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Beefsteak-Pie with Oysters
Cut six or seven thin slices out of a sirloin of beef, beat them and season with salt and pepper, flour them, and arrange in a pie-dish, surrounded by two dozen blanched oysters. Pour a little cold gravy on the bottom of the dish, and cover the pie with a good crust, baking lightly for an hour and a quarter.
A late-Victorian steak pie in the English manner, written for a cook who already knew what a pie-dish and a "good crust" meant. The instructions are thin on numbers, so here is what the original assumes.
- The hinge: the oystersBlanched oysters baked for a further hour and a quarter will be firm and small. Blanch them only until the edges just curl in their own liquor, tuck them among the beef rather than exposing them at the surface, and accept that they behave here as a seasoning for the gravy more than as a delicacy in their own right. Cooks who want plump oysters slip them in raw under the crust at the last, but that is not what Oscar wrote.
- Cutting the beefThe original gives neither thickness nor weight. Six or seven thin slices from a sirloin, beaten thinner still, would plausibly come to somewhere in the region of 1.5 to 2 lb. Modern sirloin is lean; the beating and the enclosed steam are what keep it from drying, so do not skip the pounding.
- "Cold gravy"Not gravy in the American sense but the set, jellied juices from a previous roast or a strong brown beef stock. The original asks only for 'a little': a few tablespoons up to about half a cup should moisten the bottom without floating the meat, since the oysters will release more liquid as they heat.
- "Baking lightly"The book gives no temperature. A moderate oven, in the region of 350 to 375F, suits the hour and a quarter; the phrase is probably a caution that the crust should colour gently rather than set hard in the first fifteen minutes. If the pastry browns early, lay a sheet of foil loosely over it.
- The pie-dishAn oval or round earthenware dish of 1.5 to 2 quarts, deep enough that the filling sits below the rim and the crust does not sag onto it. A pie funnel or an inverted eggcup in the centre keeps the pastry lifted.
- The crustThe recipe covers the filling in the dish, so this is a top crust only, not a double-crust pie; rough puff or a rich short paste both suit it, though the original does not say which. Cut a vent, and brush with egg wash if you want a shine.
- Flouring the meatThe flour dusted on the slices is the only thickener in the dish. Season it well and use it generously enough to bind the beef juices and oyster liquor into a light sauce.
- YieldServes four to six as a main course with a green vegetable or boiled potatoes. Let it stand ten minutes out of the oven before cutting.
Beefsteak and oyster pie is an English dish that also appears in New York, and it belongs to a period when oysters were cheap enough to be a bulking ingredient rather than a luxury. The beds of New York harbour and Long Island Sound supplied the city in enormous quantity through the nineteenth century, and oysters turn up in American cookbooks of the era stuffed into turkeys, stirred into sauces and buried in pies precisely because they cost less than the meat they accompanied. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maitre d'hotel, published his compendium in 1896, and the book reflects a hotel kitchen fluent in both French service and the plainer Anglo-American repertoire its guests still wanted. By the 1920s pollution and overharvesting had collapsed the local beds, and the oyster's role in dishes like this one shifted from economy to extravagance.