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Veal and Oyster Pie
Cut one pound of neck of veal into small pieces, put them in a saucepan, cover with water and stew them for an hour. Cut two ounces of pork into small pieces, put them in with the veal, and add one chopped onion, one tablespoonful of chopped parsley, one tablespoonful of thickening, one teacupful of milk, and salt and pepper to taste. Cook the mixture for twenty minutes longer, then turn it into a shallow dish, put a breakfast cupful of oysters over the top, dredge in some pepper, salt and flour, and cover the pie with a common pie-crust. Bake the pie for about half an hour, and serve it either hot or cold.
A plain English-style meat pie of the sort that filled out a hotel menu's cheaper end. Two of its measurements are period cup sizes, and the crucial point is that the oysters go in raw.
- Oysters raw, and only just cookedThe oysters are laid on the hot veal and immediately covered with pastry, so their entire cooking is the half hour under the crust. Do not poach them first, or they will be rubbery by the time the pastry colours.
- "Thickening"In books of this period "thickening" normally means a tablespoonful of flour worked smooth with butter or a little cold water and stirred into the simmering pan, rather than a separately built roux; Oscar does not define the term here.
- Teacupful and breakfast cupfulA teacup is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup (6 fl oz) of milk. The breakfast cup is the larger vessel; period tables vary, putting it somewhere between about 8 fl oz and a pint, so take the oysters as roughly a pint measure of shucked oysters with their liquor drained off and adjust to the dish.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; ranges of the period had no thermometer or thermostat, and cooks judged heat by hand. A moderately hot oven, around 400°F, will set and brown a shortcrust in the stated half hour.
- Neck of vealRarely sold under that name now. Any bone-in or boneless veal stewing cut — shoulder, breast, shank meat — behaves the same; an hour of gentle simmering is what it needs to soften.
- The two ounces of porkFresh fatty pork belly or unsmoked salt pork, cut small, for richness rather than flavouring. If using salt pork, hold back on the added salt.
- Reduce before fillingThe recipe never says to drain, and a pound of veal stewed in water for an hour leaves a lot of liquid. Boil it down or lift the meat out and reduce, or the oyster liquor will make a soup under the crust and the pastry will slump.
- Crust and yield"Common pie-crust" is plain shortcrust, top only — a shallow dish with no bottom pastry. No yield is stated; a pound of veal with the oysters would serve about four.
Veal and oyster pie is an English inheritance that transplanted well: in both London and New York of the period, oysters were plentiful and cheap enough to be used for bulk and moisture in meat pies rather than as luxury, and the pairing of mild veal with briny shellfish appears in nineteenth-century cookery on both sides of the Atlantic. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's reputation, filled his 1896 book with a great many workaday dishes alongside the hotel's showpieces. The instruction to serve it "either hot or cold" is also of its time: a covered meat pie was expected to appear on a cold supper or luncheon table as readily as at dinner.