5.7 Meat Pies & Puddings – Completed!

With finally cooking recipe #445 To Make a Yorkshire Christmas Pye, I have completed the Meat Pies & Puddings section of the Meat, Poultry & Game chapter of English Food by Jane Grigson.

It was quite a big section – 21 recipes in all – and because the English have a rich history regarding pies and puddings, it covers quite a lot of ground. I found Jane’s choices really evocative of both history and regionality, both of which have declined over this – and the last – century.

Of course meat pies have a chequered past, and factory-made ones with their homogenous pink insides, or their non-specific minced meats, have sadly become the norm for us Brits; but once every home had their own repertoire of meat pies and puddings, and perhaps popped into their butcher or grocer for special pies for special occasions. Jane pines for times past: ‘We were once known for our pork pies’, she says, ‘and other pies as well. Pies, like puddings, were a great English speciality. I suppose that the reason for our modern failure is that our butchery trade was not stiffened by the same legal props and alliances: with the increasing demand for cheap food, cheapness rather than quality, all professional skill has gone.’ They were so prized that folk owned special leather pie cases used for storing and protecting pies over long journeys. Jane also blames modern farming methods that have left us with pork that’s ‘had the succulence bred out of it.’

The historical ground she covers is amazing: and the English medieval raised pie receives plenty of deserved attention. There are the celebration pies of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and includes Hannah Glasse’s #322 To Make a Goose Pye and #445 To Make a Yorkshire Christmas Pye. From medieval to Tudor times when pastry is a more delicate and pies are made from shortcrust pastry we have the classic #70 Cornish Pasty, designed to be held and tough enough to slip into a worker’s pocket to survive a morning’s work. Then, as we move into the Stuart era, pastry get even more rich and ‘puff pastes’ begin to appear, perhaps to top your #43 English Game Pie. All types are in there, and I have to say I have come quite adept at almost every aspect of pie and pastry-making, right down to the #283 Jellied Stock.

Jane had her own thoughts on pastry, bringing up ‘the question of taste and discretion. If you make a Cornish pasty for a miner…the pastry has to be very thick, or the whole thing will spoil. If you are making mince pes for the end of as large meal, you will need to roll the pastry thinner than if they are destined to fill up hungry young carol singers.’ Therefore she gives little information on how much pastry required, or indeed how to make it – something one would not get away with today. She says: ‘This is the kind of cooking accommodation we rapidly become used to. Therefore…only the type of pastry will be indicated, not its weight.’ I must admit I agree; after you’ve made a couple using your own dishes, you do get an instinct for how much you may need.

I have to say I got so much pleasure from cooking these recipes, especially the raised pies. Indeed it was making these pies in the US in my science days, and seeing how well they went down with folk who do not have them as part of their food culture, stirred up thoughts of starting my own food business. Years later I would become known for my pies making them in their hundreds for the restaurant. I have much to thank Jane for.

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There are many recipes that are not included in the chapter, but I suppose Jane had to stop somewhere, there being thousands of pie and pudding recipes. But some omissions are glaring: my main issue being the lack of puddings – one recipe in the whole section! If there is anything more English than a meat pie, then it is meat pudding. To be fair the one she does include – #200 Steak, Kidney & Oyster Pudding – is the classic, but I would have added maybe minted lamb, oxtail and plough pudding at the very least. Her niche, regional pies were interesting, but not always a success. If I were to write a pie chapter I would certainly add beef & potato, minced beef & onion and a proper pigeon pie of old: pigeon, beefsteak and bacon baked in a double layer of suet and shortcrust pastry.

There were some very, very good recipes: #43 English Game Pie (hot, with puff pastry) and #369 Game, Chicken or Rabbit Pie (cold, with hot water pastry)both scored full marks, and the excellent potato-topped #416 Cumbrian Tatie Pot narrowly missed out with a score of 9.5/10. Then, #320 Steak, Kidney and Oyster Pie and its pudding equivalent (#200) both scored 9/10.

I have to give a special mention to the showstopping pyes from Hannah Glasse: #445 To Make a Yorkshire Christmas Pye being possibly the craziest thing I’ve ever made in my life.

#156 Cheshire Pork and Apple Pie was the only disappointing one really.

Time for the stats: there were 21 recipes, but I only counted 18: #282 Raised Pies and #283 Jellied Stock being constituents of other recipes, and the Christmas pye which I never got to eat.

The section scored a mean of 8.11/10, the second-highest score so far (9.1 Stuffings being the highest). It has a median and mode of 8 – high, but others have been higher measured this way.

As usual, I have listed the recipes below in the order they appear in the book with links to my posts and their individual scores, so have a gander. It is worth pointing out, that my posts are no substitute for Jane’s wonderful writing, so if you don’t own a copy of English Food, I suggest you get yourself one.

