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Pork Pie
1 tablespoonful chopped parsley Salt and pepper to taste 4 ozs. (1 cup) grated cheese I onion 1/2 pint (I cup) cream 1 egg Some pastry Cut the meat into neat pieces; boil the macaroni in boiling salted water for half an hour, then drain it; mix the pork with the macaroni, add the cheese, the onion and parsley chopped fine, cream, salt and pepper to taste; butter a fireproof pie-plate, line it with pastry, fill it with the mixture, cover it with pastry, brush it over with the egg well beaten, and bake in a hot oven for half an hour.
Serve hot.
A thrift dish from the cold-meat chapter: yesterday's roast pork bound with macaroni and cheese under a pastry lid. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so a few quantities have to be judged rather than measured.
- Missing quantitiesThe list gives no weight for the pork and no amount for the macaroni, and both are central. For a standard 9-inch plate pie, roughly 1 lb diced cooked pork and 4 oz (about 1 cup dry) short macaroni fills it without swamping the cream.
- Do not boil macaroni for half an hourThis is the one instruction to ignore. Long boiling times of this order are common in cookery books of this era, but modern dried pasta collapses to paste. Boil 6-8 minutes, a shade under the packet time, since it cooks again in the pie.
- Hot ovenA "hot oven" in books of this vintage is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F (200-230C). At that heat the pastry sets and colours in the half hour given; the filling only needs heating through if the pork is already cooked.
- Half a pintThe book glosses its own half pint as 1 cup, so follow that rather than the 10 fl oz of a true imperial half pint. Single or light cream is right; heavy cream makes the filling greasy against the cheese.
- Fireproof pie-plateA shallow ovenproof china or earthenware plate, the shape sold now as a pie dish rather than a deep casserole. A metal 9-inch pie plate works and browns the underside better.
- The onionFinely chopped raw onion in a pie baked only thirty minutes can still taste sharp. Soften it in butter for a few minutes first and let it cool before mixing.
- CheeseUnqualified "grated cheese" in an English book of this date is likely a firm Cheddar, though Parmesan was also used with macaroni; 4 oz is the amount given. Season carefully, as the cheese carries salt and the meat may already be seasoned.
- YieldA 9-inch covered plate pie serves four to six. It is written to be served hot, but it slices more cleanly after ten minutes' rest.
Chapters of "cold meat recipes" were a fixture of British and American household cookery well into the twentieth century, when a large joint was roasted for one meal and expected to reappear in two or three more; the cook's problem was not flavour but making cooked meat palatable a second time, which is why cream, cheese and pastry do so much work here. This particular pie is not the raised, hot-water-crust pork pie of Melton Mowbray, eaten cold and set in jelly, but a soft plate pie served hot, closer in spirit to a macaroni-cheese with meat in it. Dried Italian pasta was widely stocked and cheap in Britain by the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and cookery writers used it much as they used rice, as a bland extender that stretched a small quantity of meat across more plates.