Meat PiesAnything goes for this meat pie. Heck, you can even make it vegetarian if you like. This is an incredibly easy pie recipe, and is a fantastic way to use up leftovers.
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Ingredients:
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In a large stew pot, drizzle some olive oil or bacon drippings, and saute the onions until they begin to soften. Add in the chopped or ground meat, and cook until browned. If necessary, drain of fat and then return to the pot. Add the vegetables, then the wine and broth to just cover everything. Stir, and add herbs and spices to suit your taste. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to a medium simmer. Stir occasionally, and cook covered for 2 to 3 hours, minimum. This can safely be cooked in a crock pot for several hours.
Just before spooning into the pie crusts, you may wish to thicken the gravy (which should have reduced quite a bit during the cooking time). To thicken, you can either use rice flour or bread crumbs. For rice flour, put two tablespoons of rice flour in a small bowl, and add just enough water to make a thick but smooth paste. Add this to the boiling pie filling, and stir until thickened. In medieval times they would have used bread crumbs to thicken, adding them in until the right consistency was reached, and this may also be done.
Spoon the filling into the pie crusts (it should be warm but not hot) and covered with a pastry top. Bake in a 400F oven for 20 to 25 minutes. The filling should be hot through, and the top lightly browned and thoroughly cooked.
A note: this recipe makes a wonderful filling for pasties (pronounced "pah stees"), little hand-held meat pies that were very popular in the middle ages. The paste recipe that I use lends itself very well to making pasties, and when I made this for the first time, I made both a whole pie and several small pastie style pies. The results were incredibly tasty. As pasties, these can be made a day ahead and served cold for lunch at any SCA event, inciting the envy of those less fortunate souls stuck eating modern foods.
Just before spooning into the pie crusts, you may wish to thicken the gravy (which should have reduced quite a bit during the cooking time). To thicken, you can either use rice flour or bread crumbs. For rice flour, put two tablespoons of rice flour in a small bowl, and add just enough water to make a thick but smooth paste. Add this to the boiling pie filling, and stir until thickened. In medieval times they would have used bread crumbs to thicken, adding them in until the right consistency was reached, and this may also be done.
Spoon the filling into the pie crusts (it should be warm but not hot) and covered with a pastry top. Bake in a 400F oven for 20 to 25 minutes. The filling should be hot through, and the top lightly browned and thoroughly cooked.
A note: this recipe makes a wonderful filling for pasties (pronounced "pah stees"), little hand-held meat pies that were very popular in the middle ages. The paste recipe that I use lends itself very well to making pasties, and when I made this for the first time, I made both a whole pie and several small pastie style pies. The results were incredibly tasty. As pasties, these can be made a day ahead and served cold for lunch at any SCA event, inciting the envy of those less fortunate souls stuck eating modern foods.
Based on a recipe from How to Cook Forsoothly by Katrine de Baille, pp. 114 (c) 1979
