George Washington's "War on Christmas Pies Yorkshire Pie"
I wrote about this in my Substack.
Howard and Jess have talked about it on their podcast Plodding Through the Presidents.
Yes, it is George Washington’s Yorkshire Pie. This is going to be a bit different than some of the recipes here on Cookin’ with Congress. It’s not a horrific recipe direct from a congressperson, and the instructions aren’t from the mouth of George Washington himself. Instead, Howard, Jess and I attempted to recreate a meal mentioned in a letter from George Washington.
That meal was not just a meal. It was WAR. Each Christmas, Washington declared an “attack on Christmas Pyes.” These pies were tall, ornamental, filled with many meats, and spelled incorrectly. I, too, eat baked goods with violence, so I understood the feeling.
Buckle up, because our attempt to make George Washington’s favorite Christmas pie went….haywire.
Chef George Washington
President from Virginia
Favorite Food/Homespun Recipe: Favorite Food
Notable:
leading the Continental Army during the American Revolution; having slaves’ teeth in his mouth
Quotable:
“We had [a meal] yesterday on which all the company (and pretty numerous it was) were hardly able to make an impression [on the large amount of pie].”
We did not follow the recipe from the Mount Vernon website, though it’s a great source of information. We wanted to go bigger. Taller. More ambitious. Less possible. Instead, we doubled this recipe for a Christmas standing crust, blending it with Hannah Glasse’s pie recipe from The Art of Cookery from 1774, then went with a more traditional filling that included eight different types of birds, herbs, wine and butter.
Three amateur chefs, two recipes, one 250 years old, eight birds, and more flour than you can imagine. What could go wrong?
INGREDIENTS
5 lbs flour
1.875 cups butter
1.875 cups beef tallow
2.625 cups water
2.625 cups milk
5 tsp sea salt
3 egg yolks, beaten
1 squab
2 duck breasts
1 turkey breast
1 guinea fowl
1 Cornish game hen
1 pheasant
4 quails
1 chicken
1 cup of white wine
1/2 cup butter
1 clamshell each of oregano, thyme, rosemary
4 tbsp chopped parsley
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp mace
1 tsp dried sage
1 tsp clove
Salt and pepper
INSTRUCTIONS
1) Make a standing crust.
Obviously, this is going to need to be more detailed, but that’s the first step in most old pie (pye?) recipes like this. From here on out, the steps will be the steps WE took, collectively, the three of us (plus our friend Emily).
2) Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. To make the standing crust, first heat the butter, milk, water and tallow together until fully melted and combined.
Would the recipe have called for raw milk in 1774? Maybe. Maybe whole milk didn’t cut it, but something went wrong at these early stage steps. Tallow was also different 250 years ago. Oh, and we used tallow instead of lard, which we thought might be just fine since many pie crusts do use tallow. Perhaps not.
3) Sift the flour and salt together as the other mixture warms up.
4) Once fully combined, form a hole in the center of the flour and pour the heated liquid into the center.
This was fun.
5) Working quickly, mix together. Begin kneading, working the dough until it forms a large ball. Add more flour or more water if the consistency is not right.
We knew pretty quickly that things hadn’t gone according to plan. The dough was cracking and not forming into an ideal Play-Do level of malleability. We realized once it cooled, we would not be forming via a single piece.
6) As the dough cools for 30 minutes to room temperature, debone the birds.
Deboning takes a WHILE. Game hens and quails took an especially significant amount of precision. This is where our friend' Emily’s knife skills came in handy. We ended up with about 8 pounds of bird meat after all the deboning. A lot of fowl. Stupid amount of fowl, are we serving a family of 20?
7) Cut up the deboned birds into approximately 2-inch pieces. Place them in a large pot and brown them in butter.
8) After browning, add wine and cook off at a high heat.
9) Add chopped herbs and dried herbs to the meat, draining excess liquid.
We didn’t drain enough excess liquid. Learn from our mistakes.
10) Form the dough into three pieces: two circles of equal diameter and one rectangle whose long sides equal the circumfrence of the circles.
Math. Good good, this involves geometry, I hadn’t anticipated using my second-worst subject in school (first hardest was symbolic logic, I still don’t understand what that even means). We used parchment paper and our large pot to be exact in our cuts. All three of us were anxious, as the dough didn’t seem like it was going to hold up.
11) Form the three pieces around the pot, making sure to seal any gaps. Eggwash the outside.
It stayed up when we removed the pot! Standing on its own like a just-born baby deer.
12) Pre-bake the standing crust for 20 minutes at 450 degrees or until lightly browned.
Ours collapsed. Full-on collapse, entirely deflating to our spirits. But we pressed on and picked up the pieces, trying to re-form the standing crust around our large boiling pot. We decided to keep the pot there and let it bake along with the crust, removing after 15 minutes in the oven. Somehow, this worked! Even though we had cracks and it wasn’t…pretty, it was slightly more functional. At the very least, it would hold a bunch of bird carcasses. I gently removed the pot and the crust stayed standing (now closer to 5 inches rather than 9 inches tall, but oh well).
13) Cut or stencil decorative pieces and attach to the lid.
We chose holly leaves because we are so damn festive.
14) Fill the standing crust with partially cooked fowl. Top with the lid, spoon in some butter & wine sauce and bake until birds are fully cooked and outside is browned.
Because the dough was dry, the collapse happened, and because the collapse happened, there were cracks in the structure, and because there were cracks in the structure, we couldn’t fill it with much sauce, and because we couldn’t fill it with much sauce, it came out done, but dry. Really can’t mess up a critical early step, eh? I should also note that carrying this to and from the oven was forearm work — I calculated it for TikTok at 11.8 pounds, but forgot to add some elements. We’re looking at 15+ pounds easy when counting the pan and ramekins we used to keep some crust elements in place.
How long did it take? We checked every 15 minutes, and the end result was that the birds were perfectly cooked (or a hair past) with a golden, unburnt crust at about 1 hour and 40 minutes at a much lower temperature of 350 degrees. At 450, the oven would’ve blackened it so fast the birds would barely even be warm.
Voila! If you want to actually watch me attempt to eat it, go to the Cookin’ with Congress Instagram or TikTok. We were so relieved! We had started at 10:30AM and ending at 4:50PM by tasting this ridiculous pie. Now, many old pies (PYES?) weren’t meant to be eaten crust-and-all, but we decided to dive in and get both bird and crust in each bite. Honestly, it came out better than anticipated thanks to Howard’s insistence that we make some dough rope to seal the edges where the lid met the sides. That was a crucial piece in making the pie look…well, like a Yorkshire Christmas Pie that George Washington would attack with his weird teeth.
I’ll never make this again. Lots of fun. Never again. No more medieval standing crusts in this house (I’ll probably try one next year who the hell am I kidding?).
Verdict:
The pie has gone through some desertification. Arid. In desperate needs of aioli or cranberry relish in a sandwich form. Or, Howard suggested: gravy. Was it worth 6.5 hours not including the time it took to source many, many silly birds? No. Should it go to waste? Certainly not. Pigeon is funky but I liked it. What a pye.
