Welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host Jon Townsend and today we're doing
this amazing Cheshire pork pie it is going to be great thanks for joining
us today as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century.
This recipe is from "The Universal Cook" this is Collingwood & Wollams 1792 and it is called "a
Cheshire pork pie skin a loin of pork cut it into steaks and season it with salt nutmeg and pepper
make a good crust put a layer of pork a layer of Pippins pared and cored and a little sugar enough
to sweeten the pie then a layer of pork put in a half a pint of white wine lay some butter on the
top close your pie it will take a pint of wine if your pie be large" pies meat pies like this
are really common in the 18th century they had multiple different kinds of sort of layered meat
pies sometimes there'll be different layers of meat sometimes they might have some some paste
in there or some crust or in this case we've got apples layered with pork and sometimes it would
make these giant pies you know really really tall with multiple layers this one just seems
to have three layers pork apples and then pork again and then we've got this wonderful butter
on top when we close the pie up and bake it an easy way of cooking we don't do it that
often today do we this one's gonna turn out great let's get started we've got some pork cutlets here
that are kind of sliced up thin we don't want a big thick ones it calls for apples it calls for
Pippins and these are sort of you know pie apples of the 18th century we don't have anything quite
like that so look for a a pie apple in your grocery store we've got some green pie apples
here we've got our seasoning salt pepper nutmeg of course we need some butter we need some white
wine and pie crust that's it this is gonna go together pretty quickly first thing though I'm
gonna go ahead and season up these pork cuts and then even though the recipe doesn't call
for it I'm gonna go ahead and sear them in the pan I think that's gonna bring out some extra
flavors for it and they might have done that in a time period without just telling us about it
we're not trying to cook this pork all the way
through we're just searing the outside to lock in that flavor
we've got our pork seared it's now time to assemble our pie we've got a couple
of pieces of pie crust here we made earlier and we're gonna start off with a layer of
our pork pieces after our pork we can add in our layer of apples and we've put these
apples in a little bath so they didn't turn brown real quick but we don't want to bring
in a lot of moisture because we're gonna be adding in the wine that's going to bring in
the moisture so make sure your apples are as dry as you can get them so here's the
apple layer now in the eighteenth century so many of these recipes that have savory in them
they add sweet and mix those two flavors I mean if I was gonna do this I probably wouldn't add
the sugar but we're gonna do it just like the recipe add a little sugar on top of the apples
now we put some nice big pieces of butter on top there you go that'll
add that wonderful buttery moisture before we put the top on we have the white wine
that we're gonna add into this now do we put in as much as the recipe calls for I
would worry that it would be too moist if we did that so we're gonna cut it back a
little bit especially this is necessarily a very big pie it's time for the top crust
I'm gonna go ahead and cut some vents in this top so it can let some of that moisture out
as its baking now it's ready to go in the oven if you're in a modern setting you'll
want to go for 375 for now about 45 minutes or so we're going to bake this in our earthen
oven I've already got the fire started in that so it should be to about the right temperature
here we go this pie smells tremendous it is time to try it out we got the apple flavor we
got that wonderful pork flavor in there married together they go so well together mm-hmm I can
see why they would choose a recipe like this to feature in their cookbook the nutmeg even
comes through you got to put enough nutmeg in here to make a difference right but the
nutmeg with the apple and then you add in the pork flavor to it such a great combination now
we didn't add a whole bunch of sugar to this so it's just a little sweet it isn't you know
overly sweet it's not like a you know a dessert with pork in it which doesn't sound right does
it such a wonderful simple recipe and in the time period and even today cooking in a pie
is a very easy way we don't have to watch it very much really you just set it in there and
it does its thing and it and it keeps it from overcooking so it's is a great way of cooking
and tremendous flavors it really sits in there and blends so I really love this recipe a great
one to try out at home and if you're interested in another meat pie recipe check this one out