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Hot Water Paste for Raised Pies
1 cupful of lard. 10 cupfuls of flour. 1 1/2 cupfuls of flour. 2 teaspoonfuls of salt.
Make the water and lard hot, but not boiling, pour into the middle of the flour and stir up gradually. Work it stiff and smooth. Raised pies of all sizes made of the above kind of paste formed by hand, and covered with a top crust more or less ornamented by snipping with a pair of shears, are quite an English institution; small pork pies, eel pies and others being the sole article of trade at some lunch houses; whilst the larger and more elaborate forms are among the Christmas dishes of world-wide fame.
A hot water crust in the English style, printed here with at least one typesetting error that needs sorting out before you start.
- The second "flour" is waterThe ingredient list gives "10 cupfuls of flour" and then "1 1/2 cupfuls of flour", but names no water at all. The method calls for water and lard heated together, so the second entry is almost certainly water. Read it as 1 1/2 cupfuls of water.
- The liquid is still shortEven corrected, 1 1/2 cups of water and 1 cup of lard for 10 cups of flour reads dry for a hot water crust. Expect to add hot water by the spoonful until the dough comes together as a stiff, smooth mass. The original quantity may be a further misprint, and I would not guess at what it was meant to say.
- Scale it downTen cupfuls of flour is roughly 2 3/4 lb and will make enough paste for one very large raised pie or eight to ten small pork pies. A quarter batch is more sensible for a first attempt.
- "Hot, but not boiling"This is the hinge. The liquid must be hot enough to swell the flour's starch and give a pliable, mouldable paste, but the book is explicit that it should not be allowed to boil.
- Work it warmHot water crust is shaped while it is still warm to the hand and stiffens as it cools. Keep the bowl covered with a cloth and take out only what you are moulding; a cold lump cracks rather than raises.
- Raising by handThe traditional method is to mould the warm paste up the outside of a floured jar or wooden dolly, or press it into the base and sides of a springform or loose-bottomed tin. The walls need to be an even 1/4 to 3/8 inch or they slump in the oven.
- BakingThe book gives no temperature. Raised pies are usually started hot, around 425F for 20 minutes to set the crust, then dropped to 350F for the long bake the filling needs. Cut a steam vent in the lid; the snipped decoration the text describes is done with shears before baking.
- The filling is your problemThis is a paste recipe only. Any meat filling must reach a safe internal temperature, and a pork pie of any size needs well over an hour at the lower heat.
Hot water crust is one of the older surviving forms of English pastry, descended from the medieval "coffyn" — a thick flour-and-water case that began life as a baking vessel and a means of preserving the meat inside; it is often said that the case was not meant to be eaten, though there is evidence that such crusts were eaten, given away, or reused. By the nineteenth century the crust had become palatable, enriched with lard, and the raised pie was firmly a commercial article: the note here about lunch houses selling nothing but pork and eel pies reflects the ordinary street trade of Victorian English towns, while the "larger and more elaborate forms" points at the game and veal-and-ham pies that appeared on Christmas tables and in the pages of Mrs Beeton. Its presence in a pastry manual by an author plainly not writing from England — the crust is called "quite an English institution" — is a reminder that the trade looked to England and France for its repertoire, and that a working baker was expected to turn out a hand-raised pie on request even where the form was never really native.