#70 Cornish Pasty 8/10

#320 Steak, Kidney and Oyster Pie 9/10

#129 Dartmouth Pie 7.5/10

#233 Devonshire Squab Pie 6/10

#416 Cumbrian Tatie Pot 9.5/10

#388 Sweet Lamb Pie from Westmorland 8/10

#156 Cheshire Pork and Apple Pie 5/10

#303 Cornish Charter Pie 8.5/10

#209 Chicken and Leek Pie from Wales 7/10

#324 Rabbit Pie 8/10

#43 English Game Pie 10/10

#214 Venison (or Game) Pie or Pasty 7.5/10

#282 Raised Pies n/a

#283 Jellied Stock n/a

#312 Pork Pie Filling 8/10

#284 Veal, Ham and Egg Pie 8.5/10

#403 Raised Mutton Pies 8/10

#369 Game, Chicken or Rabbit Pie 10/10

#445 To Make a Yorkshire Christmas Pye (Part 1 & Part 2) ?/10

#322 To Make a Goose Pye 8.5/10

#200 Steak, Kidney and Oyster Pudding 9/10

#445 To Make a Yorkshire Christmas Pye: Part 2

And so here we have my interpretation of Hannah Glasse’s Yorkshire Christmas Pye I made for the Channel 5 show Our Victorian Christmas (click here for part 1: history) Before I go on though, I found that the Christmas pye sequence had to be cut out for time – the show having to be cut down last minute to just one episode of an hour’s length. Boo!

I am still in the episode though: I also made Wassail and did a few to-camera bits about Victorian Christmas food. It’s on Channel 5, 9pm, 22 December (I’ll post a link when one becomes available).

Ingredients:

1 turkey

1 goose

1 chicken

1 partridge

1 woodpigeon

2.5 kg salted butter

1 hare

A selection of oven-ready small game e.g. woodcock, grouse, teal, snipe

2 eggs

Spice mix:

15 g each ground mace, nutmeg and black pepper

8 g ground cloves

50 g salt

Hot water pastry. Approximately 15 batches of the following:

500 g plain flour

500 g strong white bread flour

1 tsp salt

350 g lard

350 ml boiling water

First make the hot water pastry: mix the flours and salt in a bowl, then place lard and boiling water in a saucepan, put on a low heat and let the lard melt – don’t let it boil as it might erupt, so be careful. As soon as the lard has melted, make a well in the centre and pour in the water and fat. Mix with a wooden spoon to make a dough. As soon as it is cool enough to handle, knead slightly. Cover and cool. This can be done a couple of days in advance – simply store in the fridge.

Using a very sharp knife and poultry shears bone the turkey, goose, chicken, partridge and woodpigeon. Begin by cutting out the birds’ spines with the shears, then cut away from the carcass. Don’t worry about keeping the drumstick or even thigh meat of the partridge or wood pigeon.

Lay out the birds cut side up, then make the spice mix by mixing together the ingredients and scatter it over the birds. Now wrap the partridge around the woodpigeon, so that the pigeon fills the cavity inside the partridge, making the partridge look whole. Wrap the chicken around the two birds and so on until you have what looks like a whole goose, albeit a somewhat gory one. Refrigerate.

Now make the base of the pie. Line a large baking tray with greaseproof paper. Knead together two or three batches of pastry and roll out, making sure you flour your worktop. The pastry needs to be 5 or 6 cm thick. To get dimensions, use the whole goose as a template: it needs to fit inside snugly and there needs to be a border wide enough to build up a 5 to 6 cm thick wall. I built up the sides by rolling thick bricks of pastry and glued them on by cross-hatching the pastry and brushing with water. Then I smoothed the pastry. I needed a final height of around 30 cm. If possible, refrigerate to firm up the pastry.

Sir the 5 birds in the pie, then joint the hare (ask your butcher to do this) and tuck in pieces, along with your small game: I used 2 grouse and 2 teal, but snipe and woodcock would also work. Scatter over any remaining spice mix and then pile on large cubes of salted butter, tucking it inside and between the game.

Roll a lid with more pastry, cut a large steam hole and place on top of the pie. Decorate with a pastry rose and leaves. Glaze with egg wash.

If you can allow the pastry to firm up in the fridge or somewhere cool. Preheat the oven to 230°C.

It needed two people to get the pie safely in the oven. It’s important to have a high heat at first, so the pastry can seal up. My pie started to collapse as the front and leak butter because the heat couldn’t get round. (I found out later that that was prevented by tying card or metal around the pie, rather like a corset, keeping things from oozing out.)

It took 8 hours to cook the meat inside to a safe temperature – a meat thermometer should read 74°C. The pastry will be very black by this point – remember it isn’t for eating, it is for protection.

We let it cool for a little while, packed it up and drove to a local restaurant so we could place it their walk-in fridge. The next morning it was whisked away – not by coach or train, but by car.

