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Chicken Pie Crust
Sift together two and one-quarter quarts of flour, two and one-half teaspoons of baking powder, one-half teaspoon of salt. Rub into the flour one cup of lard and one-third pound of butter. Moisten with one pint of - milk. Place on a board and roll in one and two-thirds pounds of butter in four rollings. Line the sides of the dish and arrange four chickens stewed until nearly tender, with the largest bones removed. Cover with the remaining crust, cut an opening in center for the steam to escape.
This is a rough puff paste built at banquet scale — the butter rolled in through four turns, not the pinch of baking powder, is what lifts it. Everything below assumes you are scaling down.
- Scale firstTwo and one-quarter quarts of flour is about 9 cups, roughly 2 lb 4 oz, and the recipe covers four stewed chickens. That is a hotel or church-supper pie. Quarter the whole thing for a single 9x13 dish and one chicken.
- UnitsA pint of milk is 2 cups; a third of a pound of butter is about 11 tablespoons; one and two-thirds pounds of rolled-in butter is nearly seven sticks. Cup measures of flour varied a good deal between kitchens and were not standardised as ours are, so weigh if you can.
- The hinge: keep the butter coldThe four rollings are laminating turns. The rolled-in butter must stay firm and unabsorbed — chill the dough 20 to 30 minutes between each turn, and stop if butter starts breaking through. Warm butter gives you a greasy short crust instead of layers.
- The baking powderTwo and a half teaspoons in nine cups of flour is almost nothing. Treat it as insurance rather than leavening; do not increase it or the crust will taste soapy and rise unevenly against the steam of the lamination.
- LardThe recipe specifies only lard, rubbed in with the butter to keep the base dough tender. Modern shelf-stable hydrogenated lard behaves differently; rendered lard (leaf lard if you can get it) or an equal weight of cold butter will be closer to what was meant.
- The filling is unfinishedThe recipe assumes you know to add the stewing liquor, thickened with flour and seasoned, plus salt and pepper. Bone the chickens as directed, pack them with enough thickened gravy to come partway up, and leave headroom — a puff lid needs room to rise.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A pie of this kind wants a hot oven to set the layers — around 425F for the first 20 minutes, then down to 350F until the crust is deep gold and the filling bubbles at the vent, roughly an hour in total for a full-size dish.
- YieldAs written, this feeds a crowd of 20 or more. The quartered version fills a 9x13 pan and serves eight.
Chicken pie under a rich rolled butter crust was a fixture of American company cooking through the nineteenth century, and this version — four birds at a time, nearly two pounds of butter in the lamination alone — belongs to the era when a household cookbook still expected to cater a christening or a harvest supper. The technique is puff paste, whose origins are disputed and variously traced to French and Italian pastry practice; recipes for it were already circulating in English cookery books well before the eighteenth century, and here it is softened with lard and a little baking powder in the base dough. Stewing the birds nearly tender before they go under the crust is the older logic of pie-making: the pastry is a lid and a vessel, given only as long in the oven as it needs to color and rise, while the meat has already done its slow work on the stove.