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English Meat Pie
Knuckle of veal 1 slice onion 1 slice carrot Bit of bay leaf Sprig of parsley 12 peppercorns Blade of mace 2 teaspoons salt 1/2 lb. lean raw ham 4 tablespoons flour 4 tablespoons butter 2 doz. bearded oysters Remove meat from bones. Cover bones with cold water, add vegetables and seasonings, and heat slowly to boiling point. Add meat, boil five minutes, and let simmer until meat is tender; remove meat and reduce stock to two cups. Put ham in frying-pan, cover with lukewarm water, and let stand on back of range one hour. Brown butter, add flour, and when well browned add stock; then add veal and ham each cut into cubes. Let simmer twenty minutes and add oysters. Put in serving dish and cover with top made of puff paste. It is much better to bake the paste separately and cover pie just before sending to table.
A veal-and-ham pie in the older English style, where the filling is essentially a stewed ragout and the pastry is a lid rather than a case. The recipe assumes you will make your own stock from the knuckle bones.
- The oystersThey go in at the very end and need only to plump and firm their edges — one to two minutes off the boil. Anything longer and they toughen. "Bearded" means the dark frill of gill trimmed away; shucked oysters sold today are usually already fit to use as they come, drained of their liquor.
- Knuckle of vealA veal shank, bone in. The recipe gives no weight; knuckles of this kind run from about 2 to 4 lb. Ask a butcher to saw it across so the marrow is exposed; the bones are the whole point of the stock. Veal shank is widely sold as osso buco cuts.
- Blade of maceA single dried piece of the outer covering of nutmeg, not the ground powder. Substitute about 1/4 teaspoon ground mace or a light grating of nutmeg, added with the other seasonings.
- The ham soak"Let stand on back of range one hour" means the coolest part of a wood or coal range — gentle warmth, not cooking. The purpose is to draw salt out of a heavily cured ham. Modern supermarket ham is much less salty; a 20-minute soak in warm water is ample, and with mild ham you can skip it.
- Browning the rouxButter and flour are taken to a genuine brown, well past blond, which is what gives this filling its colour and nutty depth. Watch it closely at the end — brown butter turns black quickly. Add the hot stock off the heat and whisk.
- Reducing the stockTwo cups of stock against 4 tablespoons each of butter and flour gives a very thick, gravy-like sauce that will hold under a pastry lid. If it stiffens too much while the meat simmers, loosen it with a little more stock or the oyster liquor.
- Baking the paste separatelyThe closing note is the useful instruction. A puff pastry lid set over wet filling steams from below and goes sodden. Bake it on a sheet at 400–425F until fully risen and dry, then lay it over the hot filling as it goes to the table. A sheet of commercial all-butter puff pastry does the job.
- YieldThe quantity of meat and sauce would serve about six as a main course, though the recipe gives no yield. The stock-making and simmering spread easily over two days; the filling reheats well, and the pastry should be baked the day it is served.
Veal and ham with oysters looks odd now but was a common pairing in nineteenth-century English and American cookery, when oysters were cheap and abundant and were used to add brine and body to pale meats that had little of their own. Veal was valued for that mildness and for the gelatine in its bones, which is why recipes of this era often begin, as this one does, with a knuckle rather than a cut of flesh. The instruction to bake the pastry apart from the filling is a practical touch of a kind found in American domestic-science writing around the turn of the twentieth century, addressing the familiar problem of a puff-paste lid gone limp over gravy.