Veal Pie
Put small pieces or slices of veal in a stewpan and cover with hot water; throw in a tablespoon of salt and set the pan over the fire; remove the scum as it rises and when the meat is tender put it on a platter to cool. Take out all the bones and lay enough meat in an earthen pudding dish lined with pie paste to half fill it; scatter bits of butter as large as hickory nuts over the meat; add, generously, some pepper, then dredge with flour until white; now fill nearly to the top with some of the meat liquor. Roll out a cover of puff paste, nearly one-half an inch thick, add, slash at the center and sides, and bake one hour in a quick oven. one-half pound of good corned pork or sweet ham is out in thin slices and parboiled with the veal a nice flavor is added and very little, if any, butter need then be used, nor is any other salt necessary. Hard boiled eggs cut in slices and arranged in layers on the veal and ham are an addition to this dish.
If
A classic English-style raised meat pie in an American dress: veal is stewed first, then baked under pastry with its own liquor. The two things that decide whether it succeeds are stewing the veal only until just tender and getting the top crust hot enough to rise.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F, the usual modern equivalent for the term. At that heat the puff paste sets and lifts before the filling boils over; a slower oven gives a pale, sodden lid. If the top colors too fast, shield it.
- One hour is a lid, not a fillingThe recipe directs a full hour, but the veal is already cooked through in the stewpan, so the bake mainly browns the pastry and thickens the gravy. A shallow dish may well be done sooner; check that the liquor is bubbling at the slashes.
- Cut of vealShoulder or breast, bone in, gives the gelatin that makes the liquor set to a light jelly when cold. Boneless cutlet will be dry and gives you no body in the gravy. The recipe specifies neither cut nor quantity; something like 2 to 2 1/2 lb of bone-in meat would suit a dish of about nine inches.
- SaltA tablespoon of salt in the stewing water is for a large potful and much of it stays behind in the liquor. Taste the liquor before you ladle it into the pie, particularly if you are using the ham or corned pork variation, which is salty enough to need no added salt at all.
- Butter as large as hickory nutsA small lump, on the order of a teaspoon or two each; five or six of them over the meat. The recipe says very little butter, if any, is needed once the fat pork or ham is included.
- Dredge with flour until whiteThis is the thickener. Sift a thin, even blanket over the meat, perhaps 3 tablespoons, then add the liquor slowly so the flour hydrates rather than clumping. Filling the dish only nearly to the top matters: the gravy expands and will lift the lid off.
- Earthen pudding dishA deep stoneware or ceramic pie dish. Line only the sides and bottom edge if you want the base crust crisp; a fully lined deep dish of wet filling tends to a soft bottom unless you blind-bake it first.
- Half-inch puff pasteThat is thick by modern habit and is deliberate, so the lid supports itself over the liquid. Cut the slashes generously and keep them open, or steam will bloat the crust and split it at the rim.
- ServingProbably six as a main course, though the recipe gives no yield. It should eat as well cold as hot, when the veal liquor sets and the sliced hard-boiled eggs show in the cut face.
Veal pie of this kind descends directly from the English raised and dish pies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where veal, ham and hard-boiled egg were a standing trio, still recognizable today in the cold veal-and-ham pie of the picnic hamper. The logic is practical: veal is lean and mild, so the recipe supplies both fat and savor from cured pork, and the egg fills space and slices attractively. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued cookbooks as part of the same project of instructing the American housekeeper, and the tone here is characteristic of the turn of the century: a base method followed by variations, on the assumption that the cook owns a stewpan, a pudding dish and the judgment to tell when veal is tender. Veal was far more common on the American table then than now, calves being a routine byproduct of the dairy herd.