Having yesterday explored the Christmas mince and plum pie a little and shared a somewhat “Hieroglyphical” recipe provided by a supposed doctor of divinity and midwifery, I am going to set aside mince pies for a day or two. I hope to make one and share it. As such, I must shop in the present, nonhistorical world.
But as promised I will write about another Christmas Pie. This one is a seemingly famous one from a little later. The Yorkshire Christmas Pie was all the rage in the cookery books of the second half of the eighteenth century.
Part of its appeal was probably that it appeared in the most popular recipe book of the century. In 1746, Hannah Glasse put together a cookbook, or as she would have called it, a book of cookery or a collection of receipts. The Art of Cookery Made Easy was printed for 202 subscribers in an attempt to provide financial stability for her family. While it did not ultimately achieve that aim – Glasse declared bankruptcy in 1754 – it was a massive publishing success, being reprinted in a smaller format within a year (akin to a popular paperback) and going through at least fourteen more legal editions before 1800, in addition to a number of plagiarized versions.
However, another huge bit of the draw of this recipe - it finds its way into many other cookery books - would be the grandeur of its scale and spectacle. Before Texas claimed everything was bigger there, there was a similar claim from those in Yorkshire. It is just speculation but that may be one reason this Christmas pie had the name it did. To give us an idea, Glasse says to “Put at least four pounds of butter into the pie,” that is for the pie not the crust. There are separate instructions for it but she warns, “This crust will take a bushel of flour.” It is not easy to convert because measurements change and were not as exact but that seems to be at least 30 lbs. of flour.
Size is an attraction but there is variety as well. The centrepiece of the pie is a whole deboned turkey, “which must be large,” she writes. This is so you can slit it down the back and insert a goose, and then in turn a fowl (a chicken), then a partridge and finally a pigeon. “Lay them in the Crust, so as it will look only like a whole Turkey.” This proto- and more grandiose turducken is not the entire pie, however. “Have a hare ready cased [skinned] and... lay it as close as you can on one side: on the other side woodcock, more game, and what sort of wild fowl you can get.” All this is seasoned with “half an ounce of mace, half an ounce of nutmegs, a quarter ounce of cloves, half an ounce of black pepper all beat fine together, two large spoonfuls of salt.” To this you add the butter, put on a very thick lid and in a very hot oven it “will take a least 4 hours.”
As over the top as this pie might seem, Glasse was not writing, like so many cookery book authors before her, only for the very rich. One of the reasons she was so popular was she appealed to the slowly growing market of middle-class English people who could read. From this we could probably say that this was a practical recipe, not just a Christmas fantasy.
The Yorkshire Christmas Pie was popular enough that it appeared in at least five other cookery books before the end of the century. Charlotte Mason’s The Ladies' Assistant for Regulating and Supplying the Table; The English Art of Cookery by Richard Briggs; The Practice of Cookery, Pastry, Pickling, Preserving, etc. attributed to a Mrs. Frazer; The Ladies Complete Cookery; Or, Family Pocket Companion, Made Plain and Easy written by Mary Wilson (of Hertfordshire); and John Farley’s The London Art of Cookery, and Housekeeper's Complete Assistant all have the recipe verbatim.
If you are planning to make this, Glasse says to make the pastry walls strong so you can send it to your friends in the city. My personal undertaking in pastry will be slightly more modest as I will attempt a period mince pie in the coming days.
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