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Chicken Pie
Bit of bay leaf Salt teaspoon pepper cup flour Pie crust or biscuit dough Dress, clean, and cut up chicken. Put in a stewpan with onion, parsley, and bay leaf, salt and pepper. Cover with boiling water, and cook slowly until tender. Thicken stock with flour diluted with enough cold water to pour easily. Cover the chicken mixture with crust in which several incisions have been made. Wet edge of crust and put around a rim, which is close to edge. Bake in a moderate oven 350° F. until crust is well risen and browned.
The ingredient list has come down to us incomplete — the quantities for the chicken, onion and parsley are missing, and the fractions before "teaspoon pepper" and "cup flour" have dropped out. The method is sound and easy to follow once you fill in reasonable amounts.
- Quantities to assumeA 4–5 lb chicken, one onion, a few sprigs of parsley, a piece of bay leaf, about a teaspoon of salt and a quarter teaspoon of pepper. The flour is almost certainly a quarter to a half cup, enough to thicken roughly a quart of stock; start with a quarter cup and judge by eye.
- "Dress and clean"This means pluck, singe and draw a bird brought home whole. A supermarket chicken needs only to be cut into eight or ten pieces; keep the back and wing tips in the pot for flavour and pull them out before assembling.
- Cook slowly until tenderA simmer with the barest movement on the surface, 45 minutes to an hour for a young bird, longer for an old one. A hard boil shreds the breast and clouds the stock, which here becomes the gravy and wants to stay clear.
- The hinge: cool the fillingLet the thickened chicken and stock lose their fiercest heat before the crust goes on, and do not fill the dish to the brim. Steam trapped under pastry lifts it off the meat and leaves a raw underside; the incisions in the top are there to let it escape.
- Wet edge and rimThe line is garbled, but it most likely describes an older pie-making habit: a narrow band of pastry pressed onto the moistened lip of the dish, with the lid then laid over it and sealed to that band, giving the crust something to grip so it does not slide as it shrinks.
- OvenThe recipe already gives 350° F alongside "moderate oven," so no interpretation is needed. Expect 35 to 45 minutes for a risen, well-browned crust; if biscuit dough is used instead, closer to 25 minutes.
- YieldA 4–5 lb bird in a 2-quart dish serves six. Bone the meat before it goes under the crust unless you want diners picking joints out of gravy.
Chicken pie of this kind — a stewed fowl, its own thickened cooking liquor for gravy, and a single lid of pastry or biscuit dough — is a simplified descendant of the older English tradition of enclosed meat pies. The economy is plain in the method: nothing in the stewpan is discarded, and the crust is offered in two forms so the cook can use whichever the pantry allows.