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Chicken Pot Pie
Cut into twelve pieces one tender roasting chicken of two and a half pounds. Place in a saucepan with one quart cold water. As soon as it comes to a boil strain the water off. Then pour in one quart boiling water, season with one teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Cover the pan and let slowly cook for six minutes. Then add two small, well-cleaned leeks, tied up with four branches parsley, a sprig of bay leaf, two cloves and a sprig of thyme; put in the pan one and a half ounces salt pork, cut into small pieces. Cover the pan again and let boil for ten minutes. Add twelve small, sound, peeled onions; boil again five minutes. Add one good-sized raw potato, cut into small, half-inch-square pieces. Skim the fat off the surface. Cover the pan and boil for ten minutes more; then shift the pan on the corner of the range. Mix two tablespoons flour with two gills cold milk in a bowl and strain it into the saucepan; mix well with the wooden spoon and let boil for three minutes. Remove the leeks, parsley, etc. Pour the preparation into a deep pie dish. Spread a little chopped parsley over. Lightly egg the border of the dish all around. Cover the surface with a pie paste, same as mince pie. Egg the surface with a hair pastry brush. Make a few incisions on the surface of the paste to allow evaporation. Place in a hot oven to bake for twenty minutes, or until it obtains a nice golden colour. Remove, place the pie on a plate and serve.
A late-Victorian restaurant cook's pot pie: the bird is simmered to doneness on the stove, then the filling is topped with pastry and baked only long enough to brown the crust. A few of the measurements and range directions need translating.
- Two gills of milkA gill is half a cup, so this is one cup of cold milk whisked with two tablespoons flour. Straining the slurry in, as directed, is worth doing — it catches lumps before they reach the pot.
- A hot ovenIn period terms roughly 400-450F; the filling is already cooked, so the twenty minutes are entirely about setting and colouring the pastry.
- The corner of the rangeOn a coal range the corner was the cool zone. Shift to low heat before adding the flour-and-milk mixture, then bring it back to a gentle boil for its three minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- The first quart of waterBringing the chicken to a boil in cold water and throwing that water away is a blanching step to remove scum and give a clear, clean-tasting gravy. Rinse the pieces before returning them to the fresh boiling water.
- Salt porkAn ounce and a half of salt pork, diced, is the fat and depth in this dish. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or pancetta is the nearest substitute; if you use smoked bacon the whole pie will taste of it.
- The tied leeksThis is a bouquet garni in leek form — parsley, bay, thyme and cloves bundled inside the leeks so the lot lifts out in one go. Tie it with kitchen string and leave a tail hanging over the rim.
- Chicken size and timingA 2.5 lb bird in twelve pieces is small by modern standards; supermarket chickens run 3.5-4.5 lb and their pieces need longer than the roughly half hour of simmering here. Check that the thickest thigh piece reaches 165F before the filling goes into the dish.
- Pie paste, same as mince pieAlmost certainly a plain pie/short paste for a single top rather than puff. One store-bought round covers a standard deep dish. "Egg the border" means brush the rim with beaten egg so the pastry seals to it.
- YieldAbout four generous servings, or six alongside a vegetable. Let it stand five minutes before cutting or the gravy runs out from under the crust.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), and it reads like what it is — a chef long associated with Delmonico's writing a homely dish in professional order, with the blanching step, the tied herb bundle and the fat skimmed off the surface before thickening. The name causes confusion: in much of the English-speaking world a pot pie is exactly this, a stew under a lid of pastry, while in Pennsylvania Dutch cooking bot boi means squares of noodle dough dropped straight into the simmering broth with no oven involved at all. Both are usually traced to the older sense of a pie cooked in a pot rather than a formal raised crust, when the pastry was as much a container and a thickener as a thing to eat. The heavy use of leeks, thyme, bay and clove, and the finish with a milk-and-flour liaison, reflect the French-influenced kitchen he came out of more than any American farmhouse tradition.