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Baked Chicken Pie
Take a 4-lb. chicken; singe, draw and clean as usual. Disjoint, cut the breast into four pieces, cut the thigh and leg apart. Save the neck, wing tips, heart, gizzard and liver for soup. Put on the rest with enough boiling water to cover; cook 2 hours.
Add 2 quarts white potatoes (washed, pared and diced). Cook 20 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender. Add 1 tablespoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley and 2 tablespoons flour mixed with a little cold water. Boil 3 minutes. Pour all into dish, which has been lined with pastry; cover with pastry; brush with milk. Bake 20 minutes in a moderate oven.
A plain two-crust chicken pie built on a stewed bird and its own broth. The recipe assumes a tough older fowl and a very generous pie; both need adjusting.
- The two-hour simmerTwo hours suited the mature stewing hens of the period. A modern 4-lb supermarket chicken is young and will be falling off the bone in 45 to 60 minutes at a bare simmer; cook it longer and the breast turns to string.
- Cover with boiling water, not much more"Enough boiling water to cover" is the whole sauce for this pie, so use the smallest pot the pieces fit in. If the meat swims, you will finish with thin broth and a soggy bottom crust.
- Two quarts of potatoesThat is roughly 3 lb of potatoes once pared and diced, which is a great deal of filling relative to one chicken. Halve it for a standard 9-inch deep dish, or keep the full quantity and use a large roasting pan or two pies.
- ThickeningTwo tablespoons of flour slaked in cold water will only lightly bind the liquid. If you want gravy rather than broth, use 4 to 5 tablespoons and boil it the full three minutes to cook out the raw starch taste.
- SaltA tablespoon of salt is right for the whole potful of broth and potatoes, not for a small pie. Season to taste and remember the crust adds its own.
- Moderate oven350 to 375F. Twenty minutes at that heat sets and colours the top crust but will not crisp a bottom crust under wet filling; blind-bake the lower pastry, or skip it and bake a top crust only.
- Filling temperaturePour the filling in hot and get the pie into the oven straight away. Warm filling in cold pastry is what makes a bottom crust greasy and pale.
- The milk washMilk gives a soft matte brown. An egg wash gives more gloss if you want it; the difference is cosmetic.
- YieldAs written, eight to ten servings. The giblets set aside for soup are worth simmering with an onion while the pie bakes.
The New Royal Cook Book was one of a long line of promotional cookbooks issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, and its pastry and biscuit chapters lean heavily on baking powder; the meat chapter, by contrast, is straightforward turn-of-the-century American household cooking. Chicken pie of this kind — a stewed fowl, its broth thickened with a little flour, potatoes bulking it out, pastry above and below — was long-established American home cooking. The instruction to disjoint the bird and set aside neck, wing tips and giblets for soup suggests a period when a chicken was bought whole and expected to produce more than one meal, and when the difference between a young roasting bird and an old boiling fowl mattered in choosing a method.