Meat Pot-Pie
Cut beef, chicken, or other meat into pieces; put in boiling water; cover and cook until tender, seasoning to taste. When the stew is done add drop dumplings and serve.
A little chopped hard-boiled egg, parsley, bay leaf or other herb lends variety to the pot-pie.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in loose-leaf books, where the cook was assumed to know the dumpling routine already. The hinge is the dumplings: they steam rather than boil, so the pot must be covered and left alone.
- It is not a pieIn much American usage of this period a pot-pie meant meat stewed in its own broth with a dough element dropped on top rather than a pastry-covered dish, and that is plainly what is meant here. Nothing goes in the oven.
- Quantities are left to youNo weights are given. Figure about 2 lb of boneless stewing beef or one 4-5 lb chicken cut up, with water to cover by an inch, to serve four to six.
- Boiling water, then a simmerStarting the meat in boiling water is deliberate, but hold it at a bare simmer afterward. A rolling boil for an hour toughens beef and shreds chicken into strings.
- Cooking times by cutChuck or shin needs 2 to 2½ hours to be genuinely tender; a cut-up chicken needs 45 minutes to an hour. Test with a fork rather than a clock.
- Drop dumplingsThe book expects a separate dumpling recipe: roughly 1½ cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon fat and about ¾ cup milk, dropped by spoonfuls onto the simmering stew. Cover tightly and cook 12 to 15 minutes without lifting the lid, or the tops will be raw and sodden.
- Broth depth mattersDumplings should sit on meat and thick broth, not float in thin liquid. If the pot is watery, reduce it or thicken with a flour-and-water slurry before the dough goes in.
- Season before the dumplings"Seasoning to taste" has to happen while the broth is still accessible. Once the dumplings are on, stirring in salt breaks them up.
- Herbs and eggIf a bay leaf goes in, pull it out before serving. The recipe does not say when the chopped hard-boiled egg and parsley are added; scattering them over the finished dish keeps them fresh.
Pot-pie in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American usage covered any meat stewed in a single pot with a dough element, and the dough might be a dropped batter or rolled noodle-square rather than a crust; the Pennsylvania Dutch bot boi still means the noodle version rather than anything baked. Recipes of this shape earned their place in a general household cookbook because they used the cheap, hard-working cuts a family bought by the pound and stretched them with flour, which was cheaper still. The instructions are brief, as though written as reminders for a cook who already knew the sequence.