#445 To Make a Yorkshire Christmas Pye. A recipe I really thought I would ever cook, and what an experience! In all it took me 5 days (on and off) to make the pie. When it started to collapse in the oven I thought all was lost, but when we took it out of the oven, I saw the side closest to the back of the oven was absolutely fine. I just wish I could have tried some of the contents: the poor old bits of game on the top got a bit blackened, but the 5 birds together looked well protected. I don’t know how it turned out, and I can’t seem to get a photo of the contents. I am going to attempt this again one day, but I shall use a different recipe. My score? It’ll have to be a ?/10!

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#414 Oldbury Gooseberry Tarts

The summer fruit season is pretty much done and dusted now, with just autumn raspberries and wild blackberries hanging around, but back in June at the very beginning of the season, I made these little gooseberry ‘tarts’. I’m using ‘inverted commas’ there because they are not tarts, they are pies.

In their simplest form, Oldbury fruit tarts are hand-raised pies made from a hot-water pastry, filled with fruit and sugar and then baked. The pies, according to two of Jane’s correspondents, had links with Oldbury in Gloucestershire, and would be made by families as soon as soft fruits began to appear. In the latter half of the 19^th century (and I’m sure much earlier than that too) the pies were ‘sold at fairs at a penny each’.

Below is the recipe and my review of the tarts, but it’s worth pointing out that sometimes these Oldbury pies would be made just like normal raised pies, but instead for being filled with jellied stock as you would a pork pie, it is filled with fruit jelly preserve instead. This sounds so delicious and I may have a go at these more complex ones. I like the idea of a slice of fruit pie with jelly and some good cheese (Gloucester, of course) to round off a meal.

The hot water pastry for these pies is different to Jane’s recipe for her savoury (#282) Raised Pies in that there is both lard and butter here but no egg or icing sugar (which give crispness and an appetising brown colour to the cooked pastry). However, the method is essentially the same:

First cube 4 ounces each of butter and lard and pour over them 5 tablespoons of boiling water. Stir around until the fats have melted. Put a pound of plain flour in a bowl, make a well in the centre and tip in the warm liquid mixture. Using a wooden spoon, and then your hands, form a dough.

At this point, I kneaded the dough until smooth – Jane says it should have ‘a waxy look’ – then popped it back in the bowl, covered it with cling film and left it to rest for a bit until it felt like it could be rolled and moulded successfully.

I found that the dough made six tarts using Jane’s method of thinly rolling out batches into circles and, then using a saucer as a template to cut out perfect shapes. I kept the trimmings for the lids.

Here’s the tricky bit: now mould the edges of each pastry circle to a height of about an inch so that they form cases – or in old English coffyns. This was a bit of a nightmare; you need a good cool stiff dough to do this, and if possible, three hands.

Now you can tumble in your topped and tailed gooseberries (about 8 ounces altogether) and a good amount of Demerara sugar (at least an ounce per tart, I’d say, but use your discretion). Roll out the lids, make a hole in the centre, and glue them in place with a brush and water, making sure you crimp the edges. Now leave the pastry to harden, this is a matter of a couple of hours in the fridge, but if leaving them in a cool larder, it’ll require an overnight wait.

Bake the ‘tarts’ for around 25-30 minutes at 200⁰C. Because of a lack of either egg , icing sugar or glaze, the pastry doesn’t turn a nice golden brown, but if the filling is happily bubbling away within, you can be pretty sure they are ready.

I served them warm with some pouring cream.

#414 Oldbury Gooseberry Tarts. Well these were not really worth the effort as the pastry was pretty disappointing in both taste and texture. Gooseberries in any form are good of course, so I did eat them. I’m looking forward to trying to make a larger pie filled with fruit jelly – that hasto be delicious. 4/10.

#402 Blaeberry or Blackcurrant Pie

Wild blaeberries (from berryworks.com)

The flitterin faces come doun the brae

And the baskets gowd and green;

And nane but a blindie wud speer the day

Whaur a’ the bairns hae been.

The lift is blue, and the hills are blue,

And the lochan in atween;

But nane sae blue as the blaeberry mou’

That needna tell whaur it’s been.

Blaeberry Mou,
William Soutar

Here’s recipe from English Food that I have found extremely difficult to cook; blaeberries and blackcurrants simply don’t crop up in greengrocers. Almost all of the blackcurrants grown in this country are snatched up and turned into Ribena, the leftovers being very expensive, assuming you can track them down. Blaeberries are not commercially grown and therefore you have to rely on happening upon bushes – many bushes; you’ll need between 1 ½ and pounds for this recipe!

But then I came across some huge punnets of them at a greengrocer called Elloits in Chorlton, Manchester. I couldn’t believe my luck so I bought a couple and skipped away clutching my precious bounty back home.

