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Game Pie
Clean thoroughly one dozen birds-quail, snipe, woodcock, etc., and halve them; put into about two quarts of water and when it boils, remove the scum; next add salt, pepper, one bunch of minced parsley, one onion chopped fine, and three whole cloves; put in one-half pound of salt pork cut into dice and let boil till tender, carefully keeping the birds covered with water. Thicken with two tablespoons of browned flour and let it boil up. Stir in a piece of butter as large as an egg, remove from the fire and let cool. Have at hand one pint of potatoes cut into dice, also a rich crust. Put the crust around the sides of a buttered pudding-dish; lay in some of the birds, then some of the potatoes and so repeat till the dish is full. Pour in the gravy, put on the top crust slashed at the center and bake till done.
A boiled-then-baked game pie of the sort that assumes a hunter in the household and a dozen small birds on the table. Most of the work is in the pot; the pastry is a lid over an already-finished stew.
- Sourcing the birdsSnipe and woodcock are migratory birds that cannot legally be bought or sold in the United States; in some European countries, including the UK, wild-shot woodcock and snipe may be sold in season through game dealers. Farmed quail, generally sold around four to six ounces each, is the practical substitute; a dozen of them comes to roughly 4 lb of bird.
- Shot and bonesWild-shot birds carry pellets, and halved quail leave small sharp bones throughout the filling. Run a finger over each half before it goes in the pot, and warn anyone at the table that this is a bone-in pie.
- "A piece of butter as large as an egg"Roughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. The phrase is standard in period books and reliably means about that much.
- Browned flourPlain flour toasted dry in a skillet or a low oven until it is the colour of hazelnut shells. It thickens far less than raw flour, which is why two tablespoons into two quarts of liquid reads thin; expect a light gravy, not a paste, and brown it well or the sauce will taste raw.
- Cooking the birdsQuail are tender in 20 to 25 minutes of gentle simmering, and the salt pork wants about the same. Boiling them for the hour that older game birds needed will strip the meat off the bone and leave it dry inside the pie.
- SaltHalf a pound of salt pork plus added salt is a lot of seasoning for a stew that will reduce. Salt at the end, after the pork has given up what it has.
- The potatoesThe recipe gives no instruction to cook the pint of diced potato, so it appears to go into the dish raw and cook during baking. If so, cut it no larger than half an inch or the pie will come out with hard cubes in it.
- "Bake till done"No temperature is given. A hot oven, in the region of 400°F for 35 to 45 minutes, should colour the crust and cook the potato through. The filling is already cooked and cooled, so the slash at the centre matters mainly for steam.
- YieldA dozen small birds with pork, potato and pastry will fill a large deep dish, on the order of 3 quarts, and should serve about eight.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the company better known for dress patterns, and like most general household books of its moment it still assumed that wild game reached the kitchen through a gun rather than a butcher. That assumption was already dissolving as the book went to press: the Lacey Act of 1900 had cut into interstate traffic in wild birds, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 would end the commercial market-gunning that once put barrels of snipe and woodcock on city stalls. Pies of this construction — filling stewed first, cooled, then sealed under pastry lining the sides of a deep dish — are an old English form carried into American books largely unchanged, and the cooling step is not fussiness: warm filling melts the fat in the crust before it reaches the oven. That a recipe could open with "one dozen birds" and treat the species as interchangeable says a good deal about how ordinary small game still was on the American table a century ago.