Chicken Pie
Cut up the chicken and place in a deep oven with one large spoonful of lard. Let it brown a little and add one onion, parsley, thyme, sage and black pepper, to suit the taste. Pour on it a cupful boiling water, stir well and let it simmer till well cooked. Just before taking from the fire, rub together: 1 cup cream 1 spoonful butter. Yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs. 1 grated nutmeg and other spices to the taste. Stir well and pour in a pan lined with a paste.--Mrs. A. C.
Chicken Pie.
Make into a paste one quart of flour with the weight of four eggs in butter and a large spoonful of lard. Put the paste in a deep dish, lining the bottom and side with chicken interspersed with layers of very thin bacon. Add some large crumbs, some pepper, and a quarter-pound butter. Fill the dish with cold water, and yolks of four or six hard-boiled eggs, then dredge with flour and put on the top crust. Let it bake gradually. It will take two hours to bake.--Mrs. Col. W.
Two chicken pies from two contributors, printed back to back and written in the shorthand of cooks who already knew what they were doing. The first is a fricassee poured into a pastry-lined pan; the second is a raw-packed pie that cooks slowly under its lid.
- "A deep oven"This means a Dutch oven or deep heavy pot set on the hearth or range, not the modern box oven. Any wide, heavy-bottomed braising pan with a lid will do for browning and simmering the chicken.
- Spoonfuls'Large spoonful' most likely means a serving spoon rather than a teaspoon, so somewhere around 1 to 2 tablespoons. Note that the butter in the cream mixture is given only as '1 spoonful', not a large one.
- Weight of four eggs in butterReckoning eggs at roughly 2 oz each in shell gives about 7 to 8 oz of butter, close to two sticks, though period eggs often ran smaller. A quart of flour is 4 cups, near enough a pound, which puts this at about the usual short-pastry proportion of fat to flour.
- That whole nutmegA grated nutmeg is one entire seed, about two teaspoons of grated spice, which will overwhelm a cup of cream and a chicken. A quarter teaspoon is closer to what the dish wants.
- The cream and egg-yolk liaisonHard-boiled yolks mashed with butter and cream are a thickener, not a custard. Rub them to a smooth paste, then stir into the hot pan juices off the direct heat so the cream does not break, and let the filling cool before it meets the pastry.
- The first recipe is unfinishedMrs. A. C. lines a pan with paste and pours in the filling but never mentions a top crust or a baking time. Whether it was meant to be covered or left open is not stated; since everything inside is already cooked, the pastry only needs long enough in a hot oven to set and brown.
- "Bake gradually" and the cold water'Bake gradually' and the cold water -- For the second pie, 'gradually' indicates a steady moderate heat rather than a fierce one; the book gives no temperature, so a moderate modern oven for the stated two hours is the nearest equivalent. The dish is filled with cold water because the raw chicken, bacon and butter render into it and become the gravy.
- Raw-packed poultryTwo hours at 325F is enough for jointed chicken submerged in liquid under a crust, but check that the thickest pieces reach 165F before serving. A very large bird cut into big pieces may need longer.
- YieldNeither recipe gives a dish size or a number of servings. The second is the richer of the two, with a quarter-pound of butter and bacon layered throughout.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (first issued in 1878, with printings dated 1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions credited largely by initials or partial names, which is why the same dish appears twice with different methods and different initials attached — the book preserves the disagreement rather than settling it. The two versions bracket the whole history of the form: the older English deep-dish pie, packed raw with meat, butter and water and left to cook slowly into its own gravy, and the newer American habit of stewing the chicken first and using the pastry mainly as a container. Hard-boiled egg yolks appear in both, in the second as whole yolks tucked among the meat and in the first mashed into cream as a thickener; using cooked yolks to bind a sauce is a technique often traced to medieval and early modern European cookery. The thin bacon between the layers does the work that a pie of beef or mutton would get from its own fat, chicken being lean.