Expert: Jennifer Bartholomew - 6/7/2001

Question
my girlfriend is always on about pork pies and I was wondering if you could help me with a recipe, or is this only a york dish?

Answer
Hi Robert,

Well, I can give you a recipe- you'll find it below- but quite frankly pork pies are a lot of work and you'll probably find it easiest to buy one! A "real" British pork pie is always served cold and has a type of aspic or meat jelly binding the filling to the crust. In fact, it's quite like a French pate in pastry. You can "cheat" quite a bit though and still make a very nice pie: for example, you can buy frozen pastry, although you won't find it has quite the right texture. You can also make a nice jelly from tinned stock and gelatin rather than boiling pig's trotters to get it- no one will notice the difference. Finally, this recipe has some lovely savoury ingredients, but if you'd like to skip all the filling ingredients but the pork, bacon and pepper it will still be very good. There is a lot of room for flexibility with pork pie recipes as long as you have crust, filling, and jelly.

The recipe I've given you is for one large pie- more commonly, you would buy small single-serving pork pies. It would be easy to adapt this recipe to do so, except that obviously it's quite a lot more work to do it that way and you may not have enough small tins.

Good luck, and please let me know if you need any clarification.

Jennifer


Pork Pie- Rick Stein's recipe

Fillings
1.2kg/2 1/2lb boned pork shoulder
225g/8oz lean bacon
15ml/1tbsp chopped fresh sage
2.5ml/1/2tsp each ground mace, freshly
grated nutmeg and ground allspice
10ml/2tsp anchovy essence
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Jelly
900g/2lb pork bones
1 pig's trotter
1 carrot
1 onion
1 bouquet garni (celery, bay leaf, thyme and parsley)
12 black peppercorns
4 cloves

Pastry
450g/1lb plain flour
5ml/1tsp salt
275g/10oz chilled butter, cut into
pieces
2 eggs
1 egg yolk
30-45ml/2-3tbsp cold water

1. For the jelly, put all the ingredients into a large pan, cover with water and bring to the boil. Cover and simmer gently for 3 hours.
2.Strain through a very fine sieve into a clean pan and boil vigorously until reduced to 600ml/1 pint. Season to taste and leave to cool.
3. To make the filling, cut the pork and bacon into 1cm/ 1/2 inch pieces. Put half of the pork and 50g/2oz of the bacon into a food processor and process using the pulse button until coarsley chopped.
4. Scrape into a bowl and stir in the rest of the diced pork, bacon herbs, spices, anchovy essence, 5ml/1tsp salt and some pepper.
5. Fry a little piece of the mixture in sunflower oil, taste and adjust the flavourings if necessary.
6. To make the pastry, sift the flour and salt into a food processor or mixing bowl. Rub in the butter until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs.
7. Beat the whole egg with the egg yolk and water and gradually stir into the dry ingredients to make a soft dough. Knead briefly until smooth then cut off one third of the mixture and set it aside for the lid.
8. Roll out the larger piece and use to line the base and sides of a 20cm/8inches clip-sided cake tin, leaving the excess pastry overhanging the edges.
9. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6.
10. To assemble the pie, spoon the pork filling into the tin and slightly round the top of the mixture to give the finished pie a nice shape.
11. Brush the edge of the pastry with beaten egg. Roll out the remaining pastry and use to cover the top of the pie.
12. Cut a small hole into the centre of the lid with a small pastry cutter, remove the plug of pastry and leave the cutter in place to retain the hole during baking.
13. Brush with more beaten egg and decorate with a twisted rope of pastry and pastry leaves. Brush the top with beaten egg.
14. Bake the pie for 30 minutes, then lower the oven temperature to 180C/350F/Gas 4 and continue to cook for a further 1 1/2 hours, loosely covering the pie with a triple-thickness sheet of greaseproof paper once it is nicely browned.
15. Finally, remove the pie from the oven and leave to cool for 2 hours. Then warm through the jelly and pour into the pie through the hole in the top. Remove cutter used to make the hole in the top. Leave to go cold overnight.