wipe and cut the meat into nice pieces and dredge with Five Roses flour seasoned with salt and pepper. Place these pieces loosely in a pie dish and sprinkle over them 1 dessertspoon chopped parsley, pour in as much stock, diluted gravy or water as the dish will hold without the liquid touching the upper edges. Cover with pie crust, leaving a large opening in the centre. Bake for about 2 hours in good oven. When the crust is a nice, golden colour, cover the pie with clean greased paper to prevent burning. -Mrs. J. MacFarlane, Sunnywold, 1 egg Okanagan Lake, Vernon, B.C.
A plain raised-crust game pie in which the filling cooks from raw under the pastry, so the meat and the crust have to be managed against each other. The trailing "1 egg" in the text is a printer's stray from an adjacent recipe and belongs to nothing here.
- The hinge: keep the liquid lowThe instruction to fill only to just below the rim is what makes the pie work. Venison throws off very little fat, and a dish filled to the brim will boil up, lift the crust and spill over. Keep the liquid clear of the upper edges, as the recipe directs.
- Oven temperature"Good oven" in books of this period is not a fixed temperature; something in the moderate to moderately hot range, around 350-375F, suits two hours of raw stewing venison.
- The paper shieldThe greased paper laid over the browned crust is the period equivalent of loose foil. Put it on as soon as the pastry is golden, as the recipe directs, or the top will be dark long before the meat is tender.
- The central openingThe large hole in the lid is a steam vent, not decoration. Without it the filling steams the underside of the pastry into paste. It also lets you top up with hot stock partway through if the level drops.
- DessertspoonTwo level teaspoons. It sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon in the older British and Canadian measure.
- Cut and choice of meatUse shoulder, neck or shank cut in 1 to 1 1/2 inch pieces. Loin and haunch steaks are wasted here; two hours of moist heat turns lean prime cuts dry and stringy, while the collagen-rich cuts are the point.
- The flour dredgeFlouring the pieces both seasons them and thickens the liquid into gravy as it cooks. Season the flour firmly, since nothing else in the filling carries salt except the stock.
- YieldA standard 9 inch deep pie dish takes about 2 lb of trimmed meat and serves four to six. Rest it 10 minutes before cutting so the gravy settles.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and built largely from recipes mailed in by Canadian housewives, some printed with the contributor's name and district; this one comes from Okanagan Lake, near Vernon, British Columbia. Venison pie of this kind is often linked to the English game pies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where a flour-dredged filling was assembled raw in a deep dish, sealed under pastry and left in a cooling bread oven for hours; the long slow bake was less a culinary choice than a use for heat that was already there. The greased-paper cover is a standard trick of the wood-stove era, when oven heat could not be dialled down and the cook shielded the food instead. Recipes like this one also served the flour company's purpose neatly, since the pie names its brand in the dredge.