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Duck Pie
(Chartres.) Line a dish with puff paste, bake it to color it, and then fill it. Mix 1 pound of sausage meat with onion, parsley, salt, and pepper, chopping the onion fine. Cut into thin slices the meat of 2 fine cooked ducks,--if made of the remains of roast duck less sausage will be needed,--let these slices be left for an hour in a mixture of olive oil, pepper, onion juice, and tarragon vinegar, then drain and arrange in layers in the dish, with the sausage meat between. Cover with a fancy lid of paste, egg it to make it glaze, and bake it 1 1/2 hours. Serve hot or cold.
A raised pie of sliced duck layered with sausage meat, in the manner of a French pâté en croûte. The original assumes you already have cooked duck on hand and gives no oven temperature, so those are the gaps to fill.
- The hinge: raw pork in a long bakeThe duck is already cooked, but the sausage meat is raw, so the bake is governed by the pork. Aim for 350–375F and check that the center of the filling reaches 160F; the stated 1 1/2 hours is realistic for a full-depth pie.
- "Line a dish with puff paste, bake it to color it"This is a blind bake of the bottom crust only, so the base is not soggy under an hour and a half of meat juices. Line the dish, dock the pastry, weight it, and bake at 400F for 15 minutes until just pale gold, then cool before filling.
- Puff pastePeriod puff paste was a butter-laminated dough much like modern all-butter puff pastry, which substitutes directly. If you want a sturdier pie that slices cleanly cold, a hot-water or shortcrust pastry base with the puff reserved for the lid works better.
- Quantity of duckTwo dressed ducks yield roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb of usable meat once skin and bone are discarded, which is a workable proportion against 1 lb of sausage. Working from leftovers, scale the sausage down along with the duck; the original says only that 'less sausage will be needed' and gives no proportion.
- Sausage meatThis means bulk raw pork sausage, uncased and fairly fatty; the fat is what keeps the duck slices from drying. Plain ground pork with salt works if you season it yourself, but avoid heavily sage-flavored breakfast sausage, which fights the tarragon.
- The marinadeAn hour in oil, onion juice, pepper and tarragon vinegar is a flavoring step, not a tenderizing one, and it matters more than it looks: cooked duck reheated for 90 minutes without it goes flat. Drain the slices well or the pastry will weep.
- "Egg it"Beaten whole egg, or yolk with a spoon of water, brushed over the lid. Cut a vent in the top so steam escapes rather than lifting the fancy paste off the pie.
- Yield and servingA pie of this size serves eight to ten. Served cold it slices best after a night in the refrigerator; a few spoonfuls of well-reduced duck or veal stock poured through the vent while the pie is still warm will set to a jelly in the gaps.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century American genre: collections that gathered dishes from abroad and tagged each with its place of origin, here Chartres, so the home cook could feel she was touring Europe from her own kitchen. The city carried a real reputation for pastry-encased meat — pâté de Chartres is generally traced to the game pies of the surrounding Beauce, normally described as a partridge pie and long enough established that the name functioned as a regional label rather than a single recipe. Duck stands in easily, and the conditional allowance for a pie made "of the remains of roast duck" shows the dish doing what raised pies had always done: turning yesterday's roast into something worth putting on the table whole, hot or cold, with the sausage meat supplying the fat that reheated poultry lacks.