So – and I know you are quite likely to be thinking this – what the heck are blaeberries!? They have many aliases: tayberries, bilberries, whortleberries, whimberries, wild blueberries….the list goes on. Blaeberries are very commonly found in the very north of England, Scotland and Ireland. They are quite popular in France – where they are called myrtles – and are generally used to make liqueurs.

Jane Grigson tells us of a rather disturbing song she used to sing at school as a child where a young mother is left distraught when her baby is stolen by faeries whilst she picks blaeberries:

I went to gather blaeberries, blaeberries, blaeberries,

I went to gather blaeberries, and left my darling baby-O.

I found the track of the swan in the mist,

The swan in the mist, the swan in the mist,

I found the track of the swan in the mist,

But ne’er a trace of my baby-O.

So the blaeberry is steeped in the history of the northern climes of the British Isles, but people are trying to get this wild, rather niche, delicacy cultivated and into our shops. Susan McCallum of the Hutton Institute is asking for people to keep an eye out for blaeberry hotspots so that the most productive plants can be bred. This is because they match the American blueberry for their health benefits, and sales of blueberries are on the increase. Here’s the post all about the project.

In this recipe, Jane says we can use blaeberries or blackcurrants in this recipe; I assume because they are both found in Britain, but I think that you should use blueberries as alternative fruit because their flavour is so very close to that of the blaeberry. Jane also uses the Yorkshire trick of spiking the tart with some freshly chopped mint.

Pick over 1 ½ to 2 pounds of fresh blaeberries or blackcurrants, removing leaves and stalks. Weigh out 8 ounces of caster sugar and mix it with a heaped tablespoon of cornflour and a level tablespoon of chopped mint leaves. Layer the fruit and sugar mixture alternately in a pie dish, making sure the fruit is humps up in the centre and cover with some sweet shortcrust pastry. Brush the pie with water or egg whiteand sprinkle more sugar on top. Bake at 220⁰C for 15 minutes, and then turn the heat down to 190⁰C and bake for a further 20-30 minutes. Serve with cream.

It’s worth mentioning that it can be made as a double crust pie too.

#402 Blaeberry or Blackcurrant Pie. I decided to make this pie for one of my Pud Clubs, and not only did it go down very well, but won – pitched against six other puds! It was so delicious; a deep jammy and tart filling that was so intensely flavoured it was almost a shock, and the aromatic mint took it to another level. This might be up for the award of best pud in English Food! 10/10

#390 Isle of Man Herring Pie

I’ve been putting this one off for ages because it starts with the sentence: “A very similar recipe to the [#133] Welsh Supper Herrings”. These were not good; pappy fishy cat food mush and raw potatoes. However, that was 5 years ago (5 YEARS!) and I like to think of myself as a better cook now than in those naïve days.

This recipe comes from a Mrs Suzanne Woolley who ran a restaurant called Mheillea(‘Harvest Man’) on the Isle of Man. Normally herrings would have been cooked with potatoes as in Wales, but she decided to make a pie of them. Aside from that, it’s pretty much the same as the Welsh Supper Herrings. This did not bode well.

Mrs Woolley’s book – still avaialable!

First of all you need to make or buy some shortcrust pastry, large enough to line and lid a baking dish large enough to hold the ingredients of the pie. A small lasagne-style dish would be appropriate. Line the dish and keep it in the fridge. Reserve the pastry for the lid in the fridge too.

Next, prepare 6 herrings. You need to scale, gut and bone them. Or ask your fishmonger to do it. Boning herring is actually a pretty straight-forward job, as you need no filleting skills whatsoever. I can’t put it better than Jane herself:

Cut off heads, fins and tails and bone them: to do this, put the herring on a board, backbone up, spreading out the slit sides of the belly. Press gently along the backbone from neck to tail, until you feel the bone giving. Turn the herring over, and you will find you can pick out the backbone complete with most of the whiskery bones still attached (separate bones can be pulled out).

It’s worth mentioning that you need really fresh firm herrings for this. If they’re just a few days’ old, they will have started to go mushy, and the procedure described by Jane above will be most unsuccessful.

Next, season them on both sides with salt, black pepper and ground mace (about ½ a teaspoon should do it). Spread some softened butter over the base of the pie and arrange the herrings on top. Peel, core and slice 3 good-sized cooking apples and thinly slice 2 medium onions. Put the apple on next to forma layer, then the onions. Place dots of butter over the top, season again with salt and pepper, then sprinkle over 4 tablespoons of water.

Roll out the remainder of the pastry, sealing the pie with some beaten eggor cream. Make a hole in the middle of the pie so that steam can escape and brush the lid with your egg or cream.

Bake at 180-190⁰C for 40 minutes or so. “Check after 30 minutes”, says Grigson, “by pushing a larding needle or skewer through the central hole of the lid, so that it pierces the herring; you should be able to feel whether the herrings are cooked by the way the needle or skewer goes in.”

