Home › Meats and Entrees › Turkey Pie
Turkey Pie
(Amiens.) Cut into thin slices the dark meat of a cold roast turkey and half as much beef tongue. To every pound of both, allow 1 ounce of butter and four truffles, salt and pepper. Make a stock from the bones, gravy, and stuffing, with 1 pint of water, onion, carrot, and herbs, also a bayleaf; when this has cooked 1 hour, reduce it to a cupful. Pour it over the meat and truffles, arranged in a dish, and cover the top with a thin layer of pastry or a thick layer of bread-crumbs. Bake 1 hour, serve hot or cold.
A cold-turkey dish built on a concentrated stock rather than a sauce, in the manner of a French pâté en croûte. Everything depends on the reduction: a cupful of stock from a pint, with the bones, pan gravy and leftover stuffing all lending body.
- The hinge is the reductionThe pint of stock must come down to a single cup, or the pie will be soupy under its lid and the pastry will sog from beneath. Reduce it uncovered and taste before pouring — reduced pan gravy and stuffing can push it very salty, so hold back on added salt until the end.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven temperature. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a dish of already-cooked meat; with a pastry lid you might start at 400F for the first 15 minutes to set and colour it, then drop to 350F.
- An hour is too longBoth meats are already cooked; the bake exists only to marry them and brown the top. Thirty to forty minutes at 350F is enough for a dish of ordinary depth. A full hour dries the dark meat and turns the tongue leathery.
- TrufflesFour truffles to the pound is seasoning-scale generosity by modern standards; truffles were more plentiful and considerably less costly in turn-of-the-century France, though still a luxury item. A tablespoon of chopped preserved truffle plus its juice, or 250g of sautéed cremini mushrooms finished with a few drops of truffle oil, gives a defensible version at a small fraction of the cost.
- Beef tongueSold cured or fresh at butchers and Latin and Jewish markets; it needs long simmering and peeling before slicing, so buy it ready-cooked if you can. Good pastrami or a firm boiled ham slices to the same effect.
- The butterAn ounce per pound of meat is not for greasing the dish — dot it over the layers so it melts down into the stock and enriches it. Softened and smeared onto the slices is easier than trying to distribute cold flakes.
- Crumb toppingA "thick layer of bread-crumbs" wants coarse fresh crumbs tossed in melted butter, not fine dry ones, which will pack into a paste. Add them for the last 20 minutes only.
- Yield and servingA pound of turkey plus half a pound of tongue fills a 1.5-quart dish and serves four to five. Served cold, the stock sets to a light jelly; the recipe leaves the choice open with 'serve hot or cold'.
The parenthetical "(Amiens)" invites a connection, though how much weight it will bear is a matter of inference: Amiens, in Picardy, was known throughout the nineteenth century for its pâté de canard d'Amiens, a duck pâté baked in a crust that appeared on regional-specialty lists alongside Chartres partridge pie and Périgord truffles. What this entry offers is that idea reduced to household scale — a cold-meat pie enriched with truffle and bound with a concentrated stock, using up the carcass, the gravy and yesterday's stuffing rather than a purpose-made forcemeat. The instruction to serve it hot or cold is the honest tell: cold, with the stock set to jelly, it edges toward the charcutier's manner; hot, it is a Monday supper made from Sunday's bird.