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French Chicken Pie
754. Parboil a couple of chickens, put the giblets in a small saucepan, and stew with water from the chickens for gravy, add sweet herbs and mace; when the chickens are cold, cut them up and lay them in a deep dish, line with puff-paste, pound some ham and tongue with the liver, and the yolks of six hard boiled eggs, make this forcemeat into balls and put among the chickens; add butter rolled in flour. Cover the pie with puff-paste and bake; mushrooms chopped fine are an improvement, also a little cream.
A covered two-crust chicken pie of the mid-Victorian sort, written for cooks who already knew the shape of the thing. The gaps are the oven, the timings and the amount of liquid, all of which need supplying.
- Order of workThe dish is lined with pastry first, then filled: parboil and cool the birds, line the deep dish, then pack in the joints and forcemeat balls. The sequence in the original text reads back to front.
- ParboilingFifteen to twenty minutes at a bare simmer is enough — the point is to firm the flesh and start the stock, not to cook the birds through. They finish in the oven. Save every drop of that water.
- The giblet gravySimmer necks, gizzards and hearts (keep the liver back for the forcemeat) in the chicken water with a blade of mace and a bundle of thyme, parsley and marjoram for about 45 minutes, then strain and reduce. Add roughly a cup to the pie before the lid goes on; the rest is poured in hot through a hole in the crust after baking.
- Forcemeat ballsPound about 4 oz each of cooked ham and tongue with the raw livers and six hard-boiled yolks; a food processor does it in seconds. It needs seasoning the original does not mention — pepper, a little mace, salt only after tasting, since ham and tongue are both salty. Roll into balls the size of a walnut.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié: 2 oz butter worked to a paste with 1 oz flour, dotted over the filling to thicken the juices as they bake. Without it the gravy stays thin under the crust.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Start at 425F for 20 minutes to set and colour the puff pastry, then drop to 350F for a further 50-60 minutes. Cover the top with foil if it browns before the birds are done; the thickest joints should read 165F.
- PastryTwo 500 g blocks of all-butter puff will line and lid a deep 9-10 inch dish. Chill the lined dish before filling, and glaze the lid with beaten egg.
- Cream and mushroomsThe optional additions are worth taking. Sauté 8 oz finely chopped mushrooms dry until their liquid has gone before adding them, or they will water the filling; the cream is best stirred into the hot giblet gravy poured in at the end.
- YieldTwo chickens in a deep dish feeds eight to ten. Pies of this kind were commonly eaten cold as well as hot, and this one would slice more neatly the next day.
Covered chicken pies stiffened with ham, tongue and hard-boiled yolks were standing dishes of the English cold table well before this book was compiled, and the label "French" here probably signals refinement rather than any French original — forcemeat balls, mace, a puff-paste lid and a finishing enrichment of cream were the marks of a genteel kitchen following the fashion set by French-trained cooks in great houses. The economy of the method is worth noticing: the water the birds are parboiled in becomes the stock, the giblets become the gravy, and the livers go into the forcemeat, so a pair of chickens yields a dish for ten with nothing thrown away. Pies of this kind travelled well and were often cut cold, which may be why the filling is bound with thickened gravy rather than swimming in it.