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Potato and Onion Pie No. 1
1 pound of potatoes 1 pound of onions 1 ounce butter 1 teacup of milk Pepper and salt Short paste Slice the onions and potatoes, and put them into cold water. Bring them to boiling point, and boil quickly for three minutes. Put them into a pie dish, and add the butter and the milk, which must be boiling, and season well with pepper and salt. Cover the dish with a stout crust, and bake in a moderate oven for an hour and a half. No time must be lost in covering the pie with the crust, and putting it into the oven, as the potatoes must not be allowed to cool or the flavor will be spoiled.
A plain vegetable pie that depends entirely on heat management: the filling goes into the crust hot and straight into the oven. Everything else is straightforward.
- The hinge: work hot and fastThe instruction to lose no time is the whole recipe. Have the pastry rolled and the oven at temperature before you drain the vegetables, so the boiling milk and hot potato go under the lid immediately. Cooling potato in an uncovered dish gives the finished pie a flat, slightly stale flavor.
- Moderate oven350F. At an hour and a half the crust will color well before the end; lay a sheet of foil loosely over the top once it is browned to your liking.
- Teacup of milkA teacup in cookbooks of this period is usually reckoned at about a quarter pint, roughly half a breakfast cup, so somewhere in the region of two-thirds to three-quarters of a modern cup. The measure is genuinely loose.
- Short pasteOrdinary shortcrust, about 8 oz flour to 4 oz fat, rolled thicker than usual since the recipe calls for a stout crust that must survive ninety minutes. Cut a vent or two, or the steam will lift and split it.
- SlicingNo thickness is given. Cut both potatoes and onions about an eighth of an inch; the three-minute boil only takes the raw edge off, and the rest of the cooking happens in the sealed dish.
- Dish sizeA pound each of potato and onion fills a 1.5-quart pie dish with a slight dome, which is what you want so the crust rests on the filling rather than sagging into a gap.
- SeasoningSeason more heavily than instinct suggests. Two pounds of bland vegetables under a lid of pastry absorb a great deal of salt, and there is no stock or meat in the dish to carry it.
- YieldServes four as a main course with a green vegetable, six as a side.
Potato and onion under a pastry lid is one of the oldest and cheapest of British baked dishes, a cousin of the Lancashire and Cornish potato pies that fed households on days when meat was absent by necessity rather than choice. Such books were rarely vegetarian in principle. They simply demonstrated that a filling dinner could be built from potatoes, onions, milk and butter, which is exactly what this pie does.