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Old-fashioned English Chicken Pie
Cover chicken, cut in pieces for serving, with boiling water, add two sprigs of thyme, one sprig of marjoram, bit of bay leaf, two sprigs parsley, tied in a bag. Simmer gently until tender.
One half hour before chicken is done, add one half pound bacon cut in small pieces.
Arrange on the bottom of baking dish, slices of hardcooked eggs, cover with sautéd mushrooms, then a layer of chicken meat, and continue until dish is filled. Add three cups of sauce made from the liquor in the pan and thickened with two tablespoons butter and four tablespoons flour cooked together; reheat in oven, and garnish with pastry points cut in the shape of triangles, and parsley, and serve.
A composed pie rather than a baked one: the chicken is poached, layered with egg, bacon and mushrooms, sauced, and only reheated. The pastry never sits on top raw, so nothing depends on oven timing.
- Bouquet garni in a bagThe herbs "tied in a bag" are a bouquet garni; a scrap of cheesecloth or a tea infuser does it. Pull it out before making the sauce so the herbs do not go on infusing.
- Simmer means simmerAn old fowl needed 1.5-2 hours; a supermarket chicken is tender in 45-60 minutes and will shred if pushed further. Keep the water at a bare tremble, never a rolling boil, or the meat goes stringy and the broth cloudy.
- The bacon is for the brothAdding it half an hour from the end seasons the poaching liquid, which becomes the sauce. Taste the liquor before salting the finished sauce at all.
- The sauce is the hingeTwo tablespoons butter to four tablespoons flour is a dry, tight roux for three cups of liquid. The recipe only says the butter and flour are "cooked together"; give them a few minutes before the hot broth goes in, add the liquid gradually, and simmer the sauce on so it does not taste of raw flour.
- Skim firstPoached chicken with bacon throws a lot of fat. Let the strained liquor settle and lift the fat off, or the sauce breaks into grease when it reheats.
- MushroomsSauté them hard in butter until they have given up their water and browned. Wet mushrooms will thin the sauce in the dish.
- Reheating and the pastry pointsThe recipe says only "reheat in oven"; a moderate oven until the sauce bubbles at the edges will do. Bake the pastry triangles separately on a sheet and set them on top just before serving, otherwise they soften into the sauce.
Chicken pie of this kind — poached fowl layered with bacon, hard-cooked egg and mushroom under a gravy — belongs to the English dish-pie tradition, where hard-boiled eggs were a common filler and a way of stretching one bird across a table; the same combination survives in Victorian veal-and-ham pie. What marks this version as of its moment is that the pastry has retreated to a garnish: instead of a sealed crust baked with the filling, the cook arranges baked triangles on top at the last minute. Lowney's was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and the book carries a full general cookery section alongside its confectionery — hence a meat chapter in a chocolate company's book.