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Leicestershire Medley
(England.) Line a dish with some good pie-crust; bake it until a light brown. Cut up 1 pound each of roast beef, bacon, and cored apples. Fill in alternate layers, seasoning with salt, pepper, and powdered ginger, and when it is full, a pint of ale, or enough to moisten all. Put on a lid of the dough and bake in a moderate oven 2 hours. Serve hot or cold.
A leftovers pie in the old English manner: cooked meat, salt pork, apple and ale sealed under pastry and left in a slow-ish oven long enough for everything to melt together. Two details in the original need translating before you start.
- The hinge: use cooked beefThe recipe assumes roast beef already cooked, not raw steak. Two hours in a moderate oven with ale will make cooked beef tender and unctuous; raw beef cut small will simply toughen and shed water.
- Moderate oven350F. At two hours, cover the pastry loosely with foil once it has taken colour, or the lid will be dark long before the filling has finished.
- Blind-baking the base"Bake it until a light brown" means the shell goes into the oven before it is filled -- line, weight, and bake at 400F for about 20 minutes, then uncovered until pale gold. This is the main defence against a soggy bottom under a pint of liquid.
- A pint of aleIf the book is read as American, a pint is 2 cups; an English pint of the same date is 20 fl oz. Either way the instruction "or enough to moisten all" governs -- add liquid until it comes about two thirds up the filling, not to the rim, or it will boil out under the lid.
- The ale itselfA soft English-style bitter or brown ale. Modern hop-forward IPAs turn aggressively bitter over two hours of baking, and a heavy stout will dominate the apple.
- BaconPeriod bacon was frequently more heavily salted than modern bacon, and unsmoked (green) bacon was common. Use a slab or thick-cut streaky, and if it tastes very salty raw, blanch it a minute and drain before layering -- then salt the pie cautiously at the end.
- ApplesThe text says only "cored," and says nothing about peeling; peeling gives a smoother result. Choose a variety that holds its shape -- Braeburn, Northern Spy -- since softer apples will collapse to sauce.
- Powdered gingerGinger here is the seasoning that ties beef to apple, not a background note. Roughly a teaspoon spread across the layers is in keeping; taste as you go.
- Dish and yieldThree pounds of filling plus liquid wants a deep 9-inch dish or a 2-quart pie dish, and serves six to eight. The recipe's own instruction is to serve it hot or cold.
Leicestershire's name is attached to a number of hearty English pies and pork products. The beef-bacon-apple-ale combination, sweetened only by the fruit and lifted by ginger, is an older seasoning habit than it looks: dried ginger was a standard English spice for meat well before sugar became cheap, and apples with pork or bacon survives in the modern pairing of pork chops and applesauce. The instruction to serve hot or cold is the practical part: a sealed pie kept a day or two in a cold larder and travelled well. The recipe is headed "(England.)", and appears in a collection of dishes gathered from abroad for American readers.