And there you have it. I assume the pie was supposed to be a self-contained meal, maybe a suitable salad could be served alongside it.

#390 Isle of Man Herring Pie. Well I have to say I’ve not had a really terrible recipe from English Food in quite a while, so I was well overdue. The herring just did not go with the apples at all; it would at least have ben palatable as an apple and onion pie. I cannot see how this recipe made it into any cookbook! Really bad. Went straight in the bin. 1/10.

#388 Sweet Lamb Pie from Westmorland

Happy New Year Grigsoners!

There are no Christmas recipes in English Food left to cook, but this one is close, being a cross between a savoury lamb pie and a sweet mince pie. It’s a recipe that has no introduction from Jane Grigson, though I feel it should, as it is pretty strange-sounding: a pie with a minced lamb, dried fruit and apple filling. Though it hails from Westmorland (a now defunct northern English county now made up of bits of Cumberland, Lancashire and Yorkshire), it seems to me to be a very typical pie baked during the medieval period, where it was very common to cook meat with lots of dried fruit and spices.

The Westmorland Coat of Arms

Why was this done? After all it seems to be an odd combination. Many people say that it is because heavy use of fruit and spices masked the taste of rancid and rotten meat. This, however, is a total myth; the reason meat was combined with spice, dried fruit and sugar was because all of these ingredients were extremely expensive. It was all showing off. They are – in my past experience – also a good combination: previous recipes like #87 Mrs Beeton’s Traditional Mincemeatand #328 Salmon in Pastry, with a Herb Saucefollow the same principle.

By the time of the Victorian era, none of these ingredients were particularly expensive, and this sort of food fell from favour, the only surviving remnant being the now totally meat-free mince pie.

This pie is known as a ‘plate pie’, which is still commonly made in Northern England. It is simply a pie made, not in a tin, but on a plate. The plates can be of typical (ovenproof!) ceramic or formed from enamel. Whichever you use, make sure it is deepish. My Mum still makes both sweet and savoury plate pies.

To make the pie, start with the filling. Mince together 6 ounces of lean, boned lamb with 3 ounces of lamb fat(you can the butcher for fat trimmings or keep your own and freeze them until you have accrued enough). Mix these together along with 6 ounces of apples, any will do, but I used tart Bramleys, 4 ounces each of currants, raisins and sultanas, 2 ounces of candied peel, the juice of one orange and half a lemon, 2 ounces of blanched, slivered almonds, 4 tablespoons of rum, a good pinch of salt, freshly ground black pepper, half a teaspoon each of mace and cinnamon and a quarter of a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg. Phew.

Once well-mixed, give it a little taste and add more seasoning and spices if you wish.

Next, roll out enough shortcrust pastry and line the plate with it. Scatter over the filling and cover with more pastry, sealing the edges with beaten egg or water. Trim the edges and crimp, before glazing with beaten egg in the usual way.

Bake at 200⁰C for around 30 minutes.

Jane says that any remaining filling can be used to make small mince pies. I think I went one better however, and made sweet lamb Eccles cakes, which were such a success they ended up on my last Pop-Up Restaurant’s menu.

#388 Sweet Lamb Pie from Westmorland. I spotted this pie quite early, thinking it must be awful. Today I feel Jane Grigson has taught me well and I now knew this would be good. When you bite into it, you get the taste and aroma of lamb – so you know it is there – but the fruit and spice compliment it very well. There is no added sugar and the apples are still tart, so it is not sickly like a Christmas mince pie. Is it sweet? Is it savoury? It does not matter; these sorts of recipes are the crowning glory of English Food. Really lovely, go and make one. 8/10.

#384 Quick, Foolproof Puff or Flaky Pastry

Fool-proof? I’ll be the judge of that, Ms Grigson.

This is a recipe I have been putting off for ages; I have become pretty good at shortcrust pastries as well as hot-water pastry, but the rigmarole and potential disaster of a flaky pastry has always filled me with an inner dread. However, now that I am a half a fully-fledged patissier, and chock-full of confidence, I thought now is the time to give it a go.

I really should have looked at the recipe a little closer, because it is actually a rough-puff pastry as opposed to the true pâte feuilletée that can be made up of up to 1500 layers of pastry and fat. I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t the proper stuff, but then one shouldn’t run before one can walk, so perhaps a rough puff would be a happy stepping stone that will one day lead to the dizzying heights of the full puff.

This recipe was devised by, and then given to Jane Grigson, pastry chef Nicholas Malgieri who then worked ‘at Peter Frump’s famous New York cookery school’, and has now created an empire of his own. Like all rough puff pastes, it is best used for tarts, feuilletées or patisserie such as the good-old custard slice. To avoid bitter disappointment, don’t go trying to use them for something that requires a high rise, like a vol-au-vent (does anyone actually eat those anymore…?).

