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Difficult to Define, Easy to Make

The humble pot pie comes filled with a fascinating history.

BY CHERYL MORRISON

Pot-pie toppings aren’t limited to pie crust. Shepherd’s pie comes covered with mashed potatoes.

when you hear the term “pot pie,” you might have a specific dish in mind. For me, it’s the Pennsylvania-Dutch style of chicken pot pie that I grew up eating — tender chunks of chicken, potatoes, carrots and onion plus thick, chewy egg noodles in a silken broth seasoned with nothing more than salt and pepper.

My family’s chicken pot pie is cooked in a pot, and it does involve dough (for the noodles), but it is actually a stew rather than a pie. Other types of pot pies are not cooked in pots; instead, they are baked in pie pans, Dutch ovens or casserole dishes. If your definition of “pot pie” includes Mexican empanadas, Cornish pasties and other regional foods wrapped in or covered with pastry, then pot pies also can be baked on cookie sheets.

Except for the Pennsylvania-Dutch version, pot pies have crusts that encase — or at least coverstewlike fillings. The fillings usually combine vegetables — often root vegetables, such as onions, potatoes and carrots—with meat or fish. Some omit the vegetables, though, and some use only meat.

Pot-pie crust is usually made with flour, but the cooking website Epicurious.com features a recipe for halibut pot pie with a covering of mashed potatoes. If that dish qualifies as a pot pie, so does shepherd’s pie, which generally has a mashed-potato crust.

Frequent Fillings

Meat can include poultry, beef, lamb, pork and fish. The meat might be cooked before it goes into the pie — or it might not.

Pot pies generally are simple, although few are as simple as a recipe in my 60-year-old copy of “The Joy of Cooking” (Scribner) for “Canned Stew Pot Pie.” It calls for dumping a 20-ounce can of “stew: beef, lamb, etc.” into an ovenproof pot; covering it with pie dough, biscuit dough or slices of bread buttered on both sides; and baking it at 400 degrees Fahrenheit until the covering appears light brown. (Mercifully, the authors —Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker — omitted this recipe from subsequent editions.)

A later edition of the same classic cookbook contains a chicken pot-pie recipe that starts with stewing a whole chicken and making 3 cups of gravy. The meat and gravy go into a baking dish. You then make a batter of flour, eggs, milk, salt, baking powder and butter; pour the batter over the meat and gravy; and bake it at 375 degrees F until light brown. The recipe notes that the crust will “soak up quite a bit” of the gravy. “Some cooks,” it says, “prefer a biscuit pie crust top that is cut to fit the casserole, baked separately and adjusted while hot over the cooked chicken.”

Root vegetables — including onions, potatoes and carrots — often play a starring role in vegetarian pot pies.

The term “pot pie” originated in England, where cooks baked meats in “coffins” that they formed by molding pastry to fit inside a pot or pie pan.

Cut filling ingredients into bite-sized pieces before adding to a pot pie.

Rombauer and Becker also note that meat pies can be “an agreeable disposition of refrigerator accumulations.” Indeed, nearly any combination of vegetables — with or without leftover meat or fish — can be stirred with a little gravy or simple sauce, covered with pie dough, and baked into a tasty, nutritious dinner without much fuss.

American and English pot-pie recipes typically call for fillings seasoned with nothing stronger than mild herbs so the flavor comes mainly from the meat and vegetables themselves. Recipes from other locales are more apt to use spices and other ingredients with stronger flavors. The sfeeha (Arabic meat pastry), for example, uses cinnamon and cardamom to season the lamb and tomato filling, which is baked in an open pastry. The seasonings in bstilla, a Moroccan pigeon pie, include saffron, ginger and allspice. Empanadas often contain chorizo, a sausage (usually pork) made with chili peppers that can be muy picante (very spicy!).

Varied as they are, pot pies do have at least two traits in common:

• Pot pies are savory, which distinguishes them from fruit pies, cream pies, turnovers and other sweet pastries.

• Their fillings consist of bite-sized pieces of meat, fish or vegetables — or vegetables combined with meat or fish — bathed in broth or gravy.

Cheryl Morrison splits her time between New York City and southern Vermont.

A miniature pot pie makes a delicious one-person meal.

From Rome to Mexico, via England

Pot pies of one kind or another have appeared on menus around the world for at least 2,000 years, taking on many shapes and flavors. Their popularity throughout America owes much to the British.

Banquet tables in the Roman Empire often featured pot pies. “Apicius: Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome” (Dover Publications) contains a recipe for ham cooked with laurel leaves and figs and covered with a crust before baking. As the Romans expanded their empire to the north and east, they exported their taste for meat pies.

The rascally Romans sometimes baked pies containing live birds, which would fly out to startle dinner guests when the pies were cut. The Italians and British carried on with the joke. Iona and Peter Opie’s “The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes” (Oxford University Press) cites a 16^th century Italian cookbook that included instructions for making pies “so that birds may be alive in them and file out when it is cut up.” That cookbook was soon translated into English. Its presence in English kitchens suggests that “Sing a Song of Sixpence” — the nursery rhyme about “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” so that “when the pie was opened the birds began to sing” — was no mere nonsense verse.

Meat pies became something of a fad among English gentry during the 16th century. One British food writer of that time remarked on the English preference for making them from venison. In her book “Pies: Recipes, History, Snippets” (Ebury Press), Joan Struthers says the term “humble pie” derives from a once-popular English dish made of umbles, a term for the innards of deer. The gentry feasted on pies made with the choicest deer flesh, and their servants tucked into pies made of umbles. Another popular British savory from bygone days was the eel pie.

The term “pot pie” originated in England, where cooks baked meats in “coffins” that they formed by molding pastry to fit inside a pot or pie pan.

At a tin mine in Cornwall, England, that I once visited, the tour guide talked about the Cornish pasty (pronounced pahs-tee) as a hand-held convenience food for miners in days past. Wives would bake the semicircular meat pies daily and lower them into the mineshafts at mealtime. The dough for pasty crust is folded over the filling to form a semicircle, with its edges pinched together to seal in the contents and create a thick, tough seam. Miners ate the pasties with their grimy hands, holding them by the seams to avoid soiling the tender part of the crust, and discarding the seams when they finished eating.

According to the tour guide, Mexicans began to make empanadas, which outwardly are nearly identical to pasties, after Cornishmen sailed to Mexico during the early 1800s to work in the mines. — C.M.

Cornish pasties look similar to empanadas and are filled with meat and vegetables.