welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to sunday morning
the old cookbook show today we're going
to do a recipe out of
this cookbook this is the 1938
scottish women's rural institute's
cookery book
it is the fifth edition and 1938 puts us
at the end of the great depression so
you've got recipes in here that
um speak up the hard times of the
depression
but also foreshadow the hard times that
are coming down the road
with the war and i find
these cookbooks to be so interesting
because it is a community cookbook these
are recipes that have been submitted
by women who belong to the rural
institute
and so in some cases there are four five
six different versions of the same
recipe
which gives you a real snapshot into
what was happening in this time period
and also what different families in
different parts of scotland
were making yet calling the exact same
thing
and so today we're going to do a recipe
for sea pie
and that jumped out because i thought oh
i've never made a fish pie before maybe
i'll make a sea pie and then
i read it and realized it has absolutely
nothing to do with seafood
it's basically a beef stew with a piece
of pastry over the top
all made on the stovetop so we're going
to give it a go and this starts out with
two pounds of stewing steak and the
thing that i find interesting about two
pounds of stewing steak
is that this only serves four people so
that's quite a bit of beef for each
person but at the same time
in a rural setting working on a farm
you're to go through that really quickly
i remember i did early on
a depression era canadian depression
area meatloaf
and it was the same sort of thing really
beef heavy no
filler everybody needed that energy
so i'm just going to put a little bit of
salt and pepper on now we're supposed to
build it in the pan and there's no
browning going on
we're just laying in the beef that's got
a little bit of
flour on it
and then some carrots
some turnips
and some onion
and then another layer of beef
and you just layer all of this in until
it's all gone and i don't know that
layering is probably all that important
sounds good but you could probably just
put it all in and stir it up
and mix it together and achieve the same
thing
because i think after almost three hours
of cooking
it's not going to matter what order you
put any of this in
now it says to cover with water
bring to a boil
bring to a boil and then simmer for half
an hour
so it doesn't say whether to cover it or
not but it does specifically say to
cover it
later in the process so i'm assuming
that this part is
uncovered so bring this to a boil drop
the temperature
down to a simmer and in the half hour
that this is simmering i'll go ahead and
start
making the pastry covering now for the
pastry i am going to cheat and use a
food processor so this is
plain all-purpose flour baking powder
and i have some beef suet and you can
get this
this beef suede at pretty much any
grocery store here in canada it's
usually frozen
and it's in with the frozen turkeys or
you have to ask
at the counter at the meat counter and
they'll bring it out for you it's not a
product that i
i don't think they sell a lot of it it's
there they've got it you just have to
ask for it if you can't see it
so i'm going to use the food processor
i find that's just an easier way to make
pastry
so i've got a little bit of water here
and we're going to pulse this together
until you get
little pea sizes of flour
mixed with the fat and then i'll slowly
drizzle in the water
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and now we'll just roll this out it says
to roll it just a little bit
smaller than your stew pan
okay so i've got this rolled out now
it's fairly thick because
the pot that i've got this in isn't a
very large diameter
so i think we're good to go and i think
this is pretty much good to go as well
i'm going to clarify a little bit
earlier on i said oh it's a sea pie it
doesn't have any seafood in it and i
kind of laughed
i do know what this pie is i do know
what this dish is um
it is the history of the dish it
probably comes from the british from the
british navy
but it really uh took off and sort of
came into its own
here in north america in the canadian
maritimes
in northern new england in the united
states
and definitely in quebec and when i go
through
all of my quebecois cookbooks there are
dozens and dozens and dozens of recipes
for this under different names but they
all sort of mean the same thing
and they're all sort of a french
derivative of c pi
and they're made with any game meat that
was available readily available
in quebec uh rabbit all of those sorts
of things
and we ate this quite a bit when we
lived
in northern ontario big
french-speaking population where we
lived in the bush up there
and this was regularly on the menu this
was something that that was
always there but i never called it cpi
i always used the french word for it
and i think that's very interesting that
i hadn't really made the connection
and sometimes when you go through old
cookbooks and you start to make these
connections of
where did this dish come from and the
way that the names change over time
i find extremely interesting so the
pastry lid goes
on and i'm supposed to make it a little
bit smaller which of course i
didn't i made it glen sized
there we go and the lid
and this simmers on the stovetop for two
hours which will give me enough time to
clean up my mess and get ready for a
tasting
okay hey jules hey glenn hey friends
so we're going to do sea pie from a
scottish cookbook
not the quebecois no
no not the quebecois version um near as
i can tell it is
a scottish version of a quebecois recipe
which is a version of
a british recipe well you know it just
lets reminds you that people have been
sharing recipes forever
forever forever so is that a
uh i'm supposed to take this is that a
crust on top it is a crust on top
but it's steamed inside so it's almost
like a drop
biscuit okay and i'm supposed to take
biscuits i supposed to take it off and
and put it into four but i'm just gonna
cut through it
um and see what happens
it is so hot very very cautious
okay so about as flavorful as i thought
it would be
so it's it's it's a basic stew with a
super basic yeah basics do with with a
biscuit on top
yeah it's it's tasty but you know
like everything throw it a little more a
little more
so it i mean it is it is a depression
era recipe it is a world war
ii recipe because it's right on the cusp
between the two
it's only got salt and pepper in it and
not very much salt and pepper at all
so yeah so it's easy to spruce up with a
little bit of other
you know some thyme or any kind of
flavor that you like that goes with beef
you could throw in some
marmite i was gonna say that
i would definitely put marmite in it but
it's it's filling it's warm it is
i've been on the boat all day you know
it's time to have some stew
and like you know i feel like i say we
say this all the time
you make it your own right it's a great
based recipe it's got a nice biscuit on
top
it's the right level of liquids and
because it's not super goopy or anything
like that yeah so if you
if you live in quebec if you live in
scotland if you live in new england and
you still make
sea pai or sipai let us know how you
make it how does your family make this
um what what is the modern version what
is the modern version
definitely um do you bake it in the oven
with or without a lid
because this is i mean this the the
pastry is steamed which is sort of like
a
dumpling it's a dumpling pastry it's
kind of
and it's got that kind of texture to it
yeah it's more biscuit than than
in its texture yeah i i'm kind of
digging this
in in its simplicity so let us know how
you make it
thanks for stopping by see you again
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soon
you