Yorkshire Pie
Yorkshire has won so much glory by reason of its pudding, that it has some claim to our attention when it offers us a pie. What is sold in the Italian warehouse under this name is but a galantine packed in terrines of different sizes. The true Yorkshire pie is made as follows, and is one of the most noble features of an English Christmas: -Bone a goose and a large fowl. Fill the latter with a stuffing made of minced ham or tongue, veal, suet, parsley, pepper, salt, and two eggs; or for a more highly-seasoned stuffing say-minced ham, veal, suet, onion, sweet-herbs, lemon-peel, mixed spices, cayenne, salt, worked into a paste with a couple of eggs. Sew up the fowl, truss it, and stew it for twenty minutes along with the goose in some good stock, and in a close stewpan. Put the fowl within the goose, and place the goose in a pie-mould which has been lined with good hot-water paste. Let the goose repose on a cushion of stuffing, and in the midst of the liquor in which he has been stewed. Surround him in the pie with slices of parboiled tongue and pieces of pigeon, partridge, or hare. Fill the vacancies with more stuffing; put on a good layer of butter; roof it with paste; bake it for three hours; and consume it either hot or cold. These pies are sometimes made of enormous size, containing every variety of poultry and game, one within another and side by side. A Christmas pie of this kind, going from Sheffied in 1832 as a tribute to the then Yorkshire Pudding Lord Chancellor Brougham, broke down by reason of its weight.
This pie reminds one of what Alexandre Dumas regarded as his culinary triumph-the Monte Christo anchovy. Put the anchovy into an olive, the olive into a lark, the lark into a quail, the quail into a pheasant, the pheasant into a turkey, the turkey into a sucking-pig. Roast it for three hours. Then peel off layer after layer, throwing all out of the window, -save the anchovy, for which everything is to be sacrificed.
A Victorian raised pie of the grandest sort: birds boned and nested inside one another in a hot-water crust. The instructions assume a professional larder, so the gaps need filling before you start.
- The crust is the hinge"Good hot-water paste" is a raised-pie crust of flour, lard and boiling water, worked warm and made stiff enough to stand as a wall. It is structural, not a pastry to be enjoyed for its own sake; if it is too rich or too slack it will slump under the weight of two birds and their liquor.
- No oven temperature givenKettner gives none, as was usual in the period. For a pie this size, a hot start of about 425F for the first 20-30 minutes to set the crust, then 325-350F for the remainder, is a reasonable modern approach.
- Three hours is a guide, not a ruleThe time reflects a pie mould of a particular size. Judge doneness by internal temperature at the centre of the fowl: 165F. A large multi-bird pie can easily need longer than three hours, and the crust will want covering with foil or paper once it has coloured.
- Boning the birdsA goose and a fowl boned whole, skin intact, is the whole architecture of the dish. A butcher will do it on request; done at home it takes practice and a small sharp knife worked against the bone rather than the flesh.
- No quantities at allThe stuffing ingredients are listed without weights, as was common in cookery writing of the period. Reckon roughly 1 lb of minced veal and ham together, 4 oz suet, and the two eggs named, per bird, and season assertively since the pie is often eaten cold.
- "Pieces of pigeon, partridge, or hare"All three are still legitimate and available from game dealers in season. Pigeon here means woodpigeon or squab, not the urban bird.
- Stewing before bakingTwenty minutes in stock sets the shape of the birds and gives you the liquor that fills the pie. Keep that stock: it should be strong enough to set to a jelly, and a cold raised pie is judged partly on whether it does.
- Cooling mattersA pie of this bulk holds heat for hours. If it is to be eaten cold, get it out of the danger zone in reasonable time -- somewhere cool and airy, uncovered until the steam has gone -- rather than leaving a warm mass of poultry to sit overnight in a heated kitchen.
- YieldNot stated, but a goose-and-fowl pie of this construction will serve twenty or more, which is the point of it. It was made for a household at Christmas, not for a dinner of four.
The Yorkshire Christmas pie was already famous long before Kettner's book appeared in 1877; Hannah Glasse gave a version in The Art of Cookery in 1747, with turkey, goose, fowl, partridge and pigeon nested inside a standing crust and a bushel of flour for the paste, expressly noting that such pies were sent as gifts to London. That is the tradition behind this entry: the raised pie as a travelling present, built to survive a coach journey inside its own armour of lard pastry, and cut at table over days. Kettner's compiler -- the journalist E. S. Dallas, who wrote the book under the name of the London restaurateur Auguste Kettner -- is characteristically dry about the commercial imitation sold in Italian warehouses (the period term for a grocer dealing in imported delicacies), which he dismisses as galantine in a pot. The anecdote of the pie sent from Sheffield to Lord Chancellor Brougham in 1832 collapsing under its own weight belongs to the same competitive tradition as the celebrated Denby Dale pies; the detail is anecdotal rather than documented. The closing flourish about Dumas and the anchovy is Dallas enjoying himself, and is best read as a joke about diminishing returns rather than a recipe.