A Sea Pie

History

Simmons's sea pie is built almost entirely from two materials. Four pounds of flour and a pound and a half of butter are rolled with cold water into a paste; the pot is lined with it, then packed with alternating layers of meat — split pigeons, turkey, veal, mutton or whatever birds are on hand, with slices of pork between them, each course salted, peppered and dusted with flour — until the pot is full or the ingredients run out. Three pints of water go in, the top is sealed tight with more paste, and the whole stews moderately for two and a half hours. The crust here is not a wrapper around a filling but a structural layer of the dish, softening into the meat as it cooks.

That construction is the sea pie's signature: a saucepan or pot lined with a thick layer of pastry, filled with alternating courses of meat or stew and vegetables, and topped again with pastry. The name points to where the method belonged. The sea pie was served to British sailors through the eighteenth century — a single sealed pot that could be stewed slowly over a fire in a galley with no reliable oven, which is exactly how Simmons directs it. That an American cookbook printed in Hartford in 1796 carried the recipe shows the shipboard dish had already moved ashore into New England kitchens.

The same layered pot-pie took deep root in French Canada, where it is known as cipaille, cipâtes or six-pâtes. The route of that name is tangled rather than settled: one dictionary treatment holds that the word crossed the language line more than once, an English "sea pie" rendered into French and carried back again, so the tidy folk story — that "sea pie" simply became "six-pâtes," six sheets of pastry — is only one reading of a much-travelled word.

What the record keeps is the form and the maritime name; what it does not keep is the hand that first set meat between sheets of paste in a covered pot, or why Simmons placed a sailors' dish among her pies without a word about the sea beyond the recipe itself. Her interchangeable list of meats — pigeon, turkey, veal, mutton, or simply "birds" — preserves a cook's improvisation rather than a fixed formula, the method surviving while the people who carried it from ship to shore do not.

Ingredients

• 4 pound flour
• 1 1/2 pound butter
• cold water
• split pigeons, turkey pies, veal, mutton or birds
• slices pork
• salt
• pepper
• flour
• 3 pints water

Instructions

1. Roll four pounds of flour and one and a half pounds of butter into a paste, wetting it with cold water.
2. Line the pot with the paste.
3. Lay in split pigeons, turkey pies, veal, mutton or birds, with slices of pork.
4. Season with salt and pepper and dust on flour.
5. Repeat the layers until the pot is full or your ingredients are expended.
6. Add three pints of water and cover tight with paste.
7. Stew moderately for two and a half hours.