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Pork Pies, Little Raised
IN.
GREDIENTS.--2 lbs. of flour, lb. of butter, lb. of mutton suet, salt and white pepper to taste, 4 lbs. of the neck of pork, 1 dessert- PORK STEAKS. spoonful of powdered sage. AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d.
Well dry the flour, mince the suet, and put these with the butter into a saucepan, to be made hot, and add a little salt. When melted, mix it up into a stiff paste, and put it before the fire with a cloth over it until ready to make up chop the pork into small pieces, season it with white pepper, salt and powdered sage; divide the paste into rather small pieces, raise it in a round or oval form, fill with the meat, and bake in a brick oven. These pies will require a fiercer oven than those in the preceding recipe, as they are made so much smaller, and consequently do not require so soaking a heat.
TIME. If made small, about 1 hour.
SEASONABLE from September to March.
Pork Steaks and Apples. (American Recipe.) - INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons.-2 lbs. of pork, cut in steaks from the loin or neck, 2 lbs. of apples, hot lard for frying, pepper and salt. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 3d.
Trim the steaks neatly, cutting off most of the fat, season them with pepper, heat a gridiron, grease it and put on the steaks and broil them till they are thoroughly done and dry, turning them several times.
Peel the apples, take out the cores, and slice them; then fry in hot lard, and, when drained, put them round the steaks on a hot dish.
TIME. About 15 minutes to fry.
SEASONABLE from October to March.
A hot-water-crust raised pie in miniature, shaped by hand rather than in a tin. The paste has to be worked while it is still warm, which is the whole trick of the method.
- Fat quantities are unclearThe ingredient list gives "lb. of butter" and "lb. of mutton suet" with the fractions lost. Half a pound of each against the 2 lbs of flour is a plausible reading, but the original as printed does not say.
- Mutton suetShredded mutton suet is now hard to buy; beef suet or lard behaves the same way in hot-water crust. Suet and butter together give a paste that is firm enough to stand up on its own once cool.
- Work the paste warmHot-water crust must be moulded while it is still hand-hot and pliable. Keeping the bowl covered near warmth, as directed, is not optional -- once it cools it cracks instead of stretching, and the sides will split in the oven.
- Raising by handFlatten a piece of paste, then press and pull it up the sides of a floured jam jar or small tin, or work it round your fist. Aim for walls a good quarter-inch thick; thin walls collapse under the weight of the filling.
- "A fiercer oven"The book gives no temperatures. In a modern oven, something in the region of 425-450F to set the crust, dropping to about 375F for the remainder of the hour, answers the description. A brick oven's falling heat would have produced a similar decline on its own.
- Judge the pork, not the clockThe hour is given for pies "made small". Chopped pork should reach 160F at the centre; a skewer pushed through the top should meet no resistance and come out with clear, hot juices.
- Chop, do not mince"Small pieces" means hand-chopped to roughly pea size, with some fat left in. Modern minced pork packs dense and dries out; the coarse cut is what gives a raised pie its texture.
- YieldTwo pounds of flour and four of pork come to some six pounds of pie, which would divide into roughly a dozen small ones, though the recipe does not say how many it makes.
- No jelly hereUnlike many raised pork pies, this recipe adds no stock. If you want the set jelly under the lid, pour warm well-reduced pork stock through a hole in the top once the pies are baked and beginning to cool.
Raised pies are one of the oldest surviving English forms: the paste began as a sturdy container -- a "coffin" -- that could be built up by hand without a tin and would hold its shape in a bread oven, and only later became something people expected to eat. Made small, as here, they were portable food. The "seasonable from September to March" note is a reminder of the pre-refrigeration slaughter year: pigs were killed in the cold months, and fresh pork in high summer was considered risky. The instruction to bake in a brick oven, and the comparison of a "fiercer" heat against a "soaking" one, shows a cook reasoning about a retained-heat oven whose temperature could only be managed by timing and by the size of what went in.