Because Janie asked for Regency-era recipes, I have translated one for everyone’s entertainment! (Remember, at Risky Regencies, we aim to please.)

So here’s an eighteenth century recipe for a Christmas pie which you might make if you’re peckish one afternoon:

TRADITIONAL CHRISTMAS PIE (with modern editorial comments)

1. Bone a large turkey, a goose, a large fowl, a partridge, and a pigeon. (When you’re done, you can give the bones to your children to play with.)
2. Open all of these birds down the back.
3. Season the inside of the turkey with mace, nutmeg, cloves, white pepper, and salt.
4. Put the goose inside the turkey, and season the inside of the goose in similar fashion.
5. In the same way, place the fowl in the goose, the partridge in the pear tree (sorry, got confused there a second! I mean the partridge in the fowl, of course), and the pigeon in the partridge, seasoning all the way.
6. Close them all up, and try your best to make it look just like one simple innocent turkey going about his business without lots of other folks inside him.
7. Case and bone a hare, and cut it into pieces along with six woodcocks, and five golden rings (sorry, lost myself again there — I mean a boned moor game bird, of course!)
8. Take ten pounds of butter and a bushel of flour, and mush it into a paste. (This should take about two minutes. If it takes longer, you need to work out at the gym more often.)
9. Shape this into a gigantic pie crust.
10. Put some seasoning inside the crust. (No, it doesn’t say what kind. I suggest cinnamon, because I know how to spell it. But maybe instant coffee would be nice too.)
11. Place Frankenstein’s turkey inside the crust, in a supine position.
12. Put the hare by the turkey’s left wing, and the game birds by its right. Or vice versa. It doesn’t really matter. Come to think of it, isn’t it about time the left wing and the right wing started unifying? So why don’t you just take the hare pieces (no, not hairpieces!) and game pieces (no, I don’t mean checkers) and mix them all up, and then just throw them in randomly.
13. Sprinkle seasoning over all. (Again, it doesn’t specify. Maybe nacho cheese seasoning?)
14. Put four pounds of butter on the top.
15. Make a top crust.
16. Put egg whites on the crust, cover the crust with paper (I suggest you not use the Sunday paper, because of the dyes), and bake it in a hot oven for six hours.

Enjoy!

The question for today is: What’s your favorite holiday food? Your least favorite?

Cara
Cara King — www.caraking.com
My Lady Gamester — which contains no Christmas pie of any kind, honest!