Pork Pie
1 lb. fresh pork 1/2 lb. Sausage meat 1/2 cup sherry or diluted vinegar 1 teaspoon salt 1 saltspoon pepper Cut the pork in pieces the size of an English walnut, add salt and pepper and marinate in the wine for one hour, turning often. Line the bottom and sides of a well-buttered pie mould with pie paste, add a thin layer of sausage to the bottom, then half the pork, another layer of sausage and the rest of the pork, finishing with sausage meat. Wet the edge of the pie, roll the cover to fit, pinch the two edges lightly, brush the surface with egg, cut a two inch hole in the center and fill with a roll of paper to keep it open. Bake in a moderate oven for three hours. The oven should be quick enough to set the paste for the first half hour. As soon as the meat steams reduce the heat. When done, fill with meat jelly, allow it to cool thoroughly in the mould, then remove from the pan and serve in folded napkin.
A raised pork pie in the English manner, filled with jelly after baking and served cold. The original assumes you know what meat jelly is and owns a hinged pie mould; neither is a given now.
- The hinge: the jelly goes in hot, the pie comes out coldThe hinge: the jelly goes in liquid, the pie comes out cold — Meat jelly poured through the central hole fills the gap left as the pork shrinks; it should go in while still pourable but no longer steaming. The recipe then has the pie cool thoroughly in the mould — overnight in the refrigerator is safest — or it may sag when unmoulded and slice untidily.
- Oven temperaturesRead the instruction in the order it is meant: start hot, at what the book calls a 'quick' oven (roughly 400-425F by the usual modern equivalents), for the first half hour to set the crust, then drop to 'moderate', about 350F, for the remaining two and a half hours. The recipe gives no numbers of its own. Cover the top with foil if it colours too fast.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. With a pound of fresh pork and half a pound of already-seasoned sausage meat, the teaspoon of salt is about right; taste your sausage before adding more.
- Meat jellyNot gelatine dessert. Simmer pork bones, a split trotter and an onion for several hours, strain, reduce until a cooled spoonful sets firm, and season well. A strong reduced stock stiffened with a little powdered gelatine is the shortcut.
- The pie mould and the paper chimneyA hinged raised-pie mould is the likely vessel, though the recipe says only 'pie mould'; a 6- to 7-inch springform or a deep loose-bottomed cake tin works. The rolled paper in the vent hole keeps steam escaping and keeps the hole open for the jelly — a small foil tube does the same job.
- Pie pasteOrdinary short crust may crack under three hours and the weight of jelly. Hot water crust — flour, lard and boiling water — was the usual pastry for raised pies of this shape and holds its walls, though the recipe itself says only 'pie paste' and lines a buttered mould rather than hand-raising the case.
- DonenessThree hours is generous but the pastry, not the meat, sets the time. Check the centre reads 160F on a thermometer pushed through the vent hole before you take it out.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest six to eight as a cold cut, with mustard and pickles. It should keep three or four days refrigerated.
The raised pork pie is an English form: a free-standing case of stiff pastry, packed with coarse pork, baked long and slow, then filled with a savoury jelly so the finished pie slices clean and travels well. Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire is the name most often attached to it, though hand-raised meat pies of this type were common well beyond that town. The genteel touches here oted sherry in the marinade, pork cut to the size of an English walnut, the pie served in a folded napkin oted mark it as a party or buffet dish rather than a labourer's dinner.