How to make game pie

All the game meat we cooked recently was put to good use, to make 4 game pies. The pastry was hot water crust, made using our own pig fat.

The filling consisted of roast venison and boiled rabbit, pheasant and squirrel meat. Also included was raw pigeon breasts and from our Tamworth pig, 4 rashers of bacon and some sausage meat. The point about game pie is that whatever is available at any particular time is used. Therefore the recipe is not fixed.

To the filling we added a generous glass of our homemade elderberry wine, a small jar of our hedgerow jelly (but any fruit jelly would do) and a teaspoon of ground allspice.

Put the pastry into the baking tins and add the filling. Put the pastry lids on and seal the edge of the pies. Cut a small hole in the middle of the lid and glaze the pies. Put them into a preheated over at 200C for half an hour and then 180C for a further 90 minutes.

Whilst the pies are baking, we boiled up a pig’s trotter in game stock to make gelatine. In the absence of trotters, you can buy gelatine from a supermarket. Take the pies out of the over and leave them to start cooling. Put a funnel in to hole in the lid and then gradually pour in the gelatinous stock when it has cooled but before it has set. You will be surprised at just how much gelatine the pies will absorb. Leave them to cool further so that the gelatine can set.

The results were great. We had lots of filling left over after making the pies. This was made into soup, using the leftover gelatinous stock. All the bones have been dried out in the oven and will be use to make bonemeal. Nothing wasted.

Until 2009 I was working in London, UK, but I gave it up to pursue a life of self-sufficiency. My aim is to grow or forage for all my food, produce my own power and live a healthier and greener lifestyle. I left London to return to my home village of Sunniside, near Newcastle, in the North East of England. I have a couple of plots of land there as well as the garden of my house. Our village is a commuter area for Newcastle but we are surrounded by countryside which we use for picking wild foods. My mission in life is to show that it is possible to live well without destroying the planet in the process. I am also keen to ensure knowledge of historic recipes and cooking is kept alive. I regularly try out recipes from old cookbooks using the food we have grown. I make videos about our progress and about how to cook home-grown foods. These can be viewed on www.youtube.com/jonathanwallace.
www.self-sufficientinsuburbia.blogspot.com