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Veal, or Chicken, and Parsley Pie
752. Cut some slices from the leg or neck of veal; if the leg, from about the knuckle. Season them with salt; scald some parsley that is picked from the stems, and squeeze it dry; cut it a little, and lay it at the bottom of the dish; then put the meat, and so on, in layers. Fill the dish with good stock, or gravy, seasoned, but not so high as to touch the crust, Cover it with short-crust or puff-paste (pars. 725 and 732), and bake. Chicken may be cut up skinned, and made in the same way.
A plain Victorian raised-flavour pie: seasoned veal or chicken layered with blanched parsley and covered with pastry. The original assumes you already know how long a pie takes and how much parsley makes a layer, so both need pinning down.
- The hinge: scald the parsleyDropping the picked leaves into boiling water for under a minute and squeezing them dry helps keep them green and takes the raw edge off them through a long bake. Unblanched parsley in this quantity will darken to a dull khaki.
- How much parsleyNo amount is given. Two large handfuls of leaves picked from the stems, roughly 2 oz before scalding, is right for a 2 lb pie; the parsley is a layer here, not a garnish.
- Meat quantitiesFor a 2-pint pie dish, allow about 2 lb of veal cut in slices roughly half an inch thick, or one 3-4 lb chicken jointed, skinned and boned into similar pieces. Slices from the knuckle end of the leg carry more gelatine, which may be why the recipe specifies them, though it does not say.
- Stock level"Not so high as to touch the crust" matters: liquid against the underside of the pastry steams it into paste. Fill to about half an inch below the rim; if you cut a vent in the lid you can top the gravy up through it after baking should the pie seem dry.
- OvenBake at 400F for the first 20 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then drop to 350F for a further hour to hour and a quarter for veal; chicken needs about 45-55 minutes at the lower temperature. The filling should reach at least 165F.
- The pastry cross-referencesParagraphs 725 and 732 are the book's short-crust and puff-paste recipes. Any modern shortcrust made with 8 oz flour to 4 oz fat, or a block of bought puff pastry, covers a pie of this size.
- ServingServes four to six. A knuckle-based veal filling sets to a light jelly as it cools, so the pie can be cut cold as well as served hot, though the recipe does not say which was intended.
Parsley pies of this kind belong to a long English line of "herby pies" in which a green herb is treated as a bulk ingredient rather than a seasoning, and they sit alongside the West Country egg-and-parsley pies and the Cornish herby pie. Veal was a natural partner because its mildness takes flavour from whatever is packed around it, and because a knuckle contributes enough gelatine to set the gravy for cold eating -- a consideration in a household without refrigeration. The recipe's terseness and its cross-references to numbered pastry paragraphs are typical of the Victorian compendium, which set down method and left quantities to the cook. Chicken is added as an alternative at the end; a fowl was in this period a costlier proposition than a few slices off a leg of veal.