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Beef Pie
About 1/4 cup of milk Cut cold roast beef into inch-square pieces, using two cups. Put into a quart baking-dish and season with one-half teaspoonful of salt, a little pepper, one tablespoonful of tomