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Salt (Scald the corn-meal with about)
1/4 cup shortening, part chicken and part beef fat. 1/4 cup ice-water. 1/2 teaspoonful baking-powder. Scald the corn-meal with about one cup of boiling water, add the other ingredients in the order given. Put in a buttered dish and bake half an hour.
This is a favorite California dish.
Chicken Pie (from Cooked Chicken) Cut the meat from the drumsticks, disjoint and use the wings, the second joints, neck, and any other pieces. The presence of these small bones adds flavor to the pie. Put into a suitable bakingdish, season the chicken well, and pour over it one and one-third cups of thickened gravy, which can be made from the water in which the chicken was cooked. Cover with a pastry crust made of 1 cup flour cup ice-water ½ cup shortening, part 1/4 teaspoonful salt chicken and part teaspoonful bakingbeef fat powder Sift the flour, salt, and baking-powder together.
Chop in the fat, moisten with ice-water, and roll out. Put bits of butter over the crust, using a tablespoonful, sprinkle with a little flour, and roll up like a jelly roll. Let stand in the ice-box until ready to use for the pie. When rolling out the crust, make several slits in it that the steam may escape. It is considered an advantage to have a cup in the bottom of the dish to collect the gravy.
The workable part of this page is the chicken pie: cooked poultry, a thickened gravy from its own cooking liquid, and a rough-puff crust rolled up with butter like a jelly roll. A few of the pastry quantities have not survived legibly, so treat them with judgement rather than as gospel.
- Pastry proportionsThe crust reads as 1 cup flour, 1/2 cup shortening (part chicken fat, part beef fat), 1 teaspoon salt, plus ice-water and baking powder in amounts that are not legible in the original. For 1 cup of flour, standard practice is 3 to 4 tablespoons of ice-water and no more than 1/4 teaspoon baking powder.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. A single-crust pie over hot filling wants 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and lift the pastry, then 375F until the crust is browned and the gravy bubbles at the slits, roughly 35 to 45 minutes total.
- The rolled butterSpreading a tablespoon of butter over the rolled dough, dusting with flour and rolling it up is a quick rough-puff turn. The chilling in the ice-box is not optional; if the fat softens, the layers merge and the crust bakes short rather than flaky.
- Shortening"Shortening, part chicken and part beef fat" means rendered fat, not vegetable shortening. Chicken fat alone stays soft and gives a tender, savoury crust; equal parts chicken fat and beef suet or lard handles more easily. Cold butter substitutes without harm.
- The inverted cupThe cup set in the bottom of the dish acts as an improvised pie funnel. The recipe does not say which way up it goes; set inverted it collects the gravy beneath it and helps hold the crust up off the filling. A ceramic pie bird or a small inverted ramekin does the same.
- Gravy consistencyThe recipe calls for one and one-third cups of thickened gravy; the quantity of chicken is not specified. Make it slightly thicker than you would for pouring, since the meat releases liquid as it heats.
- Small bonesWings, second joints and neck are included deliberately for flavour, but they make the pie awkward to serve and hazardous to eat inattentively. Say so at the table, or strip the meat and simmer the bones into the gravy instead.
- Reheating cooked poultryThe chicken goes into the dish already cooked. Bring the filling to a full bubble in the oven rather than merely warming it through, which is what the initial high heat accomplishes.
- YieldNo yield is given. A pie built on the trimmings of one chicken in a deep dish will serve about four.
Chicken pie of this kind belongs to a thrift tradition: the breast has presumably already been served at a previous meal, and what remains is the drumstick meat, the wings, the second joints and the neck. Cooks of the period valued exactly those parts for pie because bone and cartilage give body and flavour to the gravy, and the water the bird was boiled in became the sauce rather than being thrown out. The inverted cup in the bottom of the dish is a piece of domestic ingenuity. The crust, rolled up with butter and flour and chilled before use, is a home cook's shortcut to puff pastry, common in American cookbooks that wanted flakiness without the labour of a properly turned laminated dough.