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Squab Pie
Salt and pepper to taste Gravy or stock Pastry to cover Cut the pork into neat pieces. Put a layer of the pieces in the bottom of a fireproof dish.
Add one of the apples, peeled and chopped, then one of the onions, peeled and chopped, salt and pepper, and so on till the dish is full. Pour in as much stock or gravy as will fill the dish threequarters full. Cover with pastry, and bake for two hours in a moderate oven.
3 lbs. lean pork. 4 tart apples. 3 small onions. 1 lb. lean beef I carrot I turnip 2 onions
The ingredient list has been clipped in this printing — the quantities for the pork, apples and onions are missing, and the last four lines (beef, carrot, turnip, onions) belong to the recipe that follows. Work from the method, which is complete and clear.
- Proportions to useFor a dish serving four to six: about 1/2 lb boneless pork shoulder, 2 medium cooking apples and 2 medium onions. Published versions vary considerably in the ratio of fruit and onion to meat, so adjust to taste.
- Cut of pork"Neat pieces" means 1 to 1½ inch cubes of a cut that tolerates two hours of moist heat — shoulder or blade. Loin or tenderloin will be dry and stringy long before the pastry is done.
- Moderate oven350F. If the pastry is browning faster than the meat is tenderising, lay foil loosely over the top for the last half hour.
- Fireproof dishAn ovenproof pie dish or a shallow casserole, roughly 2 quarts. It needs to take direct oven heat and hold a pastry rim, so a deep ceramic pie dish is ideal.
- Three-quarters full with liquidTake this literally: the filling must not be swimming, or the underside of the pastry steams into paste. Stock to just below the top layer of meat is right, and it will thicken from the pork and the collapsing apple.
- PastryShortcrust or a rough puff, rolled about ¼ inch. Cut a vent in the centre — two hours of a covered dish generates a great deal of steam, and without a vent the lid lifts and cracks.
- Seasoning"Salt and pepper to taste" between every layer is the point; season each stratum as you build it, since there is no stirring afterwards. A little sage or a scrape of nutmeg is period-appropriate and helps the apple read as savoury.
Squab pie contains no squab. It is a West Country dish, associated above all with Devon and Cornwall, built from layers of meat with apples and onions beneath a pastry lid, and the name is generally traced to an older pie that did use pigeons, the meat filling having replaced the birds while the title stuck. Others have suggested the layered pieces of meat sitting close together in the dish suggested squabs in a nest, which is the kind of explanation offered after the fact. Whatever the origin, the combination points to a cider-country kitchen where apples were a year-round cellar staple rather than a dessert ingredient, and where fruit was used to season and moisten cheap, fatty cuts.