Vegetable Pie
1 cup stewed Lima beans 1 cup diced carrot 1 cup diced turnip 1 cup canned peas 1 cup canned corn Stew the carrot and turnip in a small quantity of water so that little water will be left when they are tender. Add to them the cooked beans, peas, and corn, two tablespoons cooking oil, milk to make of the proper consistency for pie, and salt to taste. Put into a basin, and cover with pie crust, in which several slits have been cut; bake the pie till the crust is thoroughly cooked. Serve as the main dish at dinner.
A meatless main-dish pie with a single top crust, built from vegetables that are already cooked before they go under the pastry. The whole success of it rests on how wet the filling is.
- Control the liquid firstStew the carrot and turnip in only a small quantity of water, as the recipe directs, so the pan is nearly dry by the time they are tender. Drain the canned peas and corn well; if the filling is soupy, the underside of the crust will never set.
- "Milk to make of the proper consistency"Expect roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup. The filling should mound on a spoon like a thick stew, not pour. Add it a few tablespoons at a time.
- Oven temperatureThe original only says to bake until the crust is thoroughly cooked. Pastry over an already-hot filling wants 425F for about 25 to 30 minutes, until the top is browned and firm underneath the slits.
- The basinA "basin" here is a deep ovenproof bowl or pudding basin, about 1 1/2 quarts. A 9-inch deep pie dish or a small casserole works the same way.
- Canned peas and cornPeriod canned vegetables were often softer, and frequently more heavily salted, than today's. Modern canned corn and peas need no further cooking; frozen, thawed and drained, gives a better texture.
- Cooking oil in place of fatTwo tablespoons of oil is the whole enrichment of the filling, standing in for butter or meat drippings. Butter or a mild olive oil both work; taste for salt after it is stirred in, since nothing else in the filling is seasoned.
- Lima beansDried limas stewed until tender, or frozen ones cooked and drained. Do not use them straight from a bean liquor or the filling will loosen.
- YieldFive cups of vegetables plus crust serves four to six as a main course.
Good Food and How to Prepare It reads as a product of the American health-reform kitchen, a tradition in which vegetable oil stood in for lard, and in which a meatless pie could be offered without apology as "the main dish at dinner." The construction follows the older meat-pie pattern: cooked filling, single top crust vented with slits, baked only long enough to set the pastry. What has changed is the contents -- Lima beans in place of meat, with canned peas and corn, which by the early twentieth century were cheap and widely available year-round in the United States and, as here, were treated as already-cooked ingredients rather than raw vegetables.