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Humble Pie
(England.) This is a very old dish. Many years ago, in feudal times, the retainers, "below the salt," had a pie, so named, made of the meaner parts of the game killed in the chase. Nowadays, the same proportions of suet, herbs, bred, etc., are cooked with veal, which results in a pie not to be despised. Mince finely 1 1/2 pounds of the fillet of veal, adding 1 dozen oysters, 1 pound of beef suet, parsley, thyme, sweet marjoram, pepper, and salt, a teaspoonful of sherry, and the yolks of two eggs, also 1 cup of bread-crumbs. Beat and stir to a smooth mixture, line a dish with paste, as above, and when it is yellow, fill with this, cover with strips of paste, and bake it in a slow oven 2 hours. Serve with a brown sauce.
A forcemeat pie rather than a chunked one: everything is minced, bound with egg and crumbs, and baked slowly in a pastry case. Two things in the original need attention before you start — the fat ratio and the missing pastry recipe.
- The suet is the hingeA full pound of beef suet to a pound and a half of veal is a very high proportion, carried over, as the headnote says, from the older game pie. Four to six ounces gives a moist, sliceable forcemeat; the full pound is likely to render out and leave the filling swimming.
- "Paste, as above"The recipe leans on a crust given earlier in the book and reproduces none of it. Any firm shortcrust or hot-water pastry that will hold a two-hour bake works; puff will slump under the weight of the filling.
- "When it is yellow"This most likely means blind-baking the lined dish until the pastry has set and taken a little colour — say 15 minutes at 400F with weights, though the book gives no temperature — before the wet filling goes in. Skip it and the base stays raw.
- Slow ovenBy the conventions of the period, somewhere in the region of 275–300F. At that temperature two hours is not excessive for a dense mass of minced meat in pastry, but check the centre reaches 160F rather than trusting the clock.
- The oystersThey go in raw and cook with the filling, which is correct here — they are seasoning and moisture, not a garnish. Chop them coarsely and include their liquor; whole oysters in a minced forcemeat turn to rubber over two hours.
- Herbs and quantitiesParsley, thyme and sweet marjoram are given without amounts. A tablespoon of chopped parsley and a teaspoon each of the two dried herbs suits this volume of meat; sweet marjoram is ordinary marjoram, milder than oregano.
- "Bred"A typesetting slip for bread, i.e. the cup of crumbs listed further on. Use dry crumbs, not fresh, or the mixture will be slack.
- Brown sauceThe period meaning is a stock-based espagnole or a plain reduced brown gravy, not bottled table sauce. Serve it separately in a boat.
- YieldSix generous portions as a main course, and it slices better the day after, cold or gently reheated.
The name is generally traced not to humility but to the umbles and other offal of a deer, which by custom went to the huntsmen and household servants while the venison itself went to the high table. "Umble pie" became "humble pie" as the word dropped out of use and the pun on rank became irresistible; eating humble pie in the modern sense is a nineteenth-century figure of speech built on the dish rather than the other way round. What this version shows is the dish at the end of its life as a real food: the offal has gone entirely, replaced by fillet of veal, and only the structural bones of the old recipe survive — the heavy suet, the bread, the herbs, the oysters that were common in English meat pies of the period. That it appears in a book of foreign dishes gathered for American readers, flagged simply "(England.)", suggests the compiler valued it more as a curiosity of English custom than as anything a household was still making from need.