Members' Week 2022 recipes: A great pie
You will need
Serves 10
Enriched shortcrust pastry
- 500g (1 lb) flour
- 200g (7oz) butter
- 2 tsp salt
- 2 whole eggs
- 2 tbsp ice cold water
Crumb the flour, butter and salt. Mix the eggs with the water. Add the liquid to the flour mix and blend to form a stiff pastry which comes together and isn’t sticky. Add a little more chilled water if required. Form it into a rough rectangle and chill for at least 30 minutes.
(Note: our pastry used a mixture of stoneground wholemeal, plain and a little rye to replicate medieval landraces, but you don’t have to be this nerdy)
Forcemeat
- 750g (1 ½ lb) of mixed minced meats (the original recipe uses beef mixed with pork, veal or venison: we used venison and pork sausage meat)
- 2-3 tbsp red wine vinegar
- a large handful each of currants and chopped dates
- ½ tsp each of ground pepper, cinnamon, ginger and salt
- ¼ tsp of ground cloves, mace
- A little ground saffron
Mix all of the above together. Go easy on the spices if you aren’t certain if you’ll like them.
Filling
- 4 chicken breasts
- ½ tsp ground saffron
- 4 hard-boiled egg yolks
- ¼ tsp each of ground mace, cloves and black pepper (cubeb pepper is even better if you can get it)
- 1-2 more handfuls of chopped dates
Glaze
- 1 whole egg, beaten well with a pinch of salt
Method
Butter a 21cm round springform cake tin or 25cm x 10cm rectangular pie mould really well.
Remove your pastry from the fridge, cut off about a third (enough to form a lid later) and set aside. Form the pastry into a rough bowl (if using a round tin) or box (if rectangular). Place it in the cake tin, and use your hands to gently push the pastry out and up to line the tin fully, with no tears. Allow at least a 4cm overhang. Trim.
You can also line the tin more conventionally, by rolling the pastry and fitting it to the tin, but using this historic method means the pastry is less likely to spring a leak.
Line the bottom and sides of the pastry using the forcemeat.
Dice the chicken and mix it with the saffron. Put this into the pie, then add the spices and a layer of crumbled egg yolks, along with the dates. Moisten with a little water.
Fold the edges of the pastry back over the filling, pinching them to form a sharp edge.
Roll out the reserved pastry to make the lid: trim it to fit, moisten the edges and put the lid on. Crimp or pinch it together to seal.
Make a vent by cutting a hole in the lid and either use pastry offcuts to make a pastry chimney, use a roll of foil, or a large piping nozzle to alleviate overflow (boil out).
Decorate the top with your family crest made from pastry (other decorative schemes are also available). Glaze with egg wash. Chill. Glaze again.
Bake for around 3 hours at 150C, checking the temperature with a probe thermometer inserted down the air hole to ensure it reaches 75C.
Remove from the oven and chill. Serve cold. (You can also serve this hot).
This recipe was drawn mainly from Harleian 4016 (see Austin, Thomas.(1888) Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books) with additional tweaks taken from various other 14th and 15th century sources.
