Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping

this sheet, sprinkle lightly with flour, and roll up tightly. Give a blow or two of the pin to hold it in fold, and set on the ice until you are ready to use it—all night if you like. It is better for three or four hours’ chilling. Butter the pie-plates, lay the crust lightly within them; pinch the edges to hinder it from “crawling” while baking, fill with fruit, or whatever else is to go into them. If this is to be what a witty editor designates as “the kivered pie which stands high in the royal family of Pie,” lay the paste neatly over the filling, trim off ragged edges, and press or print down the edges. A North Carolina man thus separates the “royal family” aforesaid: “There are three varieties: kivered, unkivered and barred.” The New York editor, just quoted, says of the “kivered” variety: “Its triumphant composition requires of the artist higher qualities of head and heart, a more delicate touch, a higher strain of genius, a sublimer imagination, than the composition of the unkivered, or the barred. There must be magic in the upper crust of it. Ah! that delicious, finely-flaking upper crust, designed by a deep-revolving brain and fashioned by a sensitive hand, a pâté Queen Mab would be glad to nibble!” On the other hand, a New Orleans knight of the pen boldly defines the kivered pie as “distinctively a product of New England civilization, that has no place in simpler and more democratic states. Descendants of the men who made the charge up King’s Mountain, the Majuba Hill of this continent, take their pie unkivered. They will not touch the kivered abomination!” Mince pie Returning to our New York editorial, the amused reader finds this eulogium upon mince pie: “There goes much skill to the making of a mince pie. Within the fortunate inwards of the president of pies are strange dainties and spices, and Dr. Johnson’s drink of heroes. The elements are so mixed in it that nature may stand up and say to all the world: ‘This is a _pie_!