[11] Through most of the period of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, roughly from 1500 to 1685, it was common for the rulers and their courtiers to stage elaborate feasts where the attraction was as much the entertainment provided by musicians, comedians, jugglers and acrobats as the food itself.

[18] The Oreiller de la Belle Aurore is an elaborate game pie named after Claudine-Aurore Récamier, the mother of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.

The large square pie, which was one of her son's favorite dishes, contains a variety of game birds and their livers, veal, pork, truffles, aspic, and much else, in puff pastry.

Hannah Glasse, in her best-selling The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy, first published in 1747, gave a recipe for a Christmas pie that included pigeon, partridge, a chicken and a goose, all boned and placed one inside the other, and then placed within an enormous turkey.

[22]Benjamin Disraeli in his novel Venetia describes an English dinner around 1770 that included ...that masterpiece of the culinary art, a great battalia pie, in which the bodies of chickens, pigeons, and rabbits, were embalmed in spices, cock's combs, and savoury balls, and well bedewed with one of those rich sauces of claret, anchovy, and sweet herbs ... [on] the cover of this pastry ... the curious cook had contrived to represent all the once-living forms that were now entombed in that gorgeous sepulchre.

[24] The 1845 cookbook The practical cook, English and foreign describes similar game pies of chickens, pigeons, partridges, hares, rabbits, pheasants, gray plovers, grouse, wild fowls or small birds, which may have slices of ham added.

[25] In the second half of the 18th century, potters such as Josiah Wedgwood introduced industrial processes that made it practical to mass-produce glazed pottery containers capable of withstanding the heat of the oven, at relatively low prices.

[26] Following a suggestion by Richard Lovell Edgeworth in 1786, Wedgwood started making game pie dishes with an inner liner to hold the contents and an ornamental cover.

These were a useful alternative to the traditional pastry coffin, since there were endemic shortages of wheat at this time caused by the early Industrial Revolution coupled with the disruption of trade during the Napoleonic wars[27] Wedgwood's dishes often had raised bas-relief ornaments of dead game and vine leaves, and a lid handle often modeled on a hare or root vegetable.

William Jesse in his 1844 biography of Beau Brummel says this design was introduced in 1800 when the royal household prohibited the use of flour for pastry in their kitchens, using rice instead.

[32] Mrs. Beeton addressed a broad audience in her 1861 Book of Household Management, giving simple recipes for grouse and partridge pie and for preparing other common game such as wild duck, hare, corn-crake, pheasant, plovers, ptarmigan, quail, venison, etc.

Wodehouse notes that Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright once hit the game pie at the Drones six times with six consecutive bread rolls from a seat at the far window.

[34] In Vile Bodies, a novel about the period between the first and second world wars, Evelyn Waugh describes the game pie at Shepheard's, a fictional club, as "quite black inside and full of beaks and shot and inexplicable vertebrae".