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English Meat Pie
Knuckle of veal 1 slice onion 1 slice carrot Bit of bay leaf Sprig of parsley 12 peppercorns Blade of mace 2 teaspoons salt 1/2 lb. lean raw ham 4 tablespoons flour 4 tablespoons butter 2 doz. bearded oysters Remove meat from bones. Cover bones with cold water, add vegetables and seasonings, and heat slowly to boiling point. Add meat, boil five minutes, and let simmer until meat is tender; remove meat and reduce stock to two cups. Put ham in frying-pan, cover with lukewarm water, and let stand on back of range one hour. Brown butter, add flour, and when well browned add stock; then add veal and ham each cut into cubes. Let simmer twenty minutes and add oysters. Put in serving dish and cover with top made of puff paste. It is much better to bake the paste separately and cover pie just before sending to table.
A veal-and-oyster stew finished with a pastry lid, from the era when a knuckle of veal was cheap and oysters cheaper. Most of the work is stock-making; the only delicate moment is the oysters.
- The oysters are the hingeThey go in at the very end and need only a minute or two in the hot sauce, just until the edges ruffle. Held longer, they shrink and turn rubbery, and they will leak enough liquor to thin the gravy.
- Knuckle of vealThe lower shank, bone in; the same cut that is cross-cut for osso buco, but ask for it whole so you can take the meat off yourself. The recipe gives no weight; 3 to 4 lb is a reasonable amount for the quantities here. Use the bones for the stock as directed -- they carry the gelatin that gives the sauce body.
- "Bearded" oystersShucked oysters with the dark frill trimmed away. Two dozen shucked oysters with their liquor is the modern equivalent; trimming is optional and mostly cosmetic.
- Blade of maceA piece of the dried outer covering of the nutmeg, still sold whole in some spice shops. About 1/4 teaspoon ground mace substitutes, added with the stock rather than boiled with the bones.
- Soaking the hamAn hour in lukewarm water on the cooler end of a wood range drew salt out of heavily cured ham. Modern lean ham is far milder — taste it, and if it is not aggressively salty skip the soak and hold back on the 2 teaspoons of salt until the sauce is finished.
- Brown butter, add flourA brown roux. Cook the butter and flour together over medium heat until the colour of a hazelnut shell, then add the hot stock gradually off the heat to avoid lumps. Reduce the strained stock to a full 2 cups before you start; less and the sauce will be pasty.
- Baking the paste separatelyTake the book's advice. Bake the puff paste round on a sheet at 425F until risen and deep golden, 20 to 25 minutes, and set it over the filling as it goes to the table. Baked on top of a wet stew, the underside steams and collapses.
- YieldNo yield is given; the quantities suggest roughly six servings as a main course. The filling can be made a day ahead and reheated gently, with the oysters added only at serving.
The English meat pie of this period was defined less by a fixed filling than by the pairing of stewed meat with oysters, a combination that ran through British cookery from the eighteenth century onward, when oysters were plentiful and cheap enough to serve as a seasoning for beef, veal and mutton rather than a luxury in their own right. Here the puff-paste lid is baked separately -- the recipe recommends it outright, on the grounds that a crust set over a wet filling does not stay crisp.