Home › Meats and Entrees › Fife Pie
Fife Pie
(Scotland.) Cut a plump young rabbit into joints, make a forcemeat of the liver,--or chicken livers, if preferred,--parboiled and minced, bread-crumbs, 2 ounces of bacon, thyme, parsley, lemon peel, nutmeg, pepper, and salt, and yolk of an egg. Form into balls. Arrange the meat in layers, with thin slices of bacon between, and the balls here and there. Pour in one cup of consomme and a spoonful of white wine, cover with puff paste, and bake 1 1/2 hours. Best eaten cold, as the Roman pie is better eaten hot.
A raw-filled game pie with a puff crust, written for a cook who already knew the pastry and the oven. The two things the original leaves out are the temperature and any indication of how much liquid the finished pie should hold.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. Puff paste needs a hot start, around 425F for the first 15-20 minutes to set and lift the layers, then dropped to 325-350F for the remainder so the rabbit cooks through without the crust burning. Cover the pastry loosely with foil once it has coloured.
- The rabbit is the variableA "plump young rabbit" means a farmed or young wild animal of about 2.5-3 lb, which will be tender in the stated 1 1/2 hours. An older wild rabbit will still be tough and stringy after that time; joint it and braise it until tender before it goes under the pastry, or the pie fails on the meat rather than the crust.
- JointingTwo front legs, two hind legs, and the saddle cut across into two or three pieces. The ribcage and forequarter carry little meat and are better boiled down for the consomme than layered in the pie.
- Forcemeat ballsThe only quantity the original gives is the 2 ounces of bacon; the rest is reconstruction. Reckon on 2 oz bacon to about a cup of fresh breadcrumbs and whatever liver you have -- a single rabbit's liver is small, well short of a quarter-pound, which is presumably why chicken livers are offered as an alternative -- bound with one yolk. Season firmly — a spoonful fried off in a pan will tell you whether the nutmeg and lemon peel are showing before you commit the lot. Roll walnut-sized; larger balls will not cook through in the time.
- LiquidOne cup of consomme sounds sparse and is meant to be. A raw-filled pie generates juice from the meat and bacon, and a flooded pie steams its own lid soggy from beneath. Use good jellied stock rather than a thin broth if you want the set that makes the cold version worth eating.
- Lemon peel and thymePeel means the zest only, pared thin and minced; the white pith turns bitter over an hour and a half. Fresh thyme leaves, stripped from the stalk, about a teaspoon.
- Steam and the crustCut a vent in the puff paste before it goes in. Without one the trapped steam lifts the lid off the filling and leaves a hollow dome over a wet interior.
- Serving coldThe instruction is deliberate: as the pie cools the stock sets to jelly around the meat. Cool at room temperature no more than two hours, then refrigerate overnight and bring back to cool room temperature before cutting. Feeds four to five as a main course.
Fife pie belongs to the large family of British covered game pies, distinguished mainly by its rabbit and its forcemeat balls — the same sort of stuffing mixture that went into hare, veal and pigeon pies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rabbit was cheap protein in rural Scotland well into the twentieth century, plentiful enough to be a nuisance to farmers, and pastry was a standard way to stretch a single animal to feed a household and keep it edible for a day or two in a cold larder. The author's aside comparing it with "the Roman pie" suggests a collection that gathered dishes country by country and liked to set them against one another; what exactly the comparison is meant to convey is not spelled out, though it is true that a pie whose stock sets firm slices cleanly cold, while a hot-eaten pie relies on its gravy staying liquid.