Raised Pies
They are of two or more kinds, either raised by pressing a common paste into the shape of a dish, with the fingers, or made more ornamental with a richer paste in a tin mould.
For the latter make the ordinary short paste the same as for covered pies or shortcake, of a pound of lard to two pounds of flour and a little salt, mixed up slightly warm. Knead it compact and smooth Put a buttered sheet of paper on a baking pan, butter the mould inside and set it on the paper; put in a bottom crust half an inch thick and then line the sides, wetting the lower edge and pressing it to join the bottom piece. The pie may be filled with anything in the meat line that is good to eat cold; there may be a boned chicken prepared exactly as directed for galantine, and some boned quails placed around it, and have truffles and mushrooms for seasonings and thin slices of fat unsmoked bacon on top. But to make it as fine as possible, the inside of the crust should be spread over with liver paste made as at No.802, or preferably perhaps, with fine simple matter, and though they are not very life-like they answer the temporary purpose quite well. You take half a dozen carrots of different sizes and cut the ends as near as may be in the resemblance of flowers, dip them in melted parrafin or wax and then immediately into cold water. The thin waxen mask of a flower shape can then be pulled off and another made. These are of course easily set in clusters on the stands by means of melted wax, and white leaves such as cakes are ornamented with complete the garlands. But all sorts of mouldings, cornices and borders can be made on the same plan. Instead of wax these stands can be covered with cake icing, white or colored, and with ornaments of gum paste.
One thing more: There is a little patching to be done in our trade as well as others. It is difficult to boil a fish so entire that it can be covered smoothly with a jelly and show no yawning chasms, and to have a boar's head without an ugly twist in the corner of his mouth. To smooth over the breaks in the fish, or to stuff it in natural form make a paste of whitefish pounded with half as much bread, a little butter, and yolks of eggs, and bake the fish a little while, covered with buttered paper. For the other case forcemeat will answer, glazed over. "`Ah! what delicacy hast thou in store for us now, my Glaucus?' cried the young Sallust, with sparkling eyes. `I know its face, by Pollux!' cried Pansa, 'it is * * *! --The Last Days of
The text runs two entries together — a raised meat pie and a passage on wax flower ornaments for cake stands — so read the second half as a printer's collision rather than part of the pie. What survives of the pie itself is a workable hot-water-style crust and a game filling in the English tradition.
- The pasteA pound of lard to two pounds of flour is a 1:2 fat-to-flour ratio by weight, roughly 450 g lard to 900 g flour, with salt to taste. "Mixed up slightly warm" is the hinge: the fat and the liquid should be warm rather than cold, so the dough is pliable enough to be pressed up the sides of a mould without cracking, and it must be worked while warm.
- Thickness and mouldsA half-inch bottom is not excessive — the crust here is structural, holding a heavy filling through a long bake. The book specifies only "a tin mould"; a hinged raised-pie mould is the likely sort, and a deep springform tin or a well-buttered loaf tin lined with paper will stand in.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Raised pies of this size are conventionally started hot, around 425F, to set the crust, then dropped to 350F for the long bake, which will run two hours or more for a filling of this weight.
- DonenessThe book assumes the cook knows when a pie is baked. Poultry forcemeat and boned birds should reach 165F at the centre, checked with a probe, not judged by the colour of the crust.
- Fat unsmoked baconThis means unsmoked cured pork fat — green bacon, fatback or pancetta. Ordinary American smoked bacon will dominate the truffle and the game; ask for unsmoked, or use thin sheets of pork back fat.
- Boned chicken and quailThe chicken is boned and rolled as for galantine, then surrounded with boned quail. Quail can be bought semi-boned from game suppliers.
- The liver paste liningRecipe No. 802 is not on this page. Any smooth, well-seasoned liver farce — chicken livers, pork fat, egg, seasoning — spread over the inside of the crust does the same job of sealing the pastry against the meat juices.
- The jellyThe text does not say so, but a cold raised pie of this kind is finished by pouring well-reduced, clarified stock through a hole in the lid once the pie is out of the oven and cooling. Without it, the meat shrinks and leaves a gap under the crust.
- The wax passageThe carrots dipped in melted paraffin, the wax garlands and the icing-covered stands belong to a chapter on table ornament. Paraffin and wax flowers are display work and are not eaten; nothing in that passage goes into the pie.
- ServingSliced cold, this is a cold-table dish for a crowd; the book gives no yield. Chill it thoroughly overnight before cutting or it will collapse.
Raised pies are the direct descendants of the medieval English "coffin" — a thick standing crust that began life as a baking vessel and a preservative shell rather than as something anyone expected to eat. By the nineteenth century the crust had become good enough to eat, and the raised game pie, boned and layered and set in aspic, was a fixture of the cold buffet in both English and American professional kitchens. Jessup Whitehead, a Chicago hotel cook and trade writer, aimed The American Pastry Cook at working pastry men rather than housewives, which is why the recipe assumes so much: no oven temperature, no baking time, and a cross-reference to a liver paste elsewhere in the book. The garbled run into wax flowers and the abrupt quotation from Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii are typical of the book's loose, discursive typesetting, and of a period in which the pastry cook was expected to be as much a decorator as a baker.