Chicken Pie
Cut a chicken in pieces for serving. Melt four tablespoons butter or use the same quantity of pork fat. Add one fourth cup onion, a sprig of parsley, bit of bay leaf, four cloves, and one tablespoon salt.
Put in chicken and cover with boiling water; cook until tender. Arrange chicken in baking dish; cover with strained and thickened stock. Cover whole dish with mashed potato or pastry crust. Bake until potato is brown or crust is done.
A straightforward two-stage dish: poach the bird in an aromatic broth, then bake it under a lid of potato or pastry. The original assumes you know how thick to make the gravy and how hot to set the oven, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- The hinge: thicken the stock properly"Strained and thickened stock" is left undefined; a roux-based gravy is the easiest route, and it needs to be thicker than a pouring sauce or it will boil up through the crust. Figure roughly 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour per cup of strained broth, cooked out for a minute before the liquid goes in. Reduce or skim the poaching liquid first; four tablespoons of fat plus chicken fat will leave a slick on top.
- Oven temperatureLowney's gives none. A pastry-topped pie wants 425F for about 25-30 minutes so the crust sets and colours; a mashed-potato top does well at 400F for 25-30 minutes, or run it briefly under the broiler at the end for browning.
- Size of birdThe recipe just says "a chicken" and gives no weight. Work on a 3 to 4 lb bird, close to a supermarket broiler-fryer today. Poaching takes 45 minutes to an hour, not the two hours an old stewing hen would need. Cook until the meat pulls easily from the bone and no longer.
- That tablespoon of saltIt seasons a whole pot of poaching water, not the finished pie, so it is not as alarming as it reads. Still, if you intend to reduce the strained stock for gravy, start with about half and correct at the end, or the sauce will be brutal.
- Take the bones outThe recipe leaves the chicken cut "in pieces for serving," meaning bone-in portions under the crust. Pulling the meat off in large pieces after poaching makes the pie far easier to serve and lets the gravy coat everything.
- Whole spicesFour cloves and a bit of bay in the poaching liquid is a lot of clove for a modern palate and they must be fished out or caught in the straining. Tie them with the parsley in a scrap of cheesecloth if you would rather not hunt.
- Potato toppingMashed potato for the lid should be stiff and well seasoned, spread or piped about half an inch thick, with the surface roughed up with a fork so it catches colour. Loose, creamy mash will sink into the gravy.
- YieldOne 3-4 lb chicken in a 2-quart baking dish serves four to six. The recipe adds no vegetables; a cup of peas or diced cooked carrot folded into the gravy is entirely in keeping with the period.
Chicken pie under a crust of pastry or mashed potato is a long-established dish in American home cookery, and is often connected with English pie traditions and with the practice of capping a stew with potato rather than dough. Its appearance here is a reminder of what a Sunday chicken meant around 1907: a bird was a substantial purchase, and the method wrings everything from it, poaching the meat and turning the poaching liquid into the sauce that binds the pie. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounded its chocolate recipes with a full general cookery course so the volume would earn a permanent place on the kitchen shelf. The plain, unfussy tone of this entry, with no oven temperature and no yield, is typical of the period's recipe writing.