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March 9
Menu: Veal and Ham Pie; Baked Sweet Potatoes Fried Parsnips; Salad of Canned Asparagus Tips; Cheese Fritters; Caramel Pudding with Meringue; Coffee Veal and Ham Pie-1/2 pounds veal, 2 hard-cooked eggs, few grains red pepper, dust of powdered mace, 1/2 teaspoon grated lemon rind, 1/2 pound ham, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 6 whole peppers, powdered sweet herbs, and pastry. Cut veal and ham into very thin pieces; mix on a plate, flour, salt, pepper, sweet herbs, lemon rind, red pepper, and mace, roll in this seasoning each piece of veal, and lay in a pie dish, alternately, layers of veal, ham, and egg, cut in slices; pile this in center of dish, add ½ cup water; line edge of dish, cover and decorate with Crisco Flake Pastry; when baked add a little very good seasoned stock, which should become a jelly when the pie is cold, or a little gelatine may be added; garnish with parsley if served cold.
A cold-cut English pie dressed up for an American shortening cookbook. Two things decide whether it works: thin slicing and the jellied stock added after baking.
- On the veal quantityThe printed page gives 1½ pounds veal against ½ pound ham, which is what our text now reads. The layering works out at that ratio.
- Cut of vealUse veal leg or shoulder, sliced very thin across the grain, or ask for cutlets and pound them. Thin is not decorative here: the pie bakes long enough for the pastry, and thick pieces of veal will still be tough when the crust is done.
- Whole peppersThe six "whole peppers" are whole black peppercorns, and the method appears to mix them in with the seasoning flour, so they stay whole in the pie. Warn anyone eating it, or crack them coarsely instead.
- Powdered sweet herbsA period pantry item: a dried mixture, commonly some combination of thyme, marjoram, savory and parsley, ground together. About a teaspoon of a dried thyme-marjoram mix does the job.
- OvenThe book assumes you know. Start at 425F for 15 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then drop to 325F for about 1 1/2 hours total, until a skewer through the vent meets no resistance. Cover the crust with foil if it browns early.
- Crisco Flake PastryThe house short pastry from elsewhere in the book — flour, salt, shortening, ice water. Any all-shortening or half-butter short crust works. Cut a steam vent; the pie gives off a good deal of liquid.
- The stock is the pointPour well-seasoned, strongly gelatinous veal or chicken stock through the vent while the pie is still hot, a little at a time, so it soaks down through the layers. If your stock does not set, soften about a teaspoon of powdered gelatine per cup in it first. Chill overnight; the jelly is what holds the slices together.
- YieldA 9-inch pie dish, six to eight servings cold, with the parsley garnish as directed. It slices far better on the second day than the first.
Veal-and-ham pie is a fixture of English cold-table cookery, close kin to the raised pork pie and the pies carried to picnics and shooting lunches through the nineteenth century — the jellied stock poured in after baking is the same trick that fills the gap under a raised pie's lid as the meat shrinks. Its appearance here, dated March 10 in a year-long "Calendar of Dinners," shows what the 1913 Crisco book was really doing: Procter & Gamble had introduced hydrogenated vegetable shortening only two years earlier, and the way to sell it was to attach it to dishes cooks already respected. The pastry called for here is a Crisco pastry, and the argument, made throughout, was that a vegetable fat kept better than lard in a warm kitchen and left no meaty taste in a crust. Veal appears to have been commoner and cheaper on American tables then than it is now, which is why a pie built on a pound and a half of it could pass as an ordinary supper.