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Chicken Pie with Oysters
Boil the chicken-a year old is best-until tender, drain off liquor from a quart of oysters, boil, skim, line the sides of a dish with a rich crust, put in a layer of chicken, then a layer of raw oysters, and repeat until dish is filled, seasoning each layer with pepper, salt, and bits of butter, and adding the oyster liquor and a part of the chicken liquor until the liquid is even with the top layer; now cover loosely with a crust having an opening in the center to allow steam to escape. If the liquor cooks away, add chicken gravy or hot water. Bake forty minutes in a moderate oven. Make gravy by adding to chicken liquor left in pot (one quart or more) two tablespoons flour, rubbed smooth with two tablespoons butter, and seasoned highly with pepper; let cook until there is no raw taste of flour and salt to taste and serve.
A two-crust pie of stewed fowl and raw oysters, thickened only by its own liquors. The instructions are compressed but complete; the points below fill in the numbers the original assumes you know.
- "A year old is best"That means a stewing hen, not a broiler — a bird with enough connective tissue to give a gelatinous, flavorful broth. A 4-5 lb hen simmered 1½ to 2 hours until the meat pulls from the bone is the equivalent; supermarket roasters will be tender in under an hour but yield a thinner liquor.
- Moderate oven350°F. Forty minutes is enough to set and brown the crust and just cook the oysters, since everything else in the dish is already cooked.
- A quart of oystersShucked oysters sold by volume: a quart is roughly 2 pints, about 24 to 36 medium oysters, with their liquor. Reserve every drop of the liquor — the recipe counts on it as part of the liquid in the pie, topped up with chicken liquor.
- Boil and skim the liquorThe oyster liquor is boiled briefly on its own so the scum of coagulated protein can be lifted off. Skipping it will tend to leave a cloudier gravy inside the pie.
- The oysters go in rawThis is the hinge. Oysters cooked twice — once in the pot, again in the oven — turn to rubber. Layered raw, they poach in the surrounding liquor in the time the crust takes to bake.
- Crust on the sides, not the bottomThe recipe lines only the sides; there is no bottom crust, which under that much liquid would go soggy. The opening in the top crust is called for explicitly, to let steam escape.
- Liquid levelBring the combined oyster and chicken liquors even with the top layer of meat, not over the crust. The oysters will release more as they heat, so err slightly low.
- The gravyTwo tablespoons each of flour and butter to a quart of broth gives a thin, pouring sauce, not a thickened one — cook it three or four minutes past the point where it smells raw. Salt last, since reduced chicken liquor concentrates fast.
- YieldProbably a deep 2- to 3-quart dish; likely six to eight servings. The gravy is made separately in the pot, so it is served alongside rather than in the pie.
Chicken and oysters together read oddly now but were commonplace in nineteenth-century American cooking, when oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by barrel and rail; they went into stuffings, sauces, patties and pies as a seasoning ingredient as much as a luxury. The Dixie Cook Book, published in the 1880s, sits squarely in that tradition — its poultry chapter assumes a barnyard fowl of known age rather than a graded supermarket bird, and the note that "a year old is best" is the kind of practical judgment a cook made while looking at her own flock.