A “Hog Meat Pie” From 1734

Meat pies are not common in the U S today. Just generally, especially not here in Indiana or in Kentucky or in Ohio, the areas that I grew up in, it was a concept that was very foreign to me until I started looking at recipes from this time period. Now, if you grew up in Europe or Africa, or plenty of other places in the world, you probably grew up eating meat pies and maybe that was something that you had even weekly. It was something that you had daily. I know that there are folks in the comment section that I noticed when I was kind of researching that have said they came here from Europe. They came here from Africa, some other place and they were disappointed because the lack of meat pies. And so they make them themselves so they can enjoy them, but they miss being able to just go find them ready-made, buy them and eat them. This recipe really got me thinking about the size of our world. And a lot of times we say it's a small world because we'll bump into somebody at the grocery store or we ended up knowing somebody's second cousin, but really it's vast. It's so vast. And I was reading this recipe thinking, I don't know anything like this. Like I've never eaten anything like this. And then I started searching online and doing some research and I find out that in London and England and the UK people probably grow up eating this all the time. This is a very common thing. And I think that we can do that a lot of times we can say, well, it's a strange thing to me. That means it's a strange thing. But if we do that now, just think about how much we do that when we're thinking about history as well. I don't want to assume anything. I don't want to put words in the mouths of people that lived hundreds of years ago. I want to learn from them. And so I've got to be really careful when I'm going through and I'm reading things. I can't just read one occurrence of something happening and assume that that was a rule for everybody that lived 300 years ago. And a lot of times I think as living historians, we can be guilty of that. So this whole thing, this whole idea, this channel, Townsend's as a retail company, the whole thing is about understanding history. We cook to understand history. We sew to understand history and we wear the clothing so that we know what that feels like. Something that I need to research more of. Maybe some folks out there have already done the research. You could throw it in the comment section, but I'm not sure how popular meat pies were in the U S overall. And you know, you see references, but there were so many different cultures coming over here and they were making kind of their own little areas throughout that I'm not sure if it was something that just went all along the Eastern seaboard. You find meat pies everywhere or if they were just in little pockets. So that's kind of the next thing that I'm going to look into when I'm researching. Unfortunately, I don't have it ready for this video, but if you guys know, go ahead and comment. I'd love to hear it. The recipe that we're making today is called a hog's meat pie and it was really confusing. It was really confusing. It's out of the collection of above 300 recipes, a book by Kettleby. And I'm pretty sure this particular recipe comes from the version that came out in the 1730s, although there were earlier versions of that book, but there was so much going on in it and stuff that I've never read before, stuff that I'd never seen before in very complicated steps to do something pretty easy. So I went looking for other recipes in the time period just to see if I could find something that would help shed some light on it, which I did in a recipe from the 1770s and there it's called a pork pie, which is what most folks over in Britain would probably call this today and it shed the light and it's really fun to go through there and say, okay, I have no idea what this is talking about. What can I find that will word this in a different way? What can I find that will explain this to me or how did I put the pieces together? So chasing that down is half the fun and some of these recipes, you don't always have to do it, but when you do, you're on the chase, you're looking everywhere and when you find it, it's gold to make a hog meat pie. Take two buttock pieces or rearing pieces of pork. Tis what lean is cut off the gammon on the inside of the flitch. Cut some of the fat off the end of the chine and beat fat and lean together. Very small. Season it with pepper, salt, mace and nutmeg. Tie the meat when beat and seasoned in a wet, clean cloth, lay it into the shape you would like to have it and the cloth and cut some long slips of chine fat to mix and lay between every layer of the beaten meat. When tis thus laid around and in order, tie it up hard and lay a heavy weight to press it very hard and close for three or four hours. Make your pie. And when you have laid in the meat, lay half a pound of butter over the meat. Just as you set it into the oven, pour in a quarter pint of clear it when you draw it. If you find it dry, pour in more melted butter. So number one, I've got to be honest with you. I didn't know what some of these cuts were and there's a lot to talk about here, but that was the first thing that stood out to me is like, I need to educate myself on these cuts and they're not necessarily called the same thing now. And sometimes, sometimes what happens is we'll, we'll refer to something now and we'll say it is this thing. But in the time period they use the same word for kind of just the cut and not the process or anything like that. So you have to really chase it down. There are a lot of problems in here that are like, okay, what's going on? So you have to start cutting it apart and say, okay, well, what are they doing here? Well, they're making a forced me. So I've done that plenty of times. I know what a forced me it is, but I've never put it into cloths and beaten it and then taking it out of the cloth and putting it back in a cloth and tying it up and put up 70 pound weight on it or whatever the heck it's calling for. I guess it makes sense, but like why, why go to all this trouble? And so I wanted to go and find something that maybe had less steps or had simplified it a little bit and I found it. So this is what that is. A pork pie. Take the inside of a gamut of pork, cut some of the fat off the chine, put them both into a marble mortar, beat them very fine and season it with grated nutmeg, pepper and salt. Make a good crust and cover a dish with it. Put in some slices of fat off the chine. Lay on this some of the beaten meat and then another layer of bacon over this. Put the rest of the meat and lay half a