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Veal and Ham Pie (Hard cooked eggs lb ham I)
2 hard cooked eggs ½ lb. ham 1 tablespoonful flour Salt, pepper, red pepper, and mace to taste 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley 1 teaspoonful grated lemon Some puff pastry rind Stock 1 teaspoonful powdered herbs Cut the veal and ham into thin slices; mix on a plate the flour, salt, pepper, red pepper, mace, powdered herbs, and lemon rind, roll in this seasoning each piece of veal, and lay in a deep casserole, alternately, layers of veal, ham, and egg cut in slices; pile this in the center of the dish, add one cupful of water, and the parsley; cover with puff pastry and bake in a hot oven for one and a quarter hours.
When baked add a little very good seasoned stock.
Serve hot or cold.
The ingredient list as printed has lost a line or two in typesetting, so read it against the method before shopping. Everything else is a straightforward English veal-and-ham pie baked under a pastry lid.
- The missing vealThe method calls for veal but no quantity survives in the list, and "1½ lb. ham" is almost certainly a run-together of two lines. Standard proportions for this pie are roughly 1½–2 lb veal cut from the leg or shoulder and ½ lb ham; the printed amounts cannot be reconstructed with confidence.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no figures; in period terms this is roughly 400-450F. At that heat for the full hour and a quarter the crust may darken well before the veal is done, so it can help to give it 20 minutes hot to set and colour the pastry, then drop to around 350F for the remainder.
- The casseroleHere a deep baking dish used uncovered, as a pie dish, with the pastry itself acting as the lid.
- Piling in the centreMounding the meat in the middle keeps the pastry domed and off the filling. The recipe does not say why, though it plausibly leaves room at the edges for steam rather than letting the underside of the crust go to paste.
- Adding the stockThe finishing stock goes in after baking. The recipe does not say how; the usual method is to pour it through a hole in the crust while the pie is still hot, filling the gap left as the meat shrinks.
- Serving coldFor the cold version the stock needs to set, which means a genuinely gelatinous one from veal or pork bones, or a plain stock with about a teaspoon of powdered gelatine per cup. Cool the filled pie and chill overnight before cutting.
- Seasonings"Red pepper" is cayenne, used in pinches. Mace is the outer sheath of nutmeg and is milder and more floral; nutmeg can stand in, used sparingly. "Powdered herbs" means a dried mixed-herb seasoning, likely something on the order of thyme, marjoram and a little sage.
- YieldPerhaps six servings as a main course, more as part of a cold table, though with the veal quantity missing from the list this is only an estimate.
Veal and ham pie is one of the fixed points of nineteenth-century English cookery, and the hard-boiled eggs laid in among the meat are its signature — they slice into neat yellow rounds and were prized as much for the look of the cut surface as for the eating. The dish belongs to the tradition of the cold raised pie carried to picnics, shooting lunches and cold suppers, which is why this version ends by telling you to add good seasoned stock and serve it hot or cold. Its appearance in a book devoted to casserole cookery is telling: the heavy hand-raised crust that stood on its own asked more skill of the cook than a pie baked in a dish. Veal's mildness is the reason the recipe leans so hard on ham, mace, lemon rind and cayenne for flavour.