My good friend Charlotte came over to give me a hand, should I need it, though really I think she came to eat the dessert it would be used to make, which is fair enough. She did take some great photos for me though, so cheers Char.

It is important to buy good quality butter when making puff pastes, so don’t go using Tesco Value, instead go for a nice French or Danish one. Jane prefers French, I’d just say go for the best you can afford. This method satisfyingly uses a whole 250g block of butter, which is 8 ½ ounces in old money, which explains the seemingly strange weights used:

Start by cutting up 8 ½ ounces of unsalted butter into cubes, then sieve 8 ½ ounces of strong flour into a bowl. Rub in one ounce of the butter into flour. Tip in the rest of the butter and ‘work lightly’. I took this to mean to make sure each cube is separate and squashed flat, ready for easier rolling later.

In a measuring jug, dissolve half a teaspoon of salt in 2 teaspoons of lemon juice, then top up to 4 fluid ounces with ice-cold water. Tip it in and quickly bring it all together; ‘it will look appalling, a raggy mess’, says Jane, and so it did.

Flour your work surface and manhandle your pastry lump into an approximate 4-by-8 inch rectangle. Flour the top generously and roll out to a 9-by-18 inch rectangle, using more flour to prevent sticking. Now do the first folds: fold the short ends into the centre, then fold the whole thing in half so that it looks like a book. Turn the ‘spine’ one quarter turn to the left, roll out again, and make the very same folds. Turn, roll and fold one more time. If at any point the butter gets too warm and soft, pop it in the fridge to firm up.

Chill for an hour (or freeze it) and it is ready to use. I used mine to make a couple of things. First was a nice crisp apple tart, glazed with brown sugar and apricot jam, and second was a nice pile of Eccles cakes. Lovely.

#384 Quick, Foolproof Puff or Flaky Pastry. Well, I have to say it was quick, and it wasfool-proof. In fact, aside for the rolling out that required some degree of precision, I would say it is easier than a shortcrust for a beginner: rubbing in is minimal, it won’t be too dry and it won’t be over-worked. Why did I put this off for so long? It has already become part of my regular repertoire and I shall be using it in the amuse bouchefor my next pop up restaurant in November. Great stuff, delicious, crisp and rich 9.5/10.

#345 English Apricot Pie

Flowers and Apricots by Joseph Bidlingmeyer, 1850

I have been eyeing this recipe for a good while, but fresh apricots are so pricey I have always put it off. However, Soulard Farmers’ market came to save me from my apricot fast by selling them for just over a dollar a pound! They were delicious too.

The reason apricots are so expensive is manifold: they flower very early and suffer poorly from bad weather – they will die even if there’s a light frost or a high wind; they don’t take to grafting well; they are very particular about the soil they grow in, to the point where the amount of fertiliser dug into the soil needs to be calculated; they also do not travel well. They are delicate things and much prefer Eastern climbes as they originated in China, coming to Europe via India and the Middle East. It is for all these reasons that you usually find apricots dried rather than fresh.

As an aside, the reason the apricot doesn’t take to grafting is because they were mis-classified as a member of the plum family, Prunus, and were grafted onto other Prunus species, cherry is usually the grafters’ favourite. It is actually part of the rose family. Everyday’s a school day.

So what are the benefits of eating this temperamental and pricey fruit, other than that they are quite delicious? Well there is quite a long list of benefits to eating apricots. The 18th century French writer Bernard le Bovier Fontenelle, who was a member of the Royal Society, lived to 100 years old and the secret to his longevity was apricots, a tip he got from his grandma. ‘A royal fruit, she called it, saying that the scatterbrained folk of our days ought to make more use of it.’ Quite.

Fontenelle

As it happens, apricots are high in phosphorus and magnesium and can significantly increase mental ability. They are super-rich in beta-carotene (which gives the fruit its yellow colour); 4 ounces of apricots will give you 50% of your daily allowance. They are also good for the blood – they can even alleviate anaemia better than liver! They are also a significant source of fluoride. Amazing.

This pie was invented by the great chef Carême. He is very particular about the type of pie dish you should use; it must be very shallow, not much deeper than a plate.

Halve 1 ½ pounds of fresh apricots and take out the stones. Next, melt 2 ounces of unsalted butter in a frying pan and stir in 8 ounces of caster sugar; this might seem alot but they really do need it. Over a moderate heat stir the sugar into the butter. After a few minutes it should start to melt. Add the apricots and coat in the butter-sugar mixture. Stir for a minute or two – you don’t want to cook the fruit, just get the apricot halves well covered.

Pile the fruit and butter and sugar, which should be toffee-like at this point, into a shallow pie dish.

Roll out some puff pastry. Cut strips around half and inch a glue them around the edge of the plate with beaten egg so that the strips ‘extend partway down the dish itself. This will create a good seal, preventing the apricots from escaping. Brush the strips with egg and cover.