pound of butter over the hole. Pour in a quarter of a pint of red wine and then put on the cover. Send it to the oven and when it comes home, if you find it dry, pour in some more melted butter. So what we have here are a lot of similarities, although this is simplifying it and even after this, you find some recipes where it excludes the mortar and pestle and really what you're making is a forced me and it doesn't really matter how you get there as long as you get there. And also this pie is intended to be baked in a dish. That's not what we're going to do today. The original pie that we read is meant to have a standing crust and I wanted to make a standing crust pork pie because I know that that's how a lot of folks will recognize this. That's how a lot of folks enjoy it already. So let's talk forced me real quick. What we're making here is essentially a sausage. So what they want, what they're trying to get at here is you want a lean cut of pork and you want a fatty cut of pork and you're going to take parts of those, chop them up, dice them and then form them together. So it's going to come out kind of like a ground sausage. You're going to spice it very similarly and that's basically what we're going to stuff into this crust. So this recipe is referencing the chime, the gammon. And so basically what's happening here is those cuts of meat can be called different things depending on where you're from and they can also be called different things depending on the time period. So sometimes they're just referring to a cut and not a process and sometimes they're not referring to even the same part of the animal necessarily. But what it's getting at is that it wants you to have a fatty piece of pork and a lean piece of pork. And so we've got a loin here and we've got pork belly here. They even referenced bacon. So we've got pork belly. We know that we're getting what they're talking about. You guys, depending on where you're from, this can mean different cuts, but it doesn't really matter because we just need fatty and we need lean and we're going to combine them. First thing we're going to do here is prepare the crust for our pie. We're going to do a hot paste. And so that means that we're going to warm somewhere between a half cup and a three quarter cup of water. And then we're going to put six ounces of fat. Now, whether you use lard or butter is up to you. The only thing that we need to do is make sure that it gets melted and heated. You don't have to boil it or anything. Just get a hot. We're going to add that to two and a half cups of flour. And at first you're going to start working this and think this is never going to turn into a paste, but it will. And so just keep working at it. After you get it all put together, pour it out of your bowl and knead it on your counter for somewhere around five minutes or so. Just make sure that it's really well combined. After you get this combined, you're going to put this aside. If you want to keep it on the counter, you can put a damp cloth over it. You're going to let it sit for somewhere around three or four hours, or you can just keep this in a Ziploc bag in your refrigerator. You can do it overnight. You can do it for a few hours, but two hours seems to be the minimum. After you're pasted and rested, you're going to form up your crust. Now this recipe is actually for two different pastes. So just cut it in half and use only one for one pie. Now that includes the lid for your pie as well. You're going to take off a little bit, maybe a little less than a golf ball. Save that for your lid. The rest of your crust, you're going to form up over a bottle or anything that you have that will form a nice standing crust. The heat from your hands will warm the dough and that makes it more pliable after it's formed set aside, because you want that to cool back down so that you don't damage it while you stuff it. Cut off equal sections from your fat pork and your lean pork and go ahead and just chop all of that into very fine diced pieces. Once you get that, you're going to work it together until it becomes like a ground sausage. You want it to kind of stick together and you want it to be a good mixture of fat and lean. After you have your forced meat combined, we're going to spice it. We're going to mix those spices in and then we can bring the crust over and begin to put this together. We're going to lay in first some strips from the belly fat cut very thin and then we're going to put in some of our forced meat and then we're going to layer that twice. At the top, we're going to put in some butter and then we're going to top it off with a little bit of claret. Now the measurements for the recipe for this particular one are a lot larger than our little hand pies here. So you're just going to have to judge this by eye. You do not want to put a pint of claret into this pie. Our pie is finished. It's put together. You just want to make sure to crimp it really well around the top so nothing's leaking out. We're going to put this in the oven for about an hour and 15 minutes or so, hour and a half on 375. We just want to make sure that everything on the inside gets cooked as well as the crust on the outside. Would you look at that pie? It smells delicious. What's not to love? It's got bacon, it's got pork sausage and it's got crust. What would really put this over the top is some mushroom ketchup, but I'm not going to use it because we need to taste what we've created here. I've made this crust before. I know that it's good, so let's give this a shot. I've got it kind of all torn up here, but here's a piece of everything. Man, I know that people go nuts over a flaky crust, but this is dense. It's kind of crunchy and soft on the inside. It's got all the textures and it's wonderful. Now there's, depending on how you season this, they go lots of ways. This is not too salty, but you could get too salty, so be careful about that. I've got a little extra pepper in there and that claret is just a little bit of sweetness that puts it over the top. This is perfect. This is so good. I'm going to make this at home tonight for my kids. As an American, especially a Midwesterner, I'm not familiar with this and I wish that I was. I wish that I grew up with this as perfect. I mean, I know that you folks out there have probably a lot of you have had this and it's a staple maybe of your childhood. It's got all the textures there. There's some crunch. It's got that soft dough on the inside. It's got the textures from the bacon and from the sausage. This is perfect. This is so good and I wish that that Americans knew more about this food. That's what's interesting about searching through these cookbooks.