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Chicken Pie
Clean, singe and cut up two small chickens, the same as for a fricassee. Place them in a kettle, and add hot water enough to cover. Put the cover on the kettle, and stew slowly until the chicken is tender, adding a little more water, if needed. Use for the crust a good pie paste rolled a little thicker than for fruit pies or puff paste. Line the sides of a deep baking dish with crust; put in part of the chicken, and season with salt and pepper; then add the rest of the chicken, and season the same way. Put in the dish two cups of the broth in which the chicken was boiled, and cover the top with crust, making in the center of the crust a hole large enough to admit of adding more of the broth if necessary and covering the hole with a removable fancy ornament cut in paste. Most chicken pie is too dry, therefore the broth should be added plentifully. Bake one hour. Heat what broth remains, add enough flour to thicken it, wetting the flour to a paste with milk, and season with salt and pepper. Send to the table in a gravy dish to be served with the pie.
The recipe assumes you know how to stew a fowl and how hot a pie oven should be, since neither is stated. Two decisions matter: how much broth goes in, and whether the bones stay.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, only "Bake one hour." A hot start of around 400F for the first 20 minutes to set and colour the pastry, dropping to about 350F for the rest of the hour, is a reasonable modern reading.
- Two small chickensA "small chicken" in this period was a light bird, on the order of 2 to 2 1/2 lb. One 4 1/2 to 5 lb roasting chicken, or two of today's small fryers, gives roughly the same amount of meat.
- Cut up as for a fricasseeThat means jointed into 8 to 10 pieces, bone in, back and neck included. The bones are what make the broth worth serving separately; if you would rather not have guests picking around them, pull the meat off after stewing and reserve the bones for the stock.
- Stewing time"Until tender" is 45 minutes to an hour at a bare simmer for a modern chicken, less for small fryers. Do not let it boil hard or the breast shreds and dries before the thighs are done.
- The broth is the pointThe instruction that matters most is the one the author flags herself: most chicken pie is too dry, therefore the broth should be added plentifully. Two cups goes in at the start, and the hole in the lid exists so you can top it up if needed during the hour. Keep the remaining broth hot on the stove for that purpose.
- Pie paste, rolled thickerA plain lard or butter shortcrust, rolled to about 1/4 inch. Note that only the sides of the dish are lined, not the bottom; with two cups of broth in the dish, a bottom crust would have little chance of staying crisp.
- The gravyRoughly 2 tablespoons flour slaked in a little milk per cup of broth. Slake it cold and pour it into the simmering broth, then cook two or three minutes so it loses the raw-flour taste.
- YieldA deep dish of this size feeds six to eight as a main course, with the gravy boat passed at table.
Chicken pie in American cookbooks of this period is a stewed dish finished under pastry rather than a raw-filled pie: the bird is simmered first, its liquor becomes both the sauce inside and the gravy alongside, and the crust functions as a lid and a starch. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine publisher Butterick, whose Delineator reached a very large audience of home cooks, and the tone here suits that market -- a confident aside about what is wrong with most versions of a familiar dish, in this case dryness, followed by a practical fix in the form of a vent hole and a spare pot of broth. A removable pastry ornament set over the vent is a decorative convention found in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pie recipes: it hides a functional hole while giving the cook somewhere to use the trimmings.