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Chicken Pie
Sift Disjoint fowl and simmer in boiling water until tender. Season to taste, and lay in deep baking dish. Mix two level tablespoons cornstarch with two level tablespoons of barley flour, add four tablespoons cream and three cups hot chicken stock, stir till it thickens. Pour over chicken and cover with crust. into mixing bowl one-half cup of barley flour, one-quarter cup cornstarch, two and one-half teaspoons baking powder, one-quarter teaspoon salt; rub in finely one tablespoon each of lard and butter.
Add milk to make dough enough as soft as may be handled. Roll out little larger than top of dish, so that crust may be placed on loosely. Pierce small openings in crust, and bake until crust is well done. Send to table in baking dish.
The text as printed has been scrambled by the typesetter: the word "Sift" belongs at the head of the crust instructions, which begin "into mixing bowl one-half cup of barley flour." Read the filling paragraph first, then the crust, and the method makes sense.
- Order of workSimmer and season the fowl, make the gravy, then mix the crust. Reserve the poaching liquid — the three cups of hot chicken stock the sauce calls for is exactly what the bird gives up.
- Wheat-free crustThe barley flour and cornstarch in place of wheat fit the pattern of wartime wheat conservation, though the recipe itself gives no reason. The dough is soft, low in gluten, and will not stretch or repair itself; roll it once, handle it as little as possible, and expect a tender, short crust rather than a flaky one.
- "Bake until crust is well done"No temperature is given. A hot oven, 425F, for 25 to 30 minutes suits a pie whose filling is already cooked and hot; the crust needs browning, not baking through from cold.
- The gravyCornstarch and barley flour both thicken, but cornstarch thins again if held at a hard boil. Bring the stock and cream just to a simmer, stir until it coats the spoon, and stop.
- "Disjoint fowl"A fowl in this period meant a mature laying hen — tough, gelatinous, and full of flavor, which is why it is simmered until tender rather than roasted. A supermarket 4 to 5 lb chicken will be tender in 45 minutes to an hour; a true stewing hen wants two hours or more.
- Placed on looselyThe instruction to roll the crust a little larger than the dish and lay it on slack, with vents cut, is what keeps steam from lifting or splitting it. Do not crimp it tight to the rim.
- Lard and butterOne tablespoon of each for that quantity of flour is a lean crust by modern standards. Rub the fat in until the mixture looks like coarse meal, and add milk a spoonful at a time until the dough is just soft enough to handle, as the recipe directs.
- YieldA whole fowl in a deep dish serves five or six. Serve it in the baking dish as directed; this crust does not travel to a platter.
"The Bride's Cook Book" appears to belong to the run of American household manuals published around the First World War, and this pie carries the period's fingerprint plainly: not a scrap of wheat flour in it. Under the voluntary conservation campaigns of 1917-18, home cooks were urged to save wheat for the armies and the Allies and to lean on barley, oats, corn and rice instead, and cookbooks of those years are thick with substitute crusts, war breads and cornstarch thickenings. Chicken pie itself is older, and its ancestry is usually traced to English cookery — a boiled fowl under a lid of pastry, a way of stretching a hen too old to roast — and it is often said to have been a Sunday and church-supper staple in America well before this book appeared. What dates this version is the flour bin, not the bird.