Beefsteak Pie
2 pounds rump, flank or chuck Sliced potatoes steak
Butter
Pie paste
Flour
Chopped onion
Egg
Salt and pepper
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 plainly written meat-and-potato pie that assumes a cook who already knows her pastry and her oven. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, which is never stated, and the browned flour, which is a technique rather than an ingredient you can buy.
- No oven temperature is givenBake at 400F for the first 20 minutes to set and colour the crust, then drop to 350F for another 30 to 40 minutes. "Until quite brown" is the only doneness cue in the original, and by that point the potatoes should be tender to a skewer pushed through the vents.
- Browned flourFlour dry-toasted in a heavy pan or a low oven until the colour of hazelnut shell. Period cookbooks often direct the cook to brown a quantity and keep it in a jar for gravies. It thickens noticeably less than raw flour, so allow roughly half again as much, and expect colour and a faint toasted taste rather than the neutral thickening of a modern roux.
- The pre-simmer is the hingeRump, flank and chuck all need long moist cooking, and the pie is baked only until the crust is brown. Simmer the strips until they are just short of tender before they go anywhere near pastry, or the filling will be tough under a perfectly browned crust.
- "With the bone"The recipe assumes a bone-in cut sold by the butcher. Buy a piece of bone-in chuck, or add a marrow bone or a beef rib to the simmering pot for the gelatin, then remove it before assembling.
- Pie pasteA plain lard or butter shortcrust is the usual reading, though puff paste was sometimes used for the top in period beefsteak pies; nothing sweet in either case. Blind-bake the bottom crust for about 15 minutes before filling, which the original does not say; a wet meat filling on raw pastry in a deep dish gives a pale, sodden base.
- Sliced potatoesCut them thin, about an eighth of an inch, and use a waxy or all-purpose potato. Thick slices of a floury variety will still be firm when the crust has finished browning.
- Gravy quantityPour in just enough thickened gravy to come up around the layers, not over them. A pie filled to the brim with liquid will boil over and lift the lid. Cut two or three vents in the top crust before the egg wash.
- YieldTwo pounds of steak with potatoes should fill a deep 9-inch dish and serve about six; the original states neither dish size nor number of servings.
Beefsteak pie belongs to a long English tradition of enclosing cheap braising cuts in pastry, the crust serving in its earliest forms as much to seal and keep the meat as to be eaten. American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reprinted it steadily, usually in something like the form given here, with potato layered in to stretch the meat further. Butterick, a pattern company that moved into domestic advice through its magazines, was publishing for a readership running a household on a budget, and the recipe shows it: rump, flank and chuck are all cheap braising cuts, the bone goes in for body, and nothing is wasted. The browned flour is a period marker in itself, a habit from the days when a cook might keep a jar of it by the range to darken gravies without making a roux each time.