Raised Pies
INGREDIENTS.-To every lb. of flour allow 1/2 saltspoonful of salt, 2 eggs, 1/3 1/3 pint of water, 6 oz. of butter. AVERAGE Cost, 1s. per lb.
Spread the flour, which should be sifted and thoroughly dry, on the paste-board; make a hole in the centre, into which put the butter; work it lightly into the flour, and, when quite fine, add the salt; work the whole into a smooth paste with the eggs (yolks and whites) and water, and make it very firm. Knead the paste well, and let it be rather stiff, that the sides of the pie may be easily raised, and that they do not afterwards tumble or shrink.
Note. This paste may be very much enriched by making it with equal quantities of flour and butter; but then it is not so easily raised as when made plainer.
Paté de Foie Gras Sandwiches. - INGREDIENTS for sandwiches for 6 persons. A small tin of foie gras, a little cress, 1/4 lb. of butter, brown bread. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Cut bread-and-butter from a tin loaf very thin, sprinkle half the slices with the cress freed from half the white stalks, spread the other half with the pâté, and put them together, trimming off the crusts.
Arrange them on a dish in a circle as cutlets, overlapping one another, and garnish with parsley or watercress; in using the latter, put a pile in the centre.
SEASONABLE. - Suitable for afternoon tea, or a savoury at luncheon.
Two separate items have run together on this page: the paste for a hand-raised pie, and an unrelated recipe for foie gras sandwiches. Neither is complete on its own, so treat the first as a component and the second as an assembly job.
- The paste is the pointThis is a crust recipe, not a pie recipe. It gives no filling, no oven temperature and no baking time; you will need those from whatever pie you intend to raise.
- MeasurementsA saltspoonful is a quarter teaspoon. One-third of an imperial pint is just under 7 fl oz, about 190 ml. To every pound (450 g) of flour, then: 6 oz (170 g) butter, 2 eggs, and that water "the average cost, 1s. per lb" is a period price note, not an instruction.
- Not the hot-water crust you expectHot-water crust, with fat melted into boiling water and the flour scalded, is the paste usually associated with raised pies of this period. Beeton's version here works butter into the flour and binds with whole egg and water, which gives a shorter, richer, less elastic dough. It will hand-raise, but it is likely to be less forgiving than hot-water crust.
- Make it firm and rest it warmThe hinge of the whole recipe is the line about the paste being stiff so the sides do not "tumble or shrink." Add the water sparingly; a slack dough will slump off the mould before it ever reaches the oven. Keep the dough at cool room temperature while working, not chilled, or it will not stretch.
- Raising the pieHand-raising means moulding the warm dough up around a floured jam jar or wooden pie dolly, then easing it off once set. A hinged raised-pie mould or a loose-bottomed cake tin does the same job with less anxiety.
- On the richer versionThe note about equal quantities of flour and butter takes you to 1 lb butter per 1 lb flour, which is effectively a rich shortcrust. It will taste better and collapse readily; use it in a mould, not free-standing.
- Foie gras sandwichesTinned pâté de foie gras keeps the recipe workable, though production is banned or restricted in several jurisdictions; a good chicken liver parfait or mousse behaves identically on thin brown bread. "Cress" here means garden or mustard cress, not watercress, though Beeton allows the latter as garnish.
- YieldThe paste quantity is given per pound of flour. The sandwiches are stated for six persons; the recipe does not say how many slices that amounts to.
Raised pies are the descendants of the medieval "coffin," a thick standing crust built by hand as much to hold and preserve the meat as to be eaten with it. By Beeton's day the pastry had become genuinely edible, and the older hand-raising technique persisted alongside the hinged moulds and tins that were by then available: a stiff dough moulded around a wooden dolly and filled with pork, veal and ham, or game. The style survives commercially in the Melton Mowbray pork pie, whose bow-sided shape is the mark of a crust raised free-standing rather than in a mould. The foie gras sandwiches that follow belong to a different world entirely, the late-Victorian and Edwardian fashion for the savoury course and for elaborate afternoon tea, when imported tinned delicacies from France reached British tables and sandwiches might be arranged in an overlapping ring like cutlets.