Steak and kidney pie is a British dish. It is a savoury pie filled principally with a mixture of diced beef, diced kidney (which may be beef, lamb, veal, or pork) and onion. Its contents are generally similar to those of steak and kidney puddings.

History and ingredients

In modern times the fillings of steak and kidney pies and steak and kidney puddings are generally identical, Bell's Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 1826, records a large dish of kidney pies in the window of a baker near Smithfield, and ten years later a kidney-pie stand outside what is now the Old 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 a Liverpool restaurant in 1847, and in 1863 a Birmingham establishment 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 in Knightsbridge in 1862, and an assault case in Lambeth in 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:

<poem>

You say you are too sad to eat!

Just hand your plate and try

This steak and kidney pie, my love–

This steak and kidney pie.

From Fun, 1875

</poem>

<poem>

I've eaten as much as a man could eat,

I've gone through a very remarkable feat;

From the twopenny tart to the kidney pie,

I've swallowed as much as I could, have I.

From The Zoo (1875), by B. C. Stephenson and Arthur Sullivan

</poem>

According to the cookery writer Jane Grigson, the first published recipe for the combination of steak and kidney was in 1859 in Mrs Beeton's Household Management.

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, Other cooks of modern times have variously specified lamb or sheep kidney (Marguerite Patten, Nigella Lawson and John Torode), ox kidney (Mary Berry, Delia Smith and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall), veal kidney (Gordon Ramsay), either pork or lamb (Jamie Oliver), and either ox, lamb or veal kidneys (Gary Rhodes).

Cooking and variations

thumb|A steak and kidney pie served in a pub

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. Some recipes call for puff pastry; others for shortcrust. In some the meat is cooked before going into the pie; in others it goes in raw.

The steak and kidney pie is found in numerous regional variants. In the West Country clotted or double cream may be poured into the pie through a hole in the pastry topping just before serving. The Ormidale pie from the Scottish Highlands is flavoured with a teaspoon each of Worcestershire sauce, vinegar and tomato sauce. Eric Partridge dates the first of these to around 1880.

A substantial part of the plot of P. G. Wodehouse's 1963 comic novel Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves hinges on the disruptive allure of a magnificent steak and kidney pie for a young man whose fiancée has decreed that he must turn vegetarian.

See also

  • Jellied eels
  • List of beef dishes
  • List of pies, tarts and flans
  • Steak and kidney pudding

Notes, references and sources

Notes

References

Sources

  • Steak and kidney pie recipe