Name: An English game pie
Yield: To Serve Twelve–Sixteen
Cuisine: United Kingdom
Ingredients: salt and pepper; 1 roasting chicken weighing 1.5 kg (3 lb); 1 thick slice of ham weighing 175 g (6 oz); 1 small hare; bayleaf; 1 clove; 15 g (½ oz) or 1 packet gelatine; 275 ml (½ pint) water; 675 g (1½ lb) flour; 1 heaped teaspoon salt; 2 sticks celery; 1 onion; 2 carrots; all the carcasses and trimmings from the meat; 1 egg beaten with a pinch of salt; 225 g (8 oz) lard; dash red wine; ½ teaspoon grated nutmeg; 1 teaspoon Worcester sauce; 1 egg, beaten; 350 g (¾ lb) sparerib or pork belly, coarsely minced; ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon; 1 onion or 2 shallots, finely chopped; grated rind of 1 lemon; 15 g (½ oz) salt; ½ teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper; 1 glass red wine

Preparation info

To Serve
Twelve–Sixteen

Difficulty
Complex

Appears in

British Cooking

By Caroline Conran

Published 1978

About

The English have always been fond of cold game - and poultry - pies; huge great gilded tower-shaped pies were the impressive centrepieces at Elizabethan feasts, in which meat and fruit and little birds were mixed together. (It was not usual then to eat the pastry.) A celebrated pie from Yorkshire contained turkey, goose, chicken, partridge and pigeon, all boned and put one inside the other. This sort of pie was sometimes filled with up to nearly 1.8 kg (4 lb) of butter and sent across the c