Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Ham and Chicken Pie
Ham and Chicken Pie
Trim off the skin of some cold chicken, and cut the meat into small pieces (chopping it), mix with it an equal quantity of finely chopped lean ham and a small lot of chopped shallot. Season with salt, pepper and pounded mace, and moisten with a few tablespoonfuls of white stock. Butter a piedish, line the edges with puff paste, and put in the mixture; place a flat of puff paste on the top, trim it round the edges, moisten and press together, punch a small hole in the top, and bake in a moderate oven. When cooked pour a small quantity of hot cream through the hole at the top of the pie, stand the piedish on a flat dish, and serve.
A cold-roast-chicken pie of the Waldorf kind: quick to assemble, but the original assumes you know the proportions and the oven by feel. A few specifics fill the gaps.
- Quantities and yieldNothing is measured. About 2 cups chopped cooked chicken to 2 cups chopped lean ham, one small shallot, and 3-4 tablespoons stock fills a 9-inch pie dish and serves six as a first course or four as a light main.
- "A moderate oven"350F. The filling is already cooked, so the bake exists only to set and colour the pastry — roughly 30 to 40 minutes, until the top is puffed and deep gold.
- The crust is not a full liningOscar lines the *edges* only, then lays a flat sheet over the top. The buttered dish takes the filling directly; the pastry rim gives the lid something to seal against. Cutting a full bottom crust will leave you with a soggy base under a wet filling.
- Puff pasteAll-butter frozen puff pastry, thawed, is a fair substitute. Roll the lid a little thicker than you would for a tart so it holds its shape over the hollow filling.
- Pounded maceBlade mace crushed in a mortar. Ground mace from a jar works; use about a quarter teaspoon, as mace is potent and will dominate at any greater dose.
- White stockAn unroasted chicken or veal stock, pale and lightly seasoned. Plain low-sodium chicken stock is fine. Keep it to a few tablespoons — the mixture should be moist, not loose, or it will boil up and lift the lid.
- SaltSeason lightly, then taste. Cured ham varies widely in saltiness, and the mixture is fully cooked already, so you can judge it before it goes in.
- The cream at the endWarm about 1/4 cup of heavy cream and pour it through the vent hole as soon as the pie leaves the oven, while everything is still hot enough to absorb it. Cold cream poured into a cooling pie simply pools at the bottom.
Chopped meat baked under a lid of puff paste belongs to a long English tradition of cold-meat pies, and this one has clear affinities with the ham-and-veal or ham-and-chicken pies of Victorian household cookery — Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book draws on that English and Anglo-French repertoire alongside the Waldorf's own dishes. It reads as a dish for cold roast meat: chicken already cooked, paired with cured ham, shallot and mace and sent out as a course in its own right. The mace is a period marker; it was a common warm spice for potted and pied meats in English kitchens into the nineteenth century.