If you have read The Hogfather, or any of Pratchett’s Diskworld books that deal with Hogswatch you know that a pork pie with a glass of sherry is what children leave out for the Hogfather on Hogswatch even. So, in addition to the goose dinner on Hogswatch, we need a pork pie on Hogswatch eve. I was planning on making that tomorrow, and today I was planning on a few other parts of the Hogswatch meal that can be made ahead, then I read the recipe, the most authentic possible as it was written by Nanny Ogg herself.

Well, turns out the pie needs to cool overnight, so we had to make it today. This is the first time I have done a raised pie using a hot water crust.  This is also the first time I have made a meat pie designed to be eaten cold. Overall this was not to hard of a pie to make, but I ran into some issues. The first was that we just do not have a raised pie mold. I did some calculations and decided out 9 inch spring-form pan would do pretty well. So we were off to the races.

I ground the pork just like last night, and chopped the ham. Add in the onion and some spices, and you have half the filling. As the other half was just cocktail sausages, I moved to the water crust next. The crust came together pretty well. It is far more forgiving then the usual sort crust we use here in America. I have never been good with traditional pie crust, but this one worked out well. I rolled it out and fitted it into the pan. The recipe has you layer the sausages between the pork mix. We they ran into the second problem, the pan was just a bit big, so the filling did not come up to the top. So we cut a top and folded over the sides a bit like a galette.I decorated it with a few stars, sausages and a pig’s nose (I am not exactly a dough artist).

Then it was into the oven for an hour and a half. We had a lot of the crust left over, so I did a hand raised pear pie. I literally just tossed this thing together. I tossed in about 3/4 of a pear, about 3 table spoons of sugar which I dissolved into a shot of apple brandy with a bit of chopped crystallized ginger. I tossed that in with the pork pie. The last part of the pork pie called for a port/broth mix with gelatin. Remember where I mentioned reading the recipe above? Well somehow I missed that that was the last step and had made the broth mixture before putting the pie in, so we kept that on the stove to keep it from gelling. I poured it in the pie. It is now chilling in our walk-in (our unheated garage).

The pear pie did leak a bit, but looked nice. I think I could use this water crust to make individual meat pies for a dinner or something in the future. We cut the little pear pie up and had it for dessert, I had it with a glass of sherry. It was quite good for a recipe I tossed together in half an hour.