Home › Meats and Poultry › Veal Pie
Veal Pie
Stew knuckle of veal an hour and a half; pick off the meat. Make sauce of equal quantities of butter and flour, stir into the boiling veal stock and season with pepper and salt, a few drops of onion juice and a little celery salt. For the pie crust, take two cups of pastry flour, one-half teaspoon of salt, two teaspoons of baking powder, two tablespoons of shortening, one egg, and nearly a cup of milk. Sift baking powder and flour, add salt, the beaten egg and milk, pouring round outside. Mix with two forks, as it makes it lighter.
Pour the mixture on boiling hot meat and gravy. Bake in hot oven.-Agnes Pitman.
A stewed veal shank under a rich baking-powder biscuit batter, closer to a cobbler than a pastry pie. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how a drop-biscuit topping behaves, and they leave a few things out.
- The hinge: the filling must be boiling when toppedThe batter is poured onto hot meat and gravy so its underside sets immediately rather than soaking. If the stew has cooled, reheat it to a full simmer in the baking dish before the topping goes on, or the bottom of the crust turns to paste.
- Knuckle of vealThis is the shank, sold today as veal osso buco or veal shank, bone in. An hour and a half may not be enough; a 2 to 3 lb shank can want 2 to 2 1/2 hours at a bare simmer, until the meat slips from the bone. Keep the cooking liquid, which will be gelatinous, for the sauce.
- "Hot oven"425F. The topping needs strong initial heat to rise; 20 to 25 minutes, until the crust is browned and dry in the centre when tested.
- The unspecified sauce"Equal quantities of butter and flour" gives no amount. For about 3 cups of veal stock, 3 tablespoons each of butter and flour gives a gravy that coats a spoon without setting solid. Cook the roux a minute before adding the hot stock.
- The shortening is listed but never usedRub or cut the 2 tablespoons into the sifted flour before the egg and milk go in. Skipping it, as the written method does, produces a tough topping.
- Onion juice and celery saltOnion juice was got by grating an onion and pressing the pulp; a tablespoon of grated onion or a pinch of onion powder does the same work. Celery salt is still sold, and it is salty, so season the gravy last.
- Mixing with two forksSound advice for any biscuit dough. The point is to combine without developing gluten; the batter should look shaggy and uneven, not smooth.
- Dish and yieldA 2-quart baking dish or a 9-inch deep pie plate. Serves four to six, and it wants eating the day it is made, as the topping goes heavy on reheating.
Veal pie of this kind belongs to a long American habit of putting a raised biscuit lid on a stew rather than a rolled pastry crust, the same logic that produces chicken pie with a baking-powder top and, in a sweeter register, fruit cobbler. Chemical leavening made it possible: by the time this book was compiled, canned baking powder was a fixture of the household pantry. The knuckle was one of the cheapest cuts, valued less for the flesh than for the gelatin it gives up. The attribution to Agnes Pitman reflects how books of this sort were assembled, as compilations of contributed household receipts, each carrying the name of the woman who sent it in.