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Another Side Dish
R. A. Sibley.
Cold turkey, chicken or any cold meat, chopped fine, seasoned with salt, pepper, and gravy; lay pie crust round the edge of the platter, and cover the same ; bake a nice brown in the oven. Very little meat makes a dish for several persons.
A leftovers pie with no quantities at all, which is the point: the meat is already cooked, so the only real cooking is browning the crust and heating the filling through.
- Oven temperaturePastry of this kind wants 400-425F. The filling is cooked meat and needs only to heat through, so a hot oven that colours the crust in 25-30 minutes is right; a slow oven will dry the meat before the pastry browns.
- The platterA platter of the period was likely to be earthenware or ironstone, and such a dish could go into the oven. Modern serving platters are rarely ovenproof. Use a pie plate or shallow baking dish of about 9 inches instead.
- How much gravyThe hinge of the dish. Chopped cooked meat with no moisture bakes into sawdust under a lid of pastry. Add gravy until the mixture is loose and glossy but not soupy, roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup for every 2 cups of chopped meat.
- Chopped, not ground"Chopped fine" means knife-cut to a coarse mince. A food processor will reduce cold roast meat to paste; pulse briefly or chop by hand for texture.
- The crust arrangementPastry is laid around the rim and then over the top, so the filling sits directly on the dish with no bottom crust. One standard single-crust quantity is enough, with a strip for the rim and a vent cut in the lid.
- SeasoningCold roast poultry is bland and the gravy has already been salted once. Season the filling and taste it before covering; a little thyme, sage or mustard is in keeping with the period.
- YieldTwo cups of chopped meat and its gravy will fill a 9-inch dish and feed perhaps four with a vegetable alongside; the recipe itself says only 'several persons,' which is the point of the closing line about 'very little meat.'
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women, with proceeds going to a charitable home, and the format shows here: a contributor's name, a few lines, no measurements, on the assumption that any reader already knew how to make pastry. Dishes like this one sit in the long tradition of English and American "made dishes" that turned Sunday's roast into Tuesday's supper, the same impulse behind shepherd's pie and rissoles. The final sentence is the selling point rather than an afterthought, and speaks to a period when a household economy was judged partly by how far a joint could be stretched.