Beefsteak Pie
2 pounds rump, flank or chuck steak Pie paste Chopped onion Salt and pepper Sliced potatoes Butter Flour Egg Cut the meat into strips two inches long by one inch wide. Put them with the bone, just cover them with water and simmer until partly done. Line a baking-dish with pie paste, put in a layer of meat with a little finely sliced onion, salt and pepper, next a layer of sliced potatoes, with a bit of butter on each slice. Alternate the steak and potato layers until the dish is full. Thicken the gravy with browned flour and pour in, put on a top crust, brush it with beaten egg and bake until quite brown.
A plain British-style meat pie in the Delineator's shorthand style: the ingredient list names things without quantities and the oven temperature is left entirely to the cook. The two points that decide whether it works are how far the meat is pre-cooked and how thick the gravy goes in.
- Oven temperature"Bake until quite brown" with no number. Start at 425F for about 15 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then drop to 350F for 45 minutes to an hour, until the potatoes yield to a skewer pushed through the vent.
- Partly done means partlySimmer the strips 30 to 40 minutes, no more. The meat finishes in the pie, and beef simmered to tenderness beforehand will be dry and stringy after another hour under a crust.
- The boneThe ingredient line says steak, but the method assumes you have a bone to simmer with it. Ask the butcher for a shin or marrow bone, or a piece of chuck on the bone; it is what gives the gravy body. Remove it before assembling.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan or a slow oven until nut-brown; period cookbooks describe keeping it ready for gravies. It thickens less than raw flour, so allow noticeably more, and judge by eye rather than by a fixed measure. Untoasted flour works but gives a paler, blander gravy.
- Gravy consistencyThicken to the body of pouring cream, not a stiff sauce. Potatoes and meat release liquid under the crust, and a gravy thickened to gluey stiffness at the outset sets like paste.
- Pie paste quantityThe recipe gives no dish size; for a baking dish of roughly 2 to 2.5 quarts, pastry made with about 3 cups flour should be enough to line the dish and cover it. A shortcrust or plain lard paste suits this better than puff.
- Cut the ventNo steam hole is mentioned. Cut one, or the filling will lift the lid and the gravy will run out at the rim.
- PotatoesSlice about a quarter-inch thick, and use a waxy or all-purpose variety. Floury bakers collapse into the gravy over an hour's baking.
- YieldTwo pounds of beef with potatoes fills a large dish and should serve about six, with the crust doing much of the work.
Beefsteak pie of this kind belongs to the broad English tradition of baked meat pies, and by the nineteenth century layered versions of this sort -- meat, onion, potato and a brown gravy under a pastry lid -- were common in household cookbooks. The Delineator, published by the Butterick pattern company, ran recipes alongside dress patterns for a readership of home cooks, and the ingredient line here offers rump, flank or chuck interchangeably; all three are relatively tough cuts suited to the preliminary simmer the recipe calls for. Browned flour as a thickening and colouring agent is a habit of the same era, described in period cookery writing as something to prepare in advance and keep on hand.