Giblet Pie
Made as chicken pie, adding livers of chicken or pigeon, which have been boiled in the water left form cooking; celery and sweet herbs. Season with mushroom or walnut catsup.--Mrs. T.
This is a variation note rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's chicken pie in front of you, a stewed bird under a crust with its own gravy. What follows fills in the parts a nineteenth-century cook would not have needed told.
- What giblets areThe neck, heart, gizzard and liver, sometimes with the wing tips. Heart and gizzard are muscle and want long simmering, roughly 45-60 minutes, until they yield to a knife; the liver wants five minutes at most or it turns chalky and bitter. Cook them separately and combine at assembly.
- "Boiled in the water left form cooking"A typesetter's slip for "from cooking" -- the broth left after poaching the chicken. Reserving and reusing that liquor is the whole economy of the dish; it seasons the giblets and thickens into the pie gravy.
- Mushroom and walnut catsupNeither is tomato ketchup. Both were thin, dark, salty condiments -- mushroom catsup a strained brine of salted mushrooms, walnut catsup the same from green walnuts, aged. Mushroom catsup is still sold by British specialty grocers; a splash of Worcestershire plus a little soy gives a comparable savoury depth, though not the same flavour.
- Sweet herbsThe standard bundle of the period: thyme, parsley, marjoram, sometimes summer savory and a bay leaf. Tied and simmered with the giblets, then removed.
- CeleryIn the 1870s celery was a seasonal vegetable of the cooler months, and the varieties then grown may have eaten sharper than modern Pascal stalks. Two or three ribs, sliced and softened in the broth, is about right; the leaves are worth adding to the herb bundle.
- OvenThe original gives no oven direction. A pie of already-cooked meat under pastry needs a hot oven to set and brown the crust rather than to cook the filling; a workable modern equivalent is 425F for 20 minutes, then 350F for another 20 to 25 until the gravy bubbles at the vent.
- Filling temperatureLet the giblets and gravy cool before the top crust goes on. Hot filling melts the fat in the pastry before it reaches the oven and gives a sodden underside.
- YieldThe giblets of two or three birds, with the chicken meat, will roughly fill a nine-inch deep dish and serve about six.
Giblet pie belongs to a long English tradition of using the parts of a bird that came free with it, and it crossed to Virginia intact -- Hannah Glasse prints a version, as do a number of the cookbook writers who followed her, usually with the giblets stewed first and the crust laid over. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries, like this one from "Mrs. T.", read as marginal notes to another recipe rather than as complete instructions: they were written by cooks for cooks who already knew the base dish. The pigeon livers are a reminder that domestic pigeons and squab were still ordinary poultry-yard food in the post-war South, and the walnut and mushroom catsups point back to an English store-cupboard of aged, salted condiments that largely disappeared from American kitchens once bottled tomato ketchup took over at the end of the century.