Home › Recipes › Meat or Chicken Pie
Meat or Chicken Pie
Make dough as for Standard Baking Powder Biscuit. (See recipe, page 9.) Have meat or chicken boiled tender. (See Fireless Cooker.) Line bake pan with dough to within an inch from the bottom, lay meats or chicken in, put in some gravy, butter, salt and pepper. Cover with crust of dough, bake about 30 minutes. Any form of meat, game or rabbits can be cooked in this way.
A baking-powder-crust pie built on already-cooked meat, from an era when a pot of boiled chicken was a weekly given. The vagueness is deliberate — this is a template rather than a fixed formula.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; the book leaves it to the cook. Bake at 425F for the 30 minutes stated; a biscuit crust needs high heat to rise and brown before the filling dries out.
- "Line to within an inch from the bottom"The phrasing is ambiguous; it appears to mean the dough lining stops short rather than covering the whole pan. A top crust alone is a workable reading.
- The gravy is the hinge"Put in some gravy" is the whole dish. Use enough well-seasoned, lightly thickened stock to come about two-thirds up the meat — too little and the pie bakes dry, too much and the crust floats and stays raw underneath. Have it hot when it goes in.
- Fireless cookerAn insulated box that held a preheated pot for hours, the period equivalent of a slow cooker. Simmer the bird or meat on the stove until tender, or use a slow cooker, then let the meat cool enough to handle and reserve the cooking liquid for the gravy.
- Bake panLikely a shallow pan rather than a deep pie dish. A 9x13 works; the filling should be no more than about two inches deep or the crust cooks before the centre is hot.
- Quantities and yieldA 4-5 lb chicken picked from the bone, or roughly 4 cups of cooked meat, with 2 to 3 cups of gravy fills a 9x13 pan and serves six.
- Game and rabbitThe closing note assumes tough, lean meat that has already been braised at length. Farmed rabbit and venison need the same treatment — cooked to full tenderness first, since 30 minutes in the oven only heats the filling and bakes the crust.
Biscuit-topped meat pies belong to a line of pastry often associated with American kitchens: where an English raised or shortcrust pie demanded rendered fat, careful handling and a long bake, baking powder dough could be mixed in five minutes and needed no rolling skill at all. Chemical leavening became cheap and reliable in American kitchens over the second half of the nineteenth century, and community and manufacturer cookbooks of the early 1900s leaned on it constantly. The recipe's structure tells you as much as its ingredients: it is written to use up boiled meat rather than to cook meat, and its reference to a fireless cooker places it in the brief period when insulated cookers were promoted as fuel-saving modern equipment. The closing line about game and rabbits is a reminder that domestic chicken was not yet the default cheap meat it became after the 1940s.