Pompeii
sausage meat, before the fowls are put in.
Then put on the top crust, pinch the edges, trim neatly, roll the scraps of paste thin and stamp out leaf shapes enough to cover the top. Leave a hole in the middle. Brush over with egg and water, tie greased paper outside the same as in baking a fruit cake; bake the pie in a slack oven three or four hours. Open the mould and take it off when the pie is nearly cold, and as no liquor is baked in the pie, some gravy made by boiling the bones of the fowl down rich enough to be jelly when cold, must be poured in the cavity left in the lid.
The renowned Perigord pie has the inside lined with slices of truffles set in liver paste seasoned with aromatic salt, and the filling is of fat goose livers and truffles, bacon on top and aspic jelly mixed with Madeira wine poured in while the pie is cooling.
This is the tail end of a raised fowl pie — the page begins mid-sentence, so the boning and layering of the birds is on the preceding page. What survives is the part that decides whether the pie works: the crust, the long slow bake, and the jelly poured in afterward.
- The hinge: no liquid goes in before bakingA raised pie is baked dry so the paste stays a rigid case rather than a soggy one. The vent hole in the lid exists so that reduced, gelatin-rich stock can be poured into the gap left as the meat shrinks and the pie cools. Pour it when the pie is warm but no longer hot, in stages, letting each addition settle.
- "Slack oven"Slack meant a cool oven, generally reckoned somewhere in the region of 250-300F, and the coolest heat a cook would normally work at. Three to four hours at that sort of heat suits a large pie packed with whole boned birds; at 350F the crust colors long before the center is done.
- The mouldA hinged or spring-sided raised-pie mould, unhinged and lifted away once the pie is nearly cold. A tall springform pan is the closest modern substitute. Do not release it while hot — the paste is still soft and will slump.
- Greased paper outsideThe paste is wrapped in greased paper and tied, exactly as a rich fruit cake was, to keep the sides from scorching over a long bake. Kitchen parchment or a loose foil collar does the same work.
- Jelly stockSimmer the fowl bones and any trimmings until the liquid sets firmly when chilled, which is the recipe's own test: "rich enough to be jelly when cold." A spoonful on a cold saucer should set firm and tacky. Modern poultry bones often need help; a little added gelatin is legitimate and invisible in the finished pie.
- Sausage meatPlain bulk pork sausage, unsmoked and fairly fat, used as the binding forcemeat between the birds. Anything lean will bake dry and crumble when the pie is sliced.
- Aromatic saltThe period's spiced salt: salt worked with pepper, and some combination of nutmeg, clove, mace, bay and thyme. Mix your own and use it sparingly, remembering the sausage meat is already seasoned.
- Serving and storageCut cold, in wedges, from the fully set pie, as a cold-table dish; the surviving text does not say how large the pie is or how many birds it holds, so no yield can be given. Once the jelly is in, it is a perishable meat pie and belongs in the refrigerator, not on a sideboard for a day.
- The Périgord variationTruffles and fat goose liver are the expensive version, not a required one. Aspic mixed with Madeira is poured in the same way and at the same moment as the plain jelly.
Raised pies of this kind — boned birds nested inside one another, packed with forcemeat, encased in a stiff hot-water paste and baked in a mould — were the great show pieces of the cold buffet, and they were as much a test of a pastry cook's hands as of his palate. The "renowned Perigord pie" invoked at the end points to the P egion, long the center of the truffle and fattened-goose-liver trade, and the name attached itself in English and American kitchens to any luxurious truffled liver pie in a crust, whether or not it came from anywhere near the Dordogne. That a manual assumes its readers know the reference tells you how thoroughly French terminology governed the kitchens that used such books; the same page moves without comment from ordinary pork sausage meat to aspic laced with Madeira, because both were expected of the same cook on the same day.