Name: Meat Pies
Ingredients: ½ pint water or gravy; meat (beef or other choice); seasoning; pie crust

Meat Pies

Ingredients

½ pint water or gravy
meat (beef or other choice)
seasoning
pie crust

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Cook the meat

Gently stew the meat in a saucepan with water or gravy, covered, for 1 hour or longer until tender.
Pour the cooked meat into an earthenware dish and let it cool.

Assemble the pie

Remove excess fat from the top of the meat mixture.
Add enough of the cooking liquid back to the meat.
Transfer the meat mixture into a pie dish and cover with pie crust.

Bake

Bake in a gentle oven at 350°F (175°C) until the crust is golden brown.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Meat: Provides the savoury filling, becoming tender through slow, moist stewing.
Water or gravy: Keeps the meat moist during stewing and forms the sauce that fills the pie.
Pie crust: Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form the golden top.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.