Backbone Pie
Take the smallest end of the backbone, cut in pieces two or three inches long; put in water and boil until done. Make nice rich pastry as for chicken pie; line the sides of a baking dish with the pastry, put in the bones, adding some water in which they were boiled; also salt, butter, and pepper to taste, with bits of pastry.
Cover top of baking-dish with pastry; put in stove and brown nicely.--Mrs. G. B.
A hog-killing dish that assumes you have a whole backbone on the table and know what to do with the thin end of it. The recipe is workable today with pork neck bones or country-style ribs, but nearly every quantity and temperature is left to judgment.
- What "backbone" meansThis is almost certainly pork rather than beef. The "smallest end" is generally taken to mean the narrow end of the hog's spine, where the bones are slim and the meat between them thin and gelatinous. Ask a butcher for pork backbone pieces or neck bones; country-style ribs are the closest supermarket substitute.
- Boil until doneRoughly 1.5 to 2 hours at a bare simmer for bony cuts, until the meat pulls away easily. Rushing this is the main way the pie fails, since the oven stage only browns the crust and will not tenderize anything.
- Save and reduce the brothThe cooking liquid is the whole sauce. Skim the fat, then reduce it until it tastes strongly of pork before ladling it into the dish; unreduced boiling water will leave the filling thin and flat.
- How much liquidAdd just enough to come partway up the bones, about a cup for a 2-quart dish. A full flood will boil up under the lid and lift or soak the top crust.
- "Bits of pastry"Scraps of dough dropped in among the meat, an old thickening trick that gives you dumplings inside the pie. They swell considerably, so use a modest handful.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given; "brown nicely" over an already-cooked filling means hot and fast. Bake at 425F for 25 to 35 minutes, until the crust is set and coloured.
- Bones at the tableThe bones go in whole and stay in. Either warn diners or pick the meat off after boiling and return it to the dish.
- YieldA backbone end plus crust would roughly fill a deep 9-inch dish and might serve four to six, depending on how much meat clings to the bones.
Backbone pie is generally traced to the calendar of the Virginia hog killing, when a family butchered in cold weather and had to use the whole animal within days. The spare, gelatinous cuts along the spine were too bony to roast and too good to waste, so they went into a pot and then under a crust, stretched with pastry scraps into a full meal. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, and initialled attributions are typical of it, which is why the recipe ends with initials rather than a byline, and why it reads as a note between cooks who already know the method: no temperatures, no timings, no quantities, just the order of operations. The habit of dropping raw dough into the meat before covering the dish is often said to link it to the wider family of English and Southern boiled-meat pies, where the crust served as both lid and thickener.