Pork Pie
Cut two or three pounds of the thick end of a loin of pork into very thick slices three inches long by two wide. Put a layer on the bottom of a pie dish and sprinkle chopped parsley and onion, and salt and pepper over it; next another layer of pork and one of seasoning as before. Repeat till the dish is full, and then pour in a cup of stock or water and one or two tablespoons of catsup. Have ready a good plain paste. Put a strip of it around the edge of the dish, put on a cover of the same and set the pie in a rather hot oven. When the crust rises and begins to color, place the pie in the bottom of the oven, put a piece of paper over it and bake fully two hours. Some partly cook the meat before putting on the crust.
A plain top-crust pork pie of the sort that turns on oven management rather than technique: high heat to set and lift the pastry, then a long, gentle bake so the meat comes tender instead of tight. The book assumes you know how to read a coal range, so the numbers are worth spelling out.
- The hinge: two heats, not oneStart at 425F until the crust has risen and taken a little color, roughly 15-20 minutes, then drop to 325F for the remaining time. Moving the pie to the oven floor and covering it with paper was the old way of shielding the pastry from top heat; a loose sheet of foil does the same job.
- "Rather hot oven"The book gives no figures, but in period usage this generally means somewhere in the 400-450F range. Baking "fully two hours" at that heat would scorch the crust and dry the filling, which is exactly why the instruction sends the pie downward and under paper.
- The cutThe thick end of a loin is usually taken to be the rib or blade end, fattier and better suited to a long bake than today's trimmed center-cut loin. Country-style ribs or boneless pork shoulder cut into two-by-three-inch slabs will generally give a better result than lean loin chops, which can go stringy in two hours.
- Catsup in 1900Commercial catsup of the period was thinner, sharper and more heavily spiced than modern tomato ketchup, and mushroom or walnut catsup was still common. A tablespoon of Worcestershire or mushroom ketchup is closer to the intended seasoning than two tablespoons of the sweet modern product.
- Plain pasteA short crust, not puff: roughly 2 cups flour, 2/3 cup lard or butter, cold water to bind. The strip pressed around the rim gives the lid something to grip; brush it with water before laying the cover on, and cut a vent in the center or the steam will lift the seal.
- Liquid and the pie dishA cup is enough only if the dish is deep and the meat well packed. Use a deep 2-quart dish so the pastry sits above the filling with a little air space, and check that the liquid comes no more than two-thirds up the meat, or the pie will boil over.
- DonenessTwo hours at 325F will bring the pork well past 145F, which is the point of the recipe: it wants collapsing tenderness, not pinkness. If you have parcooked the meat as the last line suggests, cut the covered bake to about 75 minutes.
- YieldTwo to three pounds of pork should serve about six as a main course with a potato and a green vegetable. It slices better warm than hot, and the juices may set to a light jelly when cold.
Pork pie in this book sits between two traditions. The English raised pie, baked freestanding in a hot-water crust and eaten cold, was a butcher's product by this date; what the recipe gives is the simpler domestic version, meat layered in a dish under a plain lid and served hot from the oven, closer to a steak-and-kidney pie in construction. The layering with parsley, onion, salt and pepper is the older English seasoning for pork, and the catsup is a bottled shortcut standing in for the spiced gravy an earlier cook would have made separately. The final sentence, "Some partly cook the meat before putting on the crust," is characteristic of the period's cookery writing: recipes were still transmitted as reports of common practice, with the variations noted rather than settled.