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Chicken Pie (Salt and pepper tablespoon)
1 chicken Salt and pepper 1 tablespoon flour Yolk of hard-boiled egg 1/2 tablespoon parsley 1/4 pound salt pork Pie crust Prepare the chicken as for fricassee; put the giblets in cold water and stew until nearly done; add the chicken; season with pepper and salt and simmer for twenty minutes. Remove with a skimmer and make a gravy of the broth by adding the flour, egg yolk and parsley. Line the sides of a deep baking pan with pie crust; place an inverted cup in the center; put in the chicken in layers covered with strips of salt pork and moistened with the gravy. Pour on the remainder of the gravy; cover with pie crust, making the edges as firm as possible and cutting a few slashes. Bake slowly for nearly an hour.
A plain stewed-chicken pie of the sort every American cookbook of the period carried. The instructions assume knowledge the modern cook may not have — chiefly what "as for fricassee" means and why a teacup is buried in the middle of the dish.
- The inverted cupThis is the hinge of the recipe. A heatproof teacup set upside down in the center holds up the top crust so it does not sag into the gravy, and gives the steam somewhere to collect. A ceramic pie funnel or pie bird does the same job; without one, the lid will slump and go soggy.
- "Prepare as for fricassee"Cut the bird into serving pieces at the joints — two wings, two drumsticks, two thighs, the breast split, and the back. Period cookbooks gave both white and brown fricassees; since this bird goes straight into water with the giblets, no browning is called for here.
- Simmering timeTwenty minutes suited a young fowl that would finish cooking in the oven. A supermarket broiler-fryer follows the same logic, but check that the thickest thigh meat reaches 165F by the time the pie comes out. An older stewing hen needs one to two hours of gentle simmering before it ever goes near the crust.
- GibletsHeart, gizzard and neck go into the cold water; the liver is usually left out of pie stock, as it muddies and slightly embitters the broth. The gizzard needs the longest cooking, which is why it starts before the chicken.
- "Bake slowly"A slow oven in this period is 300–325F. At that heat the pastry will cook through in the hour given but will not take much color; brushing the top with milk or beaten egg helps. If your crust is browning before the hour is out, the oven is running hot.
- The gravy is deliberately thinOne tablespoon of flour to the whole pot of broth gives a barely bound sauce, thickened further by the mashed hard-boiled yolk. That is intentional — the crust absorbs a good deal. If you want a gravy that holds on a fork, use two to three tablespoons of flour and expect a heavier pie than the author had in mind.
- Salt porkModern salt pork is very salty; rinse it, or blanch the strips a minute in boiling water, before laying them over the chicken. Season the broth lightly at the start and correct at the end, since both the pork and the reduced stock push the salt up.
- Vessel and yieldA "deep baking pan" here is a straight-sided dish, lined at the sides only — there is no bottom crust. One chicken of three to four pounds should feed four to six.
Chicken pie in this form — stewed bird, salt pork, a top crust and no bottom — is the older American pattern, closer to a British raised or dish pie than to the creamed-and-vegetabled pot pie that took over later in the twentieth century. It was a Sunday and holiday dish across New England and the mid-Atlantic well into the 1900s, and it turns up on New England Thanksgiving tables alongside the turkey. The salt pork is doing what butter or bacon fat would do now: lubricating a lean stewing fowl that had spent its useful life laying eggs. The mashed hard-boiled yolk stirred into the gravy is generally understood as an old thickener and enricher, and appears to have been common enough in nineteenth-century sauce-making before flour-and-butter roux became the standard household technique.