Battalia pie
Battalia pie is an English large game pie, or occasionally a fish pie, filled with many small "blessed" pieces, beatilles, of offal, in a gravy made from meat stock flavoured with spices and lemon. The dish was described in cookery books of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Confusion with words for battle led to the pie being crenellated, or shaped to resemble a castle with towers.
Etymology
A battalia pie was so named because it was filled with beatilles, small blessed objects such as, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "Cocks-combs, Goose-gibbets, Ghizzards, Livers, and other Appurtenances of Fowls ". The Oxford Companion to Food records that the Latin etymon was originally used to reference religious items such as rosaries and nun's pincushions, before its co-option by cooks. It is not connected with Italian battaglia, battle, but it was regularly confused with that meaning, and battalia pies were built with crenellated battlements around the edges, and sometimes as castles complete with towers.Recipe
The 1658 cookery book The Compleat Cook by "W. M." gives an early recipe for battalia pie:In his 1660 cookery book The Accomplisht Cook, Robert May gives a recipe "To make a Bisk or Batalia Pie", which instructs:
John Nott's 1723 The Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary gives a recipe for battalia pie with fish:
File:Compleat Housewife - A Battalia Pye.jpg|thumb|upright=1.4|Recipe for Battalia Pye from Eliza Smith's The Compleat Housewife, 9th edition, 1739
In the early 18th century, female cookbook authors began to omit the towers. One such omission appears in Eliza Smith's 1727 cookery book The Compleat Housewife, where battalia pie is described as follows:
This recipe, according to food historians Keith Staveley and Kathleen Fitzgerald, was an attempt "to introduce the older aristocratic style to women cooks". A recipe for battalia pie was omitted entirely by Hannah Glasse in her 1747 The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, and she dismissed its components as an "odd Jumble of Things" in line with her then modern philosophy of cooking simplicity. Recipes for battalia pie continued to appear in books and magazines. In 1741, the London Family Magazine published a recipe, and in her 1750 of A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Recipes, the English cook Anne Battam includes a recipe for "battalia pie".
Stavely and Fitzgerald credit Marie-Antoine Carême, an influential French chef of the early 19th century, with finally dispelling dishes like battalia pie from European diets. Carême opposed the practice of accompanying dishes with ingredients such as sweetbreads and cockscombs, and advocated that foods be garnished according to the principle of "meat with meat, fish with fish". Smith's recipe continued to be published through the 19th century, in Michael Willis's 1831 Cookery Made Easy, and in Anne Walbank Buckland's 1893 book, Our Viands: Whence they Come and How they are Cooked.