Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Turkey Pie
Turkey Pie
Pick the meat from the remains of some cold roast turkey, and chop it fine. Put the mince into a saucepan with a small quantity of milk, pounded mace, pepper and salt, judging the amount by the quantity of the meat; thicken it with a little flour that has been worked with butter, and stew it gently for a few minutes. Line a butter dish with a good piecrust, and when the above mixture is cold pour it over the paste, place a paste cover on the top, moisten and press the edges together, and bake in a quick oven. When cooked the pie can be served either hot or cold.
A leftovers pie of the plainest sort, written for a cook who already knows how much sauce a given pile of meat needs. Two words in the text are worth pausing over, and the temperature is the one number you must supply yourself.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400–425F. Pastry containing a cold filling wants that heat so the crust sets and colours before the interior warms through; expect a double crust to take somewhere in the region of half an hour to forty minutes, judged by colour.
- "Butter dish"Most likely a slip for a buttered dish. A pie plate or shallow baking dish, greased, is what seems to be meant — not the covered dish for table butter.
- Quantities are left to youThe original deliberately gives no measures, telling you to judge "by the quantity of the meat." As a working ratio, for 3 cups of chopped cooked turkey use about 1 cup milk thickened with 2 tablespoons butter worked into 2 tablespoons flour. The filling should mound on a spoon, not run off it.
- Flour worked with butterThis is beurre manié — equal parts soft butter and flour kneaded to a paste and whisked into the hot milk in small pieces. It thickens without the raw-flour taste of an unstirred addition.
- MaceThe dried outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. Pre-ground mace fades quickly; a scant quarter teaspoon of fresh is plenty for 3 cups of meat, and grated nutmeg is the nearest substitute.
- Let the filling go cold — this is the hingeWarm filling melts the butter in the bottom crust before the oven can set it, and the base turns to paste. Spread the mixture in a shallow tray and chill it fully; cold, thick filling also stays put when you crimp the lid.
- Reheated turkey dries outThe meat is already cooked, so the stewing step is only to bind it — two or three minutes once the sauce thickens. Longer, and the pie bakes into shreds.
- Yield and servingA 9-inch pie on this scale serves five or six. Served cold, as Oscar allows, it wants the filling a shade more heavily seasoned, since salt and mace read fainter at room temperature.
Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, is padded out with domestic economy of exactly this kind alongside the hotel's showpieces — a reminder that even a grand restaurant kitchen was judged partly on what it did with yesterday's roast. Minced-meat pies bound with a white sauce belong to a long English tradition that runs through Victorian household manuals; the same formula appears there under names like "veal pie" and "chicken pie," the meat simply being whatever was cold in the larder. The instruction to serve it hot or cold is not an afterthought: cold raised and covered pies were standard supper, picnic and luncheon food in the period, and a pie that could sit out on a sideboard was more useful in a house without refrigeration than one that had to be timed to the table.