Welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host Jon Townsend today's recipe is called a sea pie
you might think a sea pie would be full of seafood but you would be wrong
thanks for joining us today as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century
so the recipe today is called a sea pie okay if a sea pie doesn't have seafood in it why are we
gonna call it a sea pie well it's a pie that's made at sea it's a pie that's made onboard ship
it's not for the sailors per se but for the officers on board ship sailors are
just gonna have you know kind of real plain food but this is fancy this is a
fancy dish for the officers on board here's the trick how do we bake a pie at sea
that's the problem because ships in the 18th century do not have ovens so it gets very
difficult I mean I don't know how you would how do you how do you bake a pie in your 18th
century ship when you don't have an oven well you don't bake it you boil your pie so we're going to
be making a boiled pie I've never done a boiled pie this ought to be a lot of fun
we don't find say a cookbook all full of sailor recipes but we do find them showing
up in cookbooks now and then surprisingly a sea pie shows up in Amelia Simmons's first
american cookbook from 1797. It says "a sea pie four pounds of flour one and a
half pounds of butter rolled into a paste wet with cold water" basic plain old pie crust here
"line the pot there with" so we're going to line up a pot or a deep dish with pie crust
then it says "lay in split pigeons turkey pies veal mutton or birds with slices of pork
salt and pepper dust on flour doing thus till the pot is full with your ingredients expended
add three pints of water cover tight with paste and stew moderately two and a half hours" now
this takes some interpretation just like every recipe does in the 18th century and luckily there
are some other recipes sort of show up and help interpret what's going on with this one
it says stew for two and a half hours it does mean boiled many times we need a deep dish a deep
pan because we're doing layers of meat and generally we have paste in between so it'll
be you know we have this whole lined dish and then we have one kind of meat and then
a layer of paste and another kind of meat and a layer of paste till we get to the very top
we put another layer of paste on the top and then some of the recipes talking about taking a plate
putting it over the top of that tying it down tight and then boiling that whole thing
this is a typical sort of three to one sort of pie crust so we have
three times by weight the amount of flour then we do have butter and we rub this butter in we
want to start off with nice cold butter on this kind of pie crust um and I'm just rubbing it into
the flour trying not to get it too warm it's nice and cold in here so that's not
really a big problem mix it in so it's um you don't have big butter lumps in there so you
might cut the butter up into little pieces first and then when it's mixed in there good enough
then we add cold water cold water enough to bring it all together into a paste
if you're doing 18th century cooking you're going to be making a lot of pie crusts and you might
as well get good at it and they talked about a lot of different kinds of pie crusts in the uh
in that time period we're used to just you know well there's just one kind of pie crust they had
hot oil pie crusts and you know you'll find a recipe book even Amelia Simmons I think
there are three four five different sorts of pie crust recipes in there
they're all pretty similar but don't be afraid of pie crusts they don't have to be perfect and this
kind of recipe well you're going to be boiling it so it's not going to be light and fluffy anyway
so have fun with pie crusts they're not that difficult to do
we're gonna roll this out yeah I don't know not too thin I kind of want it to be a thick
in there but there's plenty here for the dish that we're gonna be using you know uh something
happened uh when I was prepping for this for this episode and uh it doesn't happen very often
in fact it's never happened to me before but I was baking uh or boiling one of these last night
took all the time to make it exactly like you know we're doing it here
uh even boiling in the same sort of pot and everything it uh boiled for an hour and a half
it was great I took it out it was hot it was toward time to go to bed I thought well you
know I'll just I'll just uh set this uh on our back porch where it will cool off and I'll check
it out in the morning and then I'll know you know exactly how it's gonna turn out for this episode
uh this morning I got up I went out to the back porch to find this to see how it turned out and
I was like well it's not there and I thought for sure I put it on the back porch maybe I
took it out to the German kitchen set here because I needed some place cool for it
I couldn't find it any place I looked all over uh and finally I put on a set of shoes I walked out
into the woods and there I found the dish the plate everything empty completely empty every
bit gone every molecule of my sea pie my test sea pie was gone apparently raccoons thought that the
sea pie was for them and so I don't know how this is going to turn out because my test one is gone
we're going to assemble this pie in a deep dish can't be in a flat pie pan we need a nice deep
pie pan we have multiple layers and we're going to be simplifying this recipe we're
making a smaller version and we're simplifying it with the kinds of meat here really it seems
like almost whatever meat you've got will work in this pie but you make these layers
of different kinds of meat so you have a variety this one we just have ham and chicken thighs that
have we taken the bones out of so we just have a layer of ham and then a layer of chicken then
there's a layer of ham and between each layer we're going to be putting a layer of the paste
once this is all put together we're gonna put a plate on top so it holds it nice and firm
and protects it from water and then we're gonna tie this up so that that plate doesn't come off
so here it is here is our sea pie I've cut it open and it does things that i didn't expect it to I've
been reading about sea pies for years in the Aubrey and Maturin series there's like 21 books
Napoleon era seafaring stories just great books I can't recommend them enough as historical fiction
it smells really really good and the pie dough crust did some
I mean it's uh not too different than a standard pie crust so uh it smells really good
let's see if we can get some out of here for us and here's a section this is
has a little bit of the chicken a little bit of the ham and some of the paste
I love what the texture of the pie dough has done in here um it's uh it it does some
really really interesting fun texture things which you know we're not kind of used to
that ham of course works really really well with the chicken and then you know we have the salt
and pepper we have got all these you know stacked layers decks on board a ship like we would have
what they talk about on a sea pie boy this is fun I'm gonna have to try this much more often
you can see why it shows up even in a cookbook like American Cookery where not everyone in
the 18th century has an oven but everyone in the 18th century has something they can boil this in
that's you know the most typical sort of cookery that's going on and if you have anything in your
kitchen to work with you've got something you can boil even just a little sea pie
in and we can put whatever we want in it you know they always have lots of different kinds of meats
and we could probably experiment and put we could put greens in here if we really wanted
to we could do you know whatever we have sort of leftover or whatever's in season
this is good I love experimenting on recipes just like this something I've wanted to try for so long
and we get to try it out we get to taste it really step right into their shoes we do that
with cooking we do that with skills and building things we have a lot of fun here on the channel
you'll find even more of that over on Townsends Plus that's our new streaming platform and there's
a lot of great content some of this YouTube and a lot more it's something you will really love
please check it out at townsendsplus.com you'll find a link down in the description section