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Rabbit Pie
(Saxony.) Clean and cut into joints a fine young rabbit. Chop 1 pound of fresh pork and 1/2 pound of veal suet, with a laurel leaf (bayleaf.), an onion, thyme, parsley, pepper, salt, and 2 cloves. Line a dish with this forcemeat, lay the rabbit on top, in alternate layers, adding 3 hard-boiled eggs, sliced, 6 mushrooms, and 6 oysters, finally 1 glass of cider or white wine. Let there be a layer of forcemeat, covered with bread-crumbs, on top of all, cover closely 3/4 hour, then let it brown while baking. Serve hot or cold. CHICKEN PIE (as made in England.).
Cut into dice 2 ounces ham, 4 mushrooms, and 4 truffles, add 2 ounces butter mixed with 1 ounce of flour and 1/2 pint of white stock and a spoonful of rum or brandy. Add, after stirring on the fire for 10 minutes, 2 cups of chopped cold chicken,--not cut too fine,--8 gherkins, cut in slices, some parsley, seasoning, and 3 anchovies, chopped and boned. Line a dish with paste, bake it until yellow, fill with this, with paste on top. Bake it an hour, and serve cold. Used for picnics on the Thames, or when shooting. CHICKEN PIE (as made in France.).
Joint a large chicken, parboil it, using the water for soup, and cut the meat from the bones and skin. Make a forcemeat of the liver, 2 ounces of ham, 4 ounces of tongue, 2 ounces of butter, and the yolks of 3 boiled eggs. Season, add onion juice, and chop fine. Line a dish with paste, bake it yellow, fill in alternate layers of meat and the forcemeat. Add 1 cup of stock mixed with a tablespoonful of lemon juice, a layer of paste, and bake it 1 1/2 hours. Serve hot or cold.
CHICKEN TART (invented for Madame de Pompadour.).
Parboil 1 pound of spaghetti, being careful not to break it. Drain it, and line a mould, twisting it all around. Fill the centre with a mixture of 2 cups of cold chopped chicken, 1/2 cup of cream blended with some flour and butter and yolk of an egg, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and chopped parsley. Steam it like a custard, 1 hour, turn it out on a dish, and pour around it some good tomato sauce. Serve hot.
Four pies in one entry, all built on the same nineteenth-century logic: a lining of forcemeat or pastry, cold cooked meat in layers, and enough fat and gelatin to let the thing be eaten cold the next day. The original gives almost no temperatures, so the numbers below are the ones the method implies.
- The hinge: the pork forcemeatIn the Saxony rabbit pie the chopped pork and suet are raw and they insulate the rabbit, so the centre must reach 160F/71C before the dish is finished. Judge by a thermometer pushed into the middle of the forcemeat, not by the browning of the crumb top.
- Oven settingsThe original gives no oven temperature at all. Covered, the rabbit pie suits a moderate oven, around 350F/175C, for the 45 minutes; uncover and raise to about 425F/220C for 10-15 minutes to brown. The English and French chicken pies, filled with already-cooked meat, will also take about 350F/175C.
- Veal suetHard fat from around the veal kidney, now hard to come by outside a butcher who will save it. Beef suet is the closest, or use fatty pork shoulder ground coarse so the forcemeat runs about a third fat by weight.
- "1 glass" of cider or wineA wine glass in period cookery is roughly 1/4 cup, sometimes 1/2. For a pie this size 1/2 cup is the sensible reading, and the cider meant is dry hard cider, not sweet juice.
- Oysters and the covered stageSix oysters buried in forcemeat for three quarters of an hour will be firm and small. Nothing can be done about that within this method; they are there for their liquor and salt, so use them shucked with their juice and expect texture, not plumpness.
- Paste, and "bake it yellow"Paste is shortcrust or hot-water crust. Baking the lining yellow is blind baking: line the dish, weight the pastry, and give it 15-20 minutes at 400F/200C until pale gold before filling.
- White stockAn unroasted veal or chicken stock, pale and lightly gelatinous. Unsalted chicken stock stands in; reduce it slightly if it tastes thin, since the 2 oz butter and 1 oz flour make a fairly loose sauce at half a pint.
- Anchovies "chopped and boned"The recipe assumes salt-packed whole anchovies that need filleting and rinsing. Six oil-packed fillets equal the three whole fish, and no further salt should go in until you have tasted.
- The spaghetti mouldParboil about half the usual time so the strands are pliable but not soft, coil them around a buttered charlotte or pudding mould, and steam covered so no water reaches the surface. It sets like a savoury custard and needs 15 minutes standing before turning out.
- YieldThe rabbit pie serves about six; each chicken pie four to six; the spaghetti mould four. The rabbit pie and the two chicken pies are all offered cold, which makes those portions generous by modern hot-dinner standards; the spaghetti tart is directed to be served hot.
This entry belongs to a genre of turn-of-the-century travel cookery that collected dishes by nationality and printed them in quick succession, which is why a German rabbit pie, two chicken pies and a moulded tart share a single paragraph. The Saxony pie is essentially a terrine or Pastete — forcemeat lining, layered meat, hard-boiled egg for the cut surface — the same construction that produces French pâté en croûte, and its instruction to serve hot or cold is the point rather than an afterthought. The English version, with gherkins, anchovy and a spoonful of brandy, is a shooting-lunch and river-picnic food of exactly the kind Victorian and Edwardian cookery books assumed their readers would pack in a hamper. The attribution of the spaghetti tart to Madame de Pompadour should be read as culinary folklore: dishes were routinely credited to famous eighteenth-century names to lend them cachet, and no contemporary source ties this one to her kitchen.