Steak and kidney pie

Steak and kidney pieis a popular British dish. It is a savoury pie filled principally with a mixture of dicedbeef, dicedkidney(which may bebeef,lamb,veal, orpork) andonion. Its contents are generally similar to those ofsteak and kidney puddings.
In modern times the fillings of steak and kidney pies andsteak and kidney puddingsare generally identical,but until the mid-19th century the norms were steak puddings and kidney pies.Bell's Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 1826, records a large dish of kidney pies in the window of a baker nearSmithfield,and ten years later a kidney-pie stand outside what is now theOld Vic, emitting sparks every time the vendor opened his portable oven to hand a hot kidney pie to a customer.
"Rump Steak and Kidney Pie" was served in aLiverpoolrestaurant in 1847,and in 1863 aBirminghamestablishment offered "Beef Steak and Kidney Pie".But until the 1870s kidney pies are far more frequently mentioned in the newspapers, including one thrown at a policeman during an affray inKnightsbridgein 1862,and an assault case inLambethin 1867 when a customer attacked a waitress for bringing her a beef pie instead of a kidney one.By the mid-1870s steak and kidney pies were as often mentioned as kidney ones. Both appeared in verse of the period:
According to the cookery writerJane Grigson, the first published recipe for the combination of steak and kidney was in 1859 inMrs Beeton'sHousehold Management.Beeton used it in apuddingrather than a pie. She had been sent the recipe by a correspondent inSussexin south-east England, and Grigson speculates that it was until then a regional dish, unfamiliar to cooks in other parts of Britain.
Beeton suggested that steak and kidney could be "very much enriched" by the addition of mushrooms or oysters.In those days oysters were the cheaper of the two: mushroom cultivation was still in its infancy in Europe and oysters were still commonplace.In the following centuryDorothy Hartley(1954) recommended the use of black-gilled mushrooms rather than oysters, because long cooking is "apt to make [oysters] go hard".
Neither Beeton nor Hartley specified the type of animal from which the kidneys were to be used in a steak and kidney recipe. Grigson (1974) calls for either veal or ox kidney,as doesMarcus Wareing.Other cooks of modern times have variously specified lamb or sheep kidney (Marguerite Patten,Nigella LawsonandJohn Torode),ox kidney (Mary Berry,Delia SmithandHugh Fearnley-Whittingstall),veal kidney (Gordon Ramsay),either pork or lamb (Jamie Oliver),and either ox, lamb or veal kidneys (Gary Rhodes).
Some versions are full, or "double-crust", pies, in which the cooking dish is lined with pastry before the meat mixture is added, after which a pastry top is put over it.In other versions the meat is put straight into the dish, with only a pastry lid.In either case, apie funnelis often used to stop the top crust sinking into the meat mixture during baking.Some recipes call forpuff pastry; others forshortcrust.In some the meat is cooked before going into the pie;in others it goes in raw.In addition to the steak and kidney, the filling typically contains carrots and onions, and is cooked in one or more of beef stock, red wine andstout.
The steak and kidney pie is found in numerous regional variants. In theWest Countryclotted or double cream may be poured into the pie through a hole in the pastry topping just before serving.The Ormidale pie from theScottish Highlandsis flavoured with a teaspoon each ofWorcestershire sauce, vinegar and tomato sauce.InEast Yorkshiresliced potatoes are substituted for kidneys and the dish is called meat and pot pie.In the English Midlands, Northern England and Scotland oysters or mushrooms or both are often added; in Scotland this variant is known as Musselburgh pie.
Among the various vernacular names for steak and kidney pie are Kate and Sidney pie, snake and kiddy pie, and snake and pygmy pie.Eric Partridgedates the first of these to around 1880.A substantial part of the plot ofP. G. Wodehouse's 1963 comic novelStiff Upper Lip, Jeeveshinges on the disruptive allure of a magnificent steak and kidney pie for a young man whose fiancée has decreed that he must turn vegetarian.