Use a fork to seal the pastry lid then make a central hole so that any steam generated during cooking can escape. Brush with more egg and sprinkle some more caster sugar. Start the pie off in a hot oven – 230°C (450°F) – for 15 to 20 minutes so that the pastry can turn golden brown, then continue cooking at a lower heat of 160-180°C (325-375°F) for 15 minutes. ‘Serve hot or warm with plenty of cream.’

Sorry about the terrible pic.

I’m normally drunk by dessert…

#345 English Apricot Pie. What a delicious fruit pie! It occurred to me whilst I was eating it that I have never eaten apricots this way. Well it certainly won’t be the last time I do it; the sugar and butter became a deliciously sweet sauce and the cooked apricots softened and turned very tart. That Carême chap knew what he was talking about.

#337 Eel Pie

This recipe puts me three-quarters of the way through the book! Who’d have thunk I’d still be ploughing through it!?

The fourth and final eel recipe from the book just in time for Good Friday, hopefully it will be better than the third which was a disaster…

Eel pies or pasties are a food that has a very long history in Britain. Sometimes they were just simply unskinned eels, herbs, spices and water covered with a ‘coffin’ of pastry, probably eaten as a stew rather like water-souchy; the pastry simply serving as a vessel within which to cook the fish. The earliest mention of eel pie I have found comes from an article by A. Peripatetic in a 19^th Century periodical called London Society:

East-Farleigh lies in the hundred of Maidston, and was given to the prior and monks of Christ-Church in Canterbury, by Ediva the Queen, mother of the two kings Eadred and Edmund in the year 941, and was…to find the convent with eel-pies.

Eels are associated the most with London and there is a great old proverb that I discovered is used in Shakespeare’s King Lear, which I can really relate to:

Lear: Oh me, my heart, my rising heart! but down.

Fool: Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels, when she put

Them i’the paste alive; she rapt ‘em o’the coxcombs with a stick,

And cry’d, Down, wantons, down!

In other words, she was so squeamish about killing the eels for her pie, she tried to bake them alive, making the whole situation worse and much more stressful than it would have been had she killed them. The first time I made eel I had to do away with them myself and it was pretty distressing (see here).

King Lear and Fool

I’m quite glad to have come to the end of the eel recipes to be honest because I was starting to feel rather guilty about eating a fish whose numbers have been in sharp decline. Anyways, if you do come across an eel for sale you may as well purchase it and turn it into a little piece of history as I did:

The first thing you need to make is the pastry – an unusual one using grated butter and cream that is somewhere between a flaky pastry and a shortcrust.

Place a block of butter in the freezer until it is well-chilled, but not frozen. Meanwhile measure out 6 ounces of flour and mix in a good pinch of salt. Next grate the butter over your kitchen scales until you have 3 ounces and add this to the flour.

Add enough cream – use either single or soured – or water to form a good soft dough, stirring in your liquid of choice at first with a knife then bringing it together with your hands. I noticed that the flour required more cream than it would have needed if using water. Cover and chill in the fridge for at least an hour. A note to Americans: Soured cream in the USA is far too thick as an option, so go for something like half-and-half or heavy cream.

Peel and finely chop four shallots and soften them slowly in butter in a wide shallow pan. When cooked, tip them into a shallow pie dish or plate with a capacity of around 2 pints.

Now prepare the eels, you need 1 ½ pounds altogether (if your eels are alive, have a gander at this post and also this one, for the good it’ll do you). The best way to skin them I have found is to cut around the base of the neck, then hold down the head firmly with a dry cloth and pull the skin off in one long piece with a pair of pliers like a slender stocking. Trim the thin ends of the tails and add them to a pan along with the heads to 18 fluid ounces of chicken or fish stock, and simmer them together for around 20 minutes. In the meantime cut the eels into one inch pieces.

Coat the eel pieces in seasoned flour and fry them, in batches if necessary, browning them well. Add more butter if need be. Scatter the eel pieces over the shallots and deglaze the pan with the eel-flavoured stock, and reduce it by about a half, then add 2 tablespoons of medium dry sherry and 5 fluid ounces of double cream. Boil for 2 more minutes before adding ½ teaspoon of thyme and 3 tablespoons of chopped parsley. Season with salt, pepper and lemon juice. Add a further tablespoon of sherry if you fancy. Pour the sauce over the eels and allow the whole thing to cool.

Peel and slice two hardboiled eggs and scatter them over the eel, then roll out your pastry, gluing it to the rim of the dish with some more cream. Add a hole or a slit for the steam to escape and decorate with the trimmings – I went with a very complex eel motif of my own design. Glaze with cream and bake at 220⁰C (425⁰F) until the pastry has turned an appetising shade of brown – around 10 or 15 minutes, then turn down the heat to 180⁰ (350⁰F) for 20 minutes.

