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Chicken Giblet Pie
Put into a pie dish some stewed chicken giblets together with the meat from the necks and pinions of the fowls. Place them in layers with slices of fat bacon between until the dish is full, pour in a little good gravy, cover the dish with a crust of mashed potatoes; bake in the oven for half an hour.
A thrift dish built from the parts left after a bird is dressed, and it depends entirely on the giblets being cooked tender before they ever reach the pie dish. Read the first clause carefully: the giblets go in already stewed.
- Stew first, and long enoughHearts and gizzards need 45-60 minutes at a bare simmer to become tender; livers need 5 minutes at most and turn grainy past that. Cook them separately and combine at assembly.
- Necks and pinionsPinions are the wing tips and first joint. Simmer necks and pinions with the gizzards, then strip the meat off the bones while warm — cold, it clings.
- The gravy"A little good gravy" most likely means the strained, reduced stewing liquid, lightly thickened, though the recipe does not say and a separate meat gravy would also fit period usage. Something on the order of a cup for a 1.5-quart dish will moisten the layers without flooding them.
- Fat baconRead this as the fat, plainly cured bacon or salt pork of the period rather than modern heavily smoked streaky bacon, which will dominate the giblets. If you use supermarket bacon, use less of it and go easy on salt elsewhere.
- Oven temperatureNothing here needs to cook through, only to heat and brown, so 375-400F for the half hour stated. Everything in the dish should be hot going in or the filling will still be tepid when the potato top colours.
- The potato crustStiff mashed potato, not loose — a soft mash slumps into the gravy. Beat in an egg yolk and pipe or fork it on, then brush with butter for colour.
- Quantities and yieldThe original gives none. Reckon the giblets, necks and pinions of four birds; the yield of picked meat is modest -- rather less than the pound and a half one might expect -- and will fill a small dish serving four.
Giblet pie belongs to a long English tradition of using every part of a fowl, and it appears in household cookery books through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, usually with a pastry lid; the mashed-potato top marks this as the plainer, kitchen-side version. Its presence in a book bearing the name of the Waldorf-Astoria's most famous maître d'hôtel is a reminder that Oscar Tschirky's collection was a working compendium rather than a menu of luxuries. "Pinion," for the wing joint, was ordinary butcher's English at the time and has largely dropped out of American usage since.