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Sea Pie
1/2 tablespoonful mushroom catchup Salt and pepper to taste 1 pint (2 cups) warm water or stock 1/2 lb. (2 cups) flour 1/4 lb. (I cup) chopped suet 1 teaspoonful baking powder Wipe and trim the meat, and cut it into small neat pieces. Prepare the vegetables and slice them. Put a layer of the vegetables into a shallow stewpan, then the meat and the remainder of the vegetables on the top. Season well with salt and pepper, add the catchup and the water or stock. Cover and stew slowly for thirty minutes.
Mix the flour with the suet, add the baking powder and a pinch of salt and mix well. Make this into a stiffish paste with cold water; roll it out into a round cake the size of the stewpan, and put it on the top of the meat and vegetables.
Continue the stewing until the meat is quite tender, and the vegetables and pastry well cooked.
A suet-crust stew cooked in one pan, with the crust steamed on top rather than baked. The printed ingredient list here is incomplete — the meat and vegetables are called for in the method but their quantities were cut off — so treat the amounts below as a working guide.
- Missing quantitiesThe meat and root vegetables are called for in the method but their weights are missing from the printed list; something in the region of 1 1/2 lb stewing beef (chuck or shin) and a similar weight of mixed roots — onion, carrot, turnip, potato — suits the pint of liquid and 1/2 lb of flour given. The recipe rolls the crust to whatever the pan measures, so the 1/2 lb of flour will give a reasonably thin lid on a pan of around 9 to 10 inches and a thicker one on anything smaller.
- The hinge: keep the lid onThe crust cooks by steam, not dry heat. Once it goes on, the pan stays covered and the liquid stays at a bare simmer; lifting the lid to check drops the steam and gives you a pale, dense top. Allow 45 minutes to an hour after the crust goes in, and expect a soft, dumpling-like surface rather than a browned pastry.
- Liquid levelThe stock should come just to the top of the meat and vegetables and no higher. If it touches the crust the underside turns to paste.
- Mushroom catchupAn old English thin, dark, salty mushroom liquor, still sold by a few specialist makers. Half a tablespoon of it is doing the same work as a dash of Worcestershire sauce or mushroom soy would.
- SuetBeef suet, shredded, is what is meant — packet shredded suet or vegetarian suet both work. Grate it from cold if using a block, and keep everything cold so it stays in flecks. Butter is not really the same thing here: it softens and blends into the flour sooner, and the crust comes out closer to a short pastry than the light, flecked suet crust intended.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon to 1/2 lb flour is on the low side by modern practice. Two teaspoons gives a lighter crust, and self-raising flour with no added powder is closer still.
- VesselA "shallow stewpan" means a wide, lidded pan — a shallow casserole or a large saute pan with a tight lid. Width matters more than depth, since the crust needs to sit flat on the solids.
- The 30-minute head startHalf an hour of stewing is only to get things going; the meat is nowhere near tender at that point. Judge the finish by the beef, not the clock.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of servings; on the assumed quantities above it would serve about four as a single dish. Cut the crust into wedges in the pan and serve a wedge over each portion.
Sea pie earned its name honestly: it is a ship's dish, a way of stretching salt or fresh meat and whatever roots were still sound with a flour-and-suet crust cooked over one fire in one pot, no oven required. It appears in both British and North American sources through the nineteenth century, and in Quebec it survives as cipaille or six-pâtes, built up in layers he six of pastry is generally treated as a back-formation from the English name rather than the other way round. Suet crusts of this kind, steamed under a lid, were the backbone of everyday English cooking well into the twentieth century.