Grigson suggests serving the pie with peas or a chicory salad, though I just went with a mixed salad.

#337 Eel Pie. A very good recipe this one – especially if you are a newcomer to eel. The sauce was nice rich, and the eel tender. The good thing about eel is that it has a very simple anatomy so the bones are fairly easy to find and remove. The sauce was a little too thick and overpowered the delicately-flavoured eel a bit. It deserves a healthy 6.5/10.

#325 Rabbit Pie

A British classic. It is rather difficult to say how far back the rabbit pie goes – as far back as pies themselves go, I would imagine. The rabbit pie is the archetypal hunter’s family meal and is certainly a cheap – or free – way of getting some good protein in you. These days of course people tend to get their rabbits from the butcher, including myself, but rabbit is getting popular again now that people are trying to cut back on their spending. I wonder if more people have taken up owning an air rifle to hunt their own. The idea strangely appeals. It is worth considering: rabbits are a pest and do not have a hunting season. The reason they are a pest is because they are an introduced species, just like the pesky grey squirrel, only these little blighters came not from America, but from France. The French have kept rabbit farms for a long time and so after William the Bastard/Conqueror came over with his Norman pals to take the English Crown, the later Plantagenet kings brought their farms over. The rabbits escaped and bred like billy-o and we have been stuck with them since.

Still Life with Rabbits, a Game Bag and a Powder Horn

by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, c1755

What is strange is that the French did (and still do) love farmed rabbit and prefer it over wild. Griggers – in all her rabbit recipes – specifies that it must be wild; “[d]omestic rabbit by contrast is as insipid as a battery chicken, even nasty in texture and taste.”

Rabbits were very popular in Northern England as a pie filling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and an alternative meat for a steak and oyster pie – back in the day when oysters were poor people’s food.

If you see a wild rabbit in the butcher’s shop try one – it’s cheaper than a chicken and is truly free-range and organic to boot!

Rabbit – like all game – is very lean so it needs a little helping hand with some additional fat, in this case streaky bacon which also helps the meat go a bit further. Forcemeat balls are often added to dishes like this – something stodgy that again increases bulk. I’m a big fan of forcemeat balls, so I was glad to see them appear in this recipe. Last and by no means least is the herb thyme which is essential in any rabbit dish. Don’t scrimp on it. Because it is used quite liberally, use fresh thyme.

This rabbit pie is the last in a trio of game recipes I cooked whilst I was in England over Christmas. It serves 6 to 8 people.
First of all joint a wild rabbit (or ask your butcher to do it) and soak it in salty cold water for around 1 ½ hours.

I am not quite sure why one needs to do this step. Perhaps it reduces the amount of water in the rabbit by osmosis for some reason? If you know, leave a comment, I’d be most grateful. Drain the rabbit and place it in a saucepan. Pour enough fresh water to cover the beast, bring the water to a boil and let it simmer for 3 or 4 minutes. Drain and dry it.

Roll the rabbit pieces in some seasoned flour and brown it in butter, lard, bacon fat or dripping in a large, deep sauté pan then fry a large chopped onion and 5 or 6 ounces of streaky bacon or salt pork. When lightly browned, add the grated rind of a lemon, a heaped tablespoon of parsley and four good sprigs of thyme.

Add enough light beef or veal stock to just cover. Cover and simmer until the rabbit is cooked. Jane doesn’t give a time here, but it will depend upon the age of the rabbit. Mine took about 1 ½ hours. To test it, I just sampled a bit of leg meat. Let the mixture cool and bone the rabbit if you want; I did because little ones were eating it.

Now the pie needs to be made. Place the mixture in a pie dish, piling it in the middle and scatter forcemeat balls around it (look here for the recipe). If you have a rather broad or long pie dish, it may be worth placing a pie funnel in the centre – I didn’t have one and the pie sank a little.

To cover the pie, roll out some shortcrust or puff pastry. Cut strips from the pastry and use it to line the rim of the dish, gluing it in place with some beaten egg. Next, cover the pie and trim any excess pastry and use it to decorate the top. Glaze with beaten egg.

My niece and nephew, Emma and Harry, expertly decorate the pie

Bake at 220⁰C (425⁰F) for 20-30 minutes and then turn the heat down to 160⁰C (325⁰F) for another 30 minutes. As usual, protect the pastry with some brown paper should it colour too much.

The best picture of the pie I could get –

it got gobbled up pretty fast!

#325 Rabbit Pie. I am on a roll with the pies at the moment because this was another excellent one. The rabbit was very tender and not too rank tasting as the previous rabbit had been. I suppose it is the risk one takes with game. The very lean rabbit was ‘fattened’ up excellently with all the streaky bacon it was fried with. Plus it was complemented perfectly by the fresh thyme and the lemon zest. Really good – now that wild rabbit is getting more common meat in Britain’s butcher shops, there’s no excuse in giving it a try. 8/10