CHICKEN AND LETTUCE PIES
Altamiras baked his chicken or rabbit pies in cazuelitas, the low-sided earthenware frying dishes used for sizzling prawns in garlicky olive oil (gambas al ajillo).
Here though, they reveal themselves as brilliant individual pie dishes, which you can take to table, so baking and serving to each person in under half an hour. For the small pies were a clever way to make use of the last heat of a well-fired bread oven.
For the filling I use farmhouse free-range chicken, Ibérico jamón offcuts, garlic, spices, a curly-leafed lettuce – Altamiras’s surprise ingredient – and a varietal Verdejo white wine from DOP Rueda. Each time I make this I find myself adding more lettuce as it cooks down till almost unidentifiable to give a really juicy pie.
For the pastry you can use a bought ready-to-roll prepared dough if you’re in a hurry, or a recreation of New Art’s 18th-century dough made with home-made soft Ibérico lard. Altamiras probably didn’t skin his chickens – he tells his readers to simply clean and cut them up, and discarding the skin would have been wasteful – but we know he must have boned them since he fitted half a chicken’s flesh into each cazuelita. Admittedly, his chickens may have been a bit scrawny, but even so, as he himself says in his prologue, “I have suggested generous servings, as this is the custom in religious communities.”
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❖ Chicken and Lettuce Pies
Juan Altamiras added shredded lettuce to his chicken pies. Perhaps he did so to make the chicken go further, but it also gives a really juicy pie.”