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Meat Pie with Crust
Use left-over meat from Sunday's roast, cutting it in 1 1/2-inch pieces. Heat it in left-over gravy, adding 1/2 dozen medium sized sliced onion, and any left-over vegetables on hand. Pour into a baking pan lined with Pie crust, finish off top with crust, pricked with fork to allow steam to escape. Bake till nicely browned.
This is a framework rather than a formula: the amounts depend entirely on what came off Sunday's roast. Two things need supplying, an oven temperature and some control over the wet filling.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. A workable modern approach is 425F for 15 minutes, then down to 375F until the crust is set and browned, roughly 35 to 45 minutes total for a 9-inch pan.
- The onionsHalf a dozen medium onions is a great deal for a pie built on one roast's leftovers, and raw sliced onion heated only briefly in gravy stays sharp and crunchy. Two or three, softened in fat first, suits most modern palates and thickens the filling as they collapse.
- Keep the filling thickLeftover gravy thins out as the meat and vegetables release moisture in the oven. Reduce it until it coats a spoon before it goes in, or the bottom crust will be raw and grey no matter how brown the top gets.
- Bottom crustA lined pan under a wet filling is the weak point here. Blind-bake the base at 400F for 12 to 15 minutes before filling, or use a top crust only.
- Filling temperatureCool the meat and gravy to lukewarm before pouring it onto raw pastry; hot filling melts the fat in the dough and the crust turns greasy rather than flaky.
- Reheated meatBring the gravy and meat to a full simmer while heating, not just warm through. Roast that has sat in the refrigerator several days should be used up or discarded rather than baked into a pie.
- YieldOne roast's worth of trimmings plus vegetables will roughly fill a 9-inch pan, enough for about four; pastry for a double crust takes something in the region of 2 1/4 cups flour.
Pies like this are a practical use for the Sunday roast: when a large joint is bought, the days that follow tend to be built around what survives it, and a crust was a standard way to turn cold odds and ends into something that could be carried to the table whole. The technique itself is much older, and in the English tradition pastry began partly as a container for keeping and transporting cooked meat rather than as something eaten for its own sake.