Hunt Pie – Recipe No. 162

It’s the first weekend in months where I haven’t had to be somewhere, go somewhere or do something and consequently I actually have time on my hands to do something I REALLY REALLY love and that is recreating wartime recipes! I’ve had a lovely day so far! I’ve so desperately needed down time.

So I have yet to find out why this pie is called ‘Hunt Pie’. The closest I have come is finding a business called ‘John Hunts’ which established itself in 1860 manufacturing pie making equipment. Could this possibly be linked?

Anyway, I made the pie for lunch and I have lots of portions left for tomorrow and because I love vegetables and pastry and added a little more seasoning than the recipe called for, I found it quite delicious!

So please enjoy the original recipe below (and my slight modifications to suit my palette in brackets).

Hunt Pie

3/4 pint of water
1 onion or small leek
3/4 lb of chopped root veg and cabbage (I used a couple of potatoes, carrots and spring greens)
4 oz lentils (I used red/orange lentils as they did not require soaking)
2 oz minced beef (I am veggie so instead I used 2 oz of marinated tofu)
1/2-1 teaspoon of meat or vegetable extract (I used a teaspoon of marmite)
salt and pepper (I also added garlic salt)

Pastry
2 oz porridge oats or oatmeal
2 oz of plain flour
1 teaspoon of baking powder
water to mix
(I added an oz of margarine as I cooked the pie in the oven rather than in the pot)

Chopped parsley (I hate parsley so used chopped chives)

Method

Bring water to boil.
Add onions/leeks, vegetables, lentils, vegetable/meat extract and seasoning, put lid on pan and cook on medium for about 10-15 minutes. Stir to prevent sticking.
Make pastry and press into a round shape enough to cover the top of the mixture in the saucepan. (I prefer a crispy pastry so once the mixture was soft and thickened which took about 30 minutes in total, I added it into a pie dish and rolled out the pastry on top and placed it in the oven).
Replace saucepan lid and cook for a further 15-20 minutes.
Lift pastry with a slice and set aside.
Remove mixture and place in pie dish and put pastry back on top.
Sprinkle with parsley.

Serves 4-6.


Advertisement

21 thoughts on “Hunt Pie – Recipe No. 162

    • When I started re-creating wartime recipes about 15 years ago, I was a meat eater so could create just about every recipe. Now I look for recipes that are veggie based or can be modified slightly. The marinated tofu worked well in this BTW xxx

      Like

    • Its great if you like veggies and stodgy comfort food 🙂 Add plenty of seasoning. A thick gravy over the top would be nice too! Tomorrow I’m making a wartime desert called ‘beetroot pudding!’. xxx

      Like

  1. Is this Marguerite Patten’s recipe? It’s one of the ones in her book that I’ve gone over many times but just haven’t got around to trying yet.

    Like

  2. Pingback: 7 Ration Book Recipes to Beat the Coronavirus Pandemic Panic Buying! – The 1940's Experiment

  3. Pingback: Home Front – Wartime Recipes (5) | Pacific Paratrooper

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.