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Chicken Pot Pie
Cut a chicken weighing from three and a half to four pounds into twelve equal pieces; put these in a stewpan, cover with cold water and leave them in for thirty minutes. Then wash them well, drain and return to the pan. Cover again with fresh water, season with salt, pepper and grated nutmeg, add a bunch of parsley, six small onions and four ounces of salted pork cut into square pieces, and cook for three-quarters of an hour, taking care to skim well; add one pint of raw potatoes and three tablespoonfuls of flour diluted with a breakfast cupful of water. Stir until it boils, and cook for ten minutes. Remove the parsley and transfer the whole to a deep earthenware baking-dish, then moisten the edges of this slightly with water, and cover the top with crust. Brush the surface over with egg, make a few transverse lines in the paste with a fork, and cut a hole in the center. Bake in a brisk oven for fifteen minutes and send to the table.
Chicken Pilau, Turkish Style Take a chicken weighing two pounds, singe and draw, wipe it well, and cut it into twelve pieces of equal size. Put these into a stewpan with one ounce of butter, and brown; add one chopped onion and one chopped green pepper, and cook for six minutes, stirring lightly with a wooden spoon. Moisten with a pint of rich chicken broth and one gill of tomato sauce, and add two ounces of dried mushrooms that have been soaking in water for several hours, or twelve canned mushrooms, and season with salt and pepper, and half a teaspoonful of diluted saffron. When incorporated add half a pint of well-washed uncooked rice and three tablespoonfuls of grated Parmesan cheese. Cook for twenty minutes more, and serve.
Two recipes have been run together in this passage: the pot pie proper, and a chicken pilau that follows it. Both are straightforward once the period measures and oven language are translated.
- The hinge: the pastry is a lid, not a pie shellThe filling goes into the dish fully cooked and boiling hot, and the crust is baked only fifteen minutes in a hot oven. That means the pastry must be rolled thin and the oven must be genuinely hot, or you will get a pale, slack top on an otherwise finished stew.
- "Brisk oven"Roughly 400-425F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is enough to set and brown a thin pastry lid; a slower oven will leave it pale.
- The thirty-minute soakCovering the cut chicken in cold water, then draining and washing, was commonly done in period cookery to draw out blood and give a paler broth. It is optional today with a clean bird.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A "breakfast cupful" is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces; treat it as one cup. A pint of raw potatoes means a pint by volume, roughly three-quarters of a pound to a pound of peeled potatoes cut in chunks.
- Salted porkSalt pork sold today varies in saltiness. Blanch the diced pork a few minutes and taste the broth before adding salt, or the reduced gravy will be over-seasoned.
- No crust recipe is givenThe book assumes you have pastry on hand. A plain short pie pastry or rough puff both suit; roll it about an eighth of an inch thick, seal to the moistened rim, and keep the central vent hole open so steam escapes rather than lifting the lid.
- YieldA 3 1/2 to 4 lb chicken with potatoes and onions serves four to six. Use a baking dish deep enough that the filling sits an inch below the rim.
- For the pilauHalf a pint of rice to a pint of broth plus a gill of tomato sauce is a generous ratio of liquid to rice; the recipe simply says cook twenty minutes more, so check at fifteen. "Diluted saffron" means saffron steeped in a little warm liquid first, which distributes the colour evenly.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf, and his 1896 book records both the hotel's own repertoire and the American home dishes its guests expected to find. Chicken pot pie is one of the latter: an English-descended dish of stewed fowl under a pastry lid, long established in American cookery, where the same name has covered everything from a deep-dish pie to a boiled dumpling stew depending on the region. What marks this version as hotel work is the discipline of the method rather than any luxury of ingredient: the chicken cut into twelve even pieces so it cooks uniformly and can be portioned at table, the broth skimmed carefully, the flour slaked in water before it goes in. The pilau printed immediately after it shows the other half of the book's character, an 1890s American kitchen reaching for what it called "Turkish style" with saffron, green pepper and Parmesan together, a combination that owes more to New York than to Constantinople.