An English game pie

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