Yorkshire Christmas Pie

A boned fowl inside a goose, walled in with pigeon, partridge and hare. One collapsed under its own weight.

From: Kettner's Book of the Table
Published: 1877
Yikes Scale: Iffy

Exactly as printed, 1877

Yorkshire has won so much glory by reason of its pudding, that it has some claim to our attention when it offers us a pie. What is sold in the Italian warehouse under this name is but a galantine packed in terrines of different sizes. The true Yorkshire pie is made as follows, and is one of the most noble features of an English Christmas: -Bone a goose and a large fowl. Fill the latter with a stuffing made of minced ham or tongue, veal, suet, parsley, pepper, salt, and two eggs; or for a more highly-seasoned stuffing say-minced ham, veal, suet, onion, sweet-herbs, lemon-peel, mixed spices, cayenne, salt, worked into a paste with a couple of eggs. Sew up the fowl, truss it, and stew it for twenty minutes along with the goose in some good stock, and in a close stewpan. Put the fowl within the goose, and place the goose in a pie-mould which has been lined with good hot-water paste. Let the goose repose on a cushion of stuffing, and in the midst of the liquor in which he has been stewed. Surround him in the pie with slices of parboiled tongue and pieces of pigeon, partridge, or hare. Fill the vacancies with more stuffing; put on a good layer of butter; roof it with paste; bake it for three hours; and consume it either hot or cold. These pies are sometimes made of enormous size, containing every variety of poultry and game, one within another and side by side. A Christmas pie of this kind, going from Sheffied in 1832 as a tribute to the then Yorkshire Pudding Lord Chancellor Brougham, broke down by reason of its weight.

This pie reminds one of what Alexandre Dumas regarded as his culinary triumph-the Monte Christo anchovy. Put the anchovy into an olive, the olive into a lark, the lark into a quail, the quail into a pheasant, the pheasant into a turkey, the turkey into a sucking-pig. Roast it for three hours. Then peel off layer after layer, throwing all out of the window, -save the anchovy, for which everything is to be sacrificed.

Kettner's Book of the Table, 1877. Public domain; transcription unaltered.

So what happens if I make it?

Entirely safe and entirely mad. It is a raised pie, and the technique — hot-water crust, boned birds nested by size — is real and still practised by people who like a challenge.

The engineering is the risk. A crust has to hold several pounds of boned poultry and game, and Kettner records one that did not.

Notes from the 21st century

Hot-water paste is a structural material. Flour, lard and boiling water, worked warm and made stiff enough to stand on its own. It is closer to modelling than to pastry.
Kettner gives no oven temperature. As was usual. For a pie this size, a hot start around 425°F for twenty to thirty minutes, then a long drop to finish.
The Monte Christo is on the same page. Anchovy in olive in lark in quail in pheasant in turkey in sucking-pig, attributed to Dumas. Roast three hours.

Also in this book

Blancmanger (Carême's receipt) — A pound of sweet almonds and twenty bitter ones, pounded raw into an uncooked jelly.
Haggis, the Edinburgh prize receipt (Meg Dods) — Let the windpipe hang over the side of the pot so the lungs can disgorge.
Lemon Custard with cherry-laurel — A leaf of cherry laurel boiled in the cream — and, in the same entry, the note that it is poisonous.

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