Veal Pot-Pie
3 cups cooked veal 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon chopped onion 1/8 teaspoon pepper Pile loosely in a three pint pan, fill to almost cover the meat with gravy, stock or water, cover and set on top of stove to heat.
A fragment of a larger method: this is the filling only, and it assumes the reader will turn to the book's biscuit or pot-pie crust dough to finish it. Read it as the base of a stew topped with dough, not as a pie in a dish.
- The missing halfPot-pies of this period were commonly finished with biscuit dough laid over the simmering meat, or cut in squares and dropped in; the recipe as printed says nothing about a topping, so look for the book's own pot-pie crust or biscuit dough. Nothing here is baked; the covered pan on the stovetop would steam any topping. Have a batch of baking-powder biscuit dough ready before you start heating the meat.
- The hinge: liquid must be simmeringThe hinge: liquid must be hot -- the recipe says only "set on top of stove to heat." If you are adding dough, bring the gravy to a steady simmer first; dough added to lukewarm liquid goes gluey and raw in the centre. Add the dough, cover tightly and leave the lid alone for 12 to 15 minutes.
- A three-pint panRoughly a 1.5-quart saucepan or small Dutch oven; 3 cups of meat fills about half of it. "Pile loosely" leaves room for the liquid and for any dough topping to swell; if the pan is packed, use a 2-quart and expect the liquid to spread.
- How much liquid"Almost cover the meat" is about 1.5 to 2 cups for 3 cups of veal. Err on the generous side, since a covered pan of dough absorbs liquid and thickens as it cooks.
- Cooked vealThis is a leftovers recipe, using meat already cooked. Diced cooked chicken, turkey or lamb can be substituted cup for cup; if you start from raw veal, stew it until tender first, and keep the cooking liquid as the stock called for.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt for 3 cups of meat plus liquid is light by current taste, particularly with unsalted homemade stock. Taste the liquid before the dough goes on, since you cannot adjust it afterwards.
- YieldEnough for about four as a main course with a dough topping, though the recipe gives no yield. Reheat leftovers to a full simmer; the dough will be soft rather than crisp either way.
American "pot-pie" in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries usually meant what this recipe describes: meat stewed in a covered pot under a lid of biscuit or noodle dough, cooked by steam rather than in an oven, conventionally associated with the English boiled crust puddings and cousin to the Pennsylvania Dutch bot boi of broth and flat dough squares. It is a reminder of how fluid the categories were: a pot-pie was a wet dish eaten from a bowl.