Vegetable Pie
INGREDIENTS for small pie.-1 onion, 1 carrot, 1 turnip, 1 stick of celery, a handful of green peas, if in season, oz. of sago, 1 oz. of butter, pepper and salt, paste to cover the pie. AVERAGE COST, 10d.
Cut all the vegetables small, and stew them with the sago, butter and seasoning, with a very little water till nearly cooked. Then put them in a pie-dish, and cover with paste made from butter, if for a vegetarian dish, and bake till the crust is done; any other vegetables may be used, and a few mushrooms are always an improvement. Time.-About 1/2 hour to bake the pie.
SEASONABLE at any time.
VEGETABLE SOUP.
A plain vegetable pie thickened with sago rather than flour, from the era when "vegetarian" in a cookery book meant chiefly that the pastry was made with butter instead of suet or lard. It needs almost nothing beyond a sensible hand with the stewing stage.
- The hinge: stew, don't boilThe vegetables go into the dish only nearly cooked, in very little water. Too much liquid and the sago cannot set it; the filling floods the pastry base and the crust never crisps. Aim for a thick, glossy mixture that just holds its shape on a spoon.
- Sago as thickenerPearl sago is a palm starch, sold in Asian and some health-food shops; it swells and turns translucent as it cooks, binding the juices. Tapioca pearls of similar size behave the same way. The quantity in the original has lost its fraction; for a small pie of this sort roughly half an ounce (about 1 tablespoon) is a reasonable reading.
- Oven heatBake at about 400-425F for a short-crust or rough-puff lid, which browns the pastry before the filling can dry out. Put the dish on a preheated baking sheet so the base of the crust sets.
- Baking timeThe stated time is incomplete in the original. A small pie with pre-cooked filling needs roughly 30-40 minutes, judged by a deep golden crust and filling bubbling at the edge.
- Pie-dish and pasteA small pie-dish of the period was likely an oval of a pint or so; a 9-inch pie plate or a dish of about 1.5 pints stands in. "Paste to cover" means a lid only, no base, so around 8 oz of pastry is plenty.
- SeasoningVegetables, sago and water give a mild, sweetish filling. Season the stew more assertively than feels right, and a spoonful of stock, a bay leaf or a little mace lifts it; the mushrooms suggested at the end do a lot of work here.
- YieldA "small pie" of this size serves two generously or three as a side dish.
Mrs Beeton's household books ran to hundreds of these workaday entries, costed to the penny -- tenpence here -- because the mistress of the house was expected to check the cook's spending. The note that the paste should be "made from butter, if for a vegetarian dish" is the telling detail: ordinary English pastry of the period is generally said to have used beef suet or lard, so a meatless pie was not automatically meat-free. Organised vegetarianism in Britain dates from the Vegetarian Society's founding in Ramsgate in 1847, and by the time these later Beeton compilations appeared, publishers seem often to have tucked in a handful of dishes for that readership. Sago, imported from the palm forests of Southeast Asia, was cheap and ubiquitous in Victorian kitchens, better known in nursery puddings than as a savoury thickener.