PIE & MASH



Chicken, chestnut mushroom, leek and thyme pie with mustard and truffle mash

To celebrate issue one of my dear friend’s, Harriet and Matt’s, new magazine Pie & Mash, i decided to provide a veritable feast. In honour of such what would i cook but pie and mash. However this dish originated in 9500BC (so its basically as old as the dinosaurs give or take a few years) and thus needs to be treated to more glory than ginsters or pukka give it... By 160BC the Roman statesman Marcus Porcius Cato wrote about the best seller of the day, Placenta . no its not as bad as it sounds but rather it is a dish consisting of sheets of flour dough topped with cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves. Still with the modern usage of the word i would not expect to see that flavour written up on the blackboards of every gastro pub up and down the country. Anyway i digress. I feel the pie has been subject to a bit of a battering in reputation, a hate war has been waged against it, the quiche or even better the tart is its much refined cousin. So i decided to counter this humble pie image and bake one incorporating all the grandeur of its ancient classical past, but fear not the contemporary delicacy of honeyed mice remains absent.
First i must confess i did not make the pastry, if you feel very strongly against shop bought pastry then go ahead and make your own but for me jus-roll is jus-fine.
I did manage to stretch myself to make the filling. Roughly chop two large onions and gently sweat with four cloves of garlic. Add in the chicken (roughly one breast per person, you can use thigh meat too though) and fry until cooked through. For earthy nuttiness throw in a box of chestnut mushrooms, leaving the smaller ones whole and just halving those slightly larger, you don’t want gobstoppers in your pie. I also added three leeks, again roughly chopped (my particular method of cooking is not a particularly neat one) and a good few sprigs of thyme, the herb of courage. If you want a nice salty edge to your filling i would recommend incorporating some pancetta or smoky bacon. Pour in a small pot of creme fraiche and then refill the pot with water and add that too. I’d recommend using half fat creme fraiche and not just because i’m a diet coke drinking girl but to avoid it all getting a bit rich. If not you may be reclining like a roman not out of glamour but from ache. The medieval english did call the pie, the coffyn... i’m just saying. Allow to bubble along for a quarter of an hour or so to get nice and flavoursome and reduce down a bit.
Pour all this in a pie dish and cover the top with the pastry which you have so easily to hand straight from the packet. With all the spare time gained from not needing to actually make it, i could decorate the top, a much more practical use of time i’m sure you’ll agree. If you like me do not have a pie dish, use whatever looks like it will be roughly the right depth and shape, in my case this was a cake tin.
On to the mash. In every episode of masterchef the mash seems to be a particularly contentious issue. Who knew that something so apparently comforting could be the source of so much debate: too lumpy, too salty, too bland, no wonder smash was invented. i chopped up a good few standard potatoes, roughly around one per person into fairly small pieces so they cooked quickly in rigorously boiling and salted water. Once boiled i drained and not having a masher (as you can tell with no pie dish and no masher mine is a well stocked kitchen, not forgetting the microwave inhabiting mouse) used a fork to break up before graduating to a whisk once a splosh of milk and a knob of butter had been added. To make the mash a little more elegant, i flavoured mine with mustard and truffle oil. Both again being controversial, i would add this in with respect to your guests’ tastes but as with the lavender debacle (see my herb dinner) do not throw caution to the wind and practice a little restraint. Oh and if you are balking at the truffle oil see my first post for a curious economic argument for it...
Once your pie has baked for 25 minutes and your mash is silky smooth, serve with long stem broccoli, broad beans (and ketchup, sorry).