Pies
1 Pound Meat Free from Bone 2 Pounds Potatoes 2 Onions Salt and Pepper to Taste 2 Carrots Water Peel and slice potatoes, carrots and onions. Cut meat in small pieces. Fill a casserole or baking dish with alternate layers of meat, carrots and onions. Put uncooked potatoes on top of pie. Fill dish three-fourths full of water. Bake in moderate oven 1/2 hours.
A plain baked meat-and-root pie of the sort that fed a household on one pound of meat. The recipe as printed has a broken cooking time, which is the first thing to settle.
- The timing is shortThe text reads "Bake in moderate oven 1/2 hours," which is too short for raw stewing meat and thick slices of potato and carrot; allow one and a half to two hours in a moderate oven, around 350F. The recipe gives no instruction about a lid, but covering for the first hour will keep the liquid from boiling away, with the cover off at the end to brown the potato top.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F, though period sources put a moderate oven anywhere from 350 to 375F. If the dish is deep and full of water it will take the upper end of the time range; test by pushing a knife through a carrot slice, which should meet no resistance.
- "Casserole" hereThe word is used of the vessel, not of the finished dish; the recipe's own phrase "a casserole or baking dish" shows as much, and in this period it generally meant an earthenware or enamelled pot. Any deep ovenproof dish of about two to three quarts will do.
- Which meat"Meat free from bone" means cheap boneless stewing cuts — beef chuck or shin, mutton or lamb shoulder. Anything lean and quick-cooking will be dry and stringy by the time the vegetables are done.
- Cut sizesMeat in half-inch pieces, carrots and onions in thin slices, potatoes sliced about a quarter inch for the top so they overlap into a lid. Uniformity matters more than usual here because nothing gets stirred.
- Water and seasoningThree-fourths full is a lot of liquid; it makes a thin gravy rather than a thick one. Season each layer as you build it, not just the top, or the middle of the pie will taste of nothing.
- YieldSomething over three pounds of solids serves four generously as a one-dish supper, with bread to catch the gravy.
This is the British-Isles kitchen tradition of a pie with no pastry, where sliced potatoes laid over the top do the work of a crust. Cousins of it appear under many regional names — Lancashire hotpot being the best known — and the logic is always the same, a small quantity of tough meat stretched with roots and baked slowly in a covered pot while the cook did other work. Such a dish required no browning, no thickening and no judgement about pastry; the whole skill lay in layering and patience.