A long forgotten dish: "Roman Pie" (Rabbit, Cheese & Macaroni) ◆ 1940s / WW2 Era Recipe

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★ About: Roman pie, commonly filled with a mixture of rabbit (or fowl), cheese, cream and macaroni, was once a dish regularly spotted in cookbooks or on the menus of restaurants or formal banquets from the late 19th Century to the middle of the 20th. But their appearance was fleeting and 80 years later by the 1950s, they seemed never to be mentioned of in print again.
Nearly another 80 years has passed since this WW2 version was published, and we believe that the Roman Pie is due a comeback. Written around the time that Roman Pies were on their way out of the limelight, this recipe pleasantly surprised us.
As far as pies go, this one is nice and light; great for summertime, and especially a picnic as it's a solid little thing and easy to transport.
Regarding the meat:- Truth be told, one of us had never eaten rabbit before and the other had but a very long time ago, so we relied on our butcher's instructions when it came to things such as cooking time and what to look out for when carving. Rabbits aren't in season at the moment in Britain, so ours was farmed rather than wild and therefore had a subtler flavour. If you are able to order in a wild rabbit you may use a little more onion or seasoning. If you'd rather use a different sort of meat, the next choice is 'fowl' - half of any you like, from chicken to guineafowl. Cook a whole one and use the rest the next day in another dish so that nothing goes to waste.
Earlier Roman Pies:- The earliest recipe we could find for Roman Pie is from The Godey’s Lady’s Book (Volumes 80-81, L.A. Godey, 1870) which is a very similar recipe to this one. It reads: ‘Boil a rabbit; cut all the meat as thin as possible. Boil two ounces of macaroni very tender, two ounces of Parmesan or common cheese, grated, a little onion, chopped fine, pepper and salt to taste, not quite half a pint of cream. Line a mould, sprinkled with vermicelli, with a good paste. Bake an hour, and serve it with or without brown sauce. Cold chicken or cold game may be used for this pie instead of a rabbit.’
Our Additions:- We should mention that we did add a few ingredients to the original recipe to boost the dish where we could, but I'm sure this would've been expected by the authors - especially with the roasting of the meat. The ingredients that we added are marked with a "✎" below.
Finally, the eagle-eyed of you might notice that the original ingredients list says "¼ oz of margarine and lard", which would be an eighth of an ounce of each. We have taken this to be a mistake; it should be a ¼ lb (4oz altogether, 2oz each) which is what you would usually expect for a short crust pastry proportionate to the other ingredients mentioned. We have reflected this in the ingredients list below and in our video.
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★ Ingredients:
For the short crust pastry:
½ lb / 227g Plain Flour
2 oz / 57 g of Lard
2 oz / 57 g of Margarine
Water
✎ 1 Egg
For the meat:
½ a Rabbit or Fowl, jointed (we used rabbit)
1 small Onion, or ½ a medium/large one
✎ Salt and Pepper to season
✎ Thyme
✎ Olive Oil
Other filling ingredients:
2 ½ oz / 71 g Grated Cheese (we used Mozzarella)
1 ½ oz / 43 g Macaroni - use a type already shaped as small rings if you can
Salt and Pepper to season
¼ pint / 142 ml Cream (we used single cream)
To serve with:
Fresh Parsley
Tomato Sauce, from the same book (see link below)
★ Full instructions: www.handeddown...
★ For the Tomato Sauce: www.handeddown...
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★ Our Website: handeddown.co.uk ★ Instagram: @handeddown.uk __________________________________________
★ Book Details: Book Details: Manual of Modern Cookery, 7th Edition (1943) Author: Jessie Lindsay & V.H. Mottram Publisher: University of London Press Ltd. (War-Time Address: St. Hugh's School, Bickley, Kent, England, U.K.)
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♪ Music: White River by Aakash Gandhi

Пікірлер: 15

@tracieeaton1082 3 жыл бұрын

That looks delicious, thank you for sharing.

@hellie_el 3 жыл бұрын

thank you for another perfectly lovely video. :)

@moniquem783 3 жыл бұрын

Was pasta available during the war? I’ve only started delving into wartime cookery for the last year or so but this is the first recipe I’ve come across with any kind of pasta. I wonder if maybe that’s part of why it fell out of favour, because you would think rabbit recipes would increase in popularity during the war, and it’s fairly light on other ingredients that were rationed or hard to come by, and could easily be tweaked to fit with what was available. Interesting. Btw, I’m loving this channel. It’s so soothing. You have a lovely voice.

@americangrit7759 Жыл бұрын

Pasta was most likely hand made and not store bought, so I'm betting if you could get flour to bake a pie you also had the ingredients for the pasta too. ❤

@moniquem783 Жыл бұрын

@@americangrit7759 true, but it still seems surprisingly lacking in my recipe books. I guess maybe it just wasn’t popular yet, but I wonder if the fact that it’s Italian and they were on the wrong side made it less likely to go into recipe books. Just like you weren’t likely to find bratwurst or struedel recipes in wartime cookbooks.