Veal Pot Pie
Cut about 3 pounds of neck, breast or other rough part in inch squares. Cover with boiling water and simmer until very tender, seasoning when two-thirds done. Make a good biscuit crust with 1 pint of flour, 2 tablespoonfuls of shortening, ½ teaspoonful of salt, 1 teaspoonful of baking-powder, and enough sweet milk to make a soft dough. Roll out a half inch thick.
Thicken the gravy with a little wetted flour and boil up for five minutes. Fit the paste over the top of the stew, cover the pot tightly and draw to where the stew will just simmer for forty-five minutes.
A stewed veal dish with a steamed biscuit lid rather than a baked one. Two details in the original need attention before you start: the leavening is under-measured by modern standards, and the lid must not be lifted while it cooks.
- Keep the lid onThe crust cooks entirely in steam. Lifting the cover lets the steam escape and the dough collapses into the gravy, so leave it sealed for the full time and judge doneness by a skewer after you uncover it at the end.
- 1 pint of flourA pint measured dry is 2 cups, about 9 oz of all-purpose flour. The recipe's 1 teaspoonful of baking powder is low for that quantity; modern baking powder is used at roughly 1 teaspoon per cup of flour, so 2 teaspoons gives the rise the crust needs.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, as distinct from the sour or buttermilk that older recipes called for by name. Expect about 3/4 cup to bring 2 cups of flour to a soft dough.
- Wetted flourA slurry: stir a couple of tablespoons of flour into an equal volume of cold water until smooth, then whisk it into the simmering broth. The five-minute boil both thickens the gravy and helps cook out the raw starch taste.
- The cutsVeal neck and breast are collagen-rich and cheap, but few supermarkets stock them. A butcher will cut either; boneless veal shoulder works, and stewing beef chuck behaves the same way if veal is not available. Figure 1 1/2 to 2 hours of gentle simmering for "very tender."
- Seasoning "when two-thirds done"The recipe holds the seasoning back until the meat is well along. Season the broth properly at that stage; the crust is only lightly salted, so the gravy carries most of the flavour.
- Heat level and timeA bare simmer, no more, or the bottom scorches under a sealed lid. Forty-five minutes suits a half-inch crust over a deep pot; check at 30 minutes if your dough is thinner or the pot is wide.
- YieldThree pounds of bone-in veal with a full biscuit lid serves five or six as a main course. Serve straight from the pot, cutting the crust into wedges over the meat.
Pot pie in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cooking often meant this: a stew finished on the stovetop under a lid of biscuit dough or rolled paste, a form that coexisted throughout the period with pastry-covered dishes baked in the oven. The method is often said to reflect the era before reliable domestic ovens and the constraints of cooking on a single boiling hole, and related stovetop traditions survive in the upland South and in Pennsylvania, where "pot pie" (bot boi) characteristically means squares of rolled dough boiled in the broth rather than a lid over the stew. Veal neck and breast were among the cheapest butcher's cuts available, full of connective tissue that long simmering turns to gelatin, which is why they appear in a book organized around low cost; the flour-thickened gravy stretched a modest amount of meat across a whole table.