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Chicken Pie
Mrs. H.
Stew chickens until tender; line the sides of a deep pie dish with nice pastry; put in the chicken, and the water in which it has boiled, (which should be but half a pint); season with a large piece of butter, salt and pepper, and then cover loosely with crust. While this is baking, have ready a quart can of fine oysters; put on the fire a pint of rich milk, (or the liquor of the oysters will do); let it come to a boil; thicken with a little flour, and season with butter, pepper and salt; pour this over the oysters boiling hot, and about fifteen minutes before the pie is done, lift the crust and pour the oysters and all into the pie; then return to the oven to finish.
A two-stage pie: chicken stewed and baked under pastry, with a creamed oyster mixture slipped in at the end. The instructions assume a cook who already knows her way around pastry, so the gaps are worth filling.
- The oysters are the hingeThey are added late, the sauce poured over them boiling hot, and they get only the final fifteen minutes in the oven rather than the whole bake. Long cooking shrinks oysters and toughens them, which is presumably why they go in at the end.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature or oven direction is given anywhere in the recipe. Bake at 375-400F, hot enough to set and colour the pastry.
- "A quart can of fine oysters"Shucked oysters packed in their own liquor, sold by the quart. A quart is about 4 cups, which is a great deal; two 8-oz containers of fresh shucked oysters with their liquor is a reduced modern substitute for one deep dish.
- Only half a pint of stewing liquidThe instruction is not casual. Chickens stewed until tender give up far more than a cup of broth, so reduce it hard, or reserve the rest for something else. Too much liquid and the bottom pastry dissolves.
- "A large piece of butter"Read this as 2 to 3 tablespoons for the chicken, and another tablespoon or so in the oyster sauce. Nineteenth-century recipes measured butter by the lump because it came from a crock, not a wrapper marked in tablespoons.
- "Rich milk"Whole milk with a splash of cream, or simply light cream. The Victorian household's milk came unhomogenised with the cream still on it.
- Cover looselyThe top crust is meant to lift off in one piece so the oyster mixture can go in. Lay it on without crimping it down all round, or cut a generous lid you can raise with a spatula.
- YieldA deep 9- or 10-inch dish, serving six to eight. Chicken and oysters together make this substantial; a sharp green salad is the whole rest of the meal.
Chicken and oysters together look extravagant now, but in the 1870s the ratio was closer to the reverse of what we would assume. Oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail and by the barrel, while a stewing hen represented a bird that had stopped laying. Combinations like this run all through American cookery of the period, from oyster-stuffed turkey to the veal-and-oyster pies of the Chesapeake, and the technique here of poaching the oysters in a thickened cream sauce and adding them at the last moment is the same logic behind the oyster stews and "scallops" of the same books. The Home Cook Book, first published in Chicago in 1874, was compiled from contributions by local women, many of whom appear only as initials, and it is a fundraising community cookbook; the attribution to "Mrs. H." is typical of the genre: recipes came in as households wrote them, brief and assuming shared knowledge, which is why the oven is never given a number.