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Veal and Ham Pie
(A more fancy recipe.) Butter a dish, and fill it with layers of sliced veal seasoned with salt, pepper, and mace, cold ham, and sweetbreads, parboiled and sliced, adding 1 dozen truffles cut fine, and a cup of rich stock, and a lid of puff paste. Bake 3 hours, pour a glass of sherry or claret or white wine through the hole, and serve hot or cold.
A Victorian pie-dish version of veal and ham, meant to be eaten hot at dinner or cold the next day. The original assumes a cook who already knows how to handle pastry and offal, so most of what needs saying is about heat, liquid and the two ingredients that have become unfamiliar.
- The hinge: the stock must setIf the pie is to be eaten cold, the cup of "rich stock" has to be a properly gelatinous veal or trotter stock that jellies when chilled. A thin modern broth will leave a wet, sloppy pie once cool; reduce a good stock until it sets firmly in the refrigerator before it goes in.
- Oven heatThe recipe names no temperature. Puff paste wants a hot start and a longer, gentler finish: around 425F for the first 15-20 minutes to raise the pastry, then down to 325F for the remainder. The stated three hours suits a deep dish of raw sliced veal; tent the crust with foil once it has coloured or it will be black long before the meat is done.
- SweetbreadsBuy veal sweetbreads, soak them in several changes of cold water for a few hours, then parboil 5 minutes, cool, and peel away the membrane before slicing. Skipping the soak leaves them bloody and strong-tasting.
- A dozen trufflesA dozen suggests small truffles rather than the large fresh Perigord ones sold today; preserved truffles in tins or jars were widely available in this period, though the recipe does not say which is meant. A small jar of preserved truffle or truffle peelings, or 8 oz of finely chopped brown mushrooms cooked dry, stands in without pretending to be the same thing.
- "A glass" of wineA wineglass of the period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz. It is poured through the steam hole after baking, while the pie is still hot, so it soaks into the filling rather than cooking off.
- The holeCut a vent in the puff paste lid before baking. It lets steam out, keeps the pastry from lifting off in one piece, and is the port for the wine afterwards.
- MaceBlade or ground mace, the outer coat of nutmeg, is the characteristic seasoning of English veal pies. Ground nutmeg at half the quantity is the nearest substitute.
- Ham and saltThe ham is already cured, so season only the veal layers. A modern wet-cured supermarket ham is much saltier than the dry-cured joint assumed here; taste before adding more salt.
- YieldA dish built on 2 lb veal, 1 lb ham and a pair of sweetbreads serves six to eight, more if served cold in slices.
Veal and ham pie was one of the fixed points of English cold-table cookery through the nineteenth century: the picnic hamper, the shooting lunch, the sideboard at a ball supper. Its logic is preservation as much as flavour, since a lean meat, a cured one and a jellied stock under a sealed pastry lid keep well for a day or two in a cool larder. The truffles and sweetbreads here are what the author means by "a more fancy recipe" - plainer versions, often with hard-boiled eggs laid between the layers, were ordinary household food, while truffles marked a dish out as company fare. The veal, ham and mace formula is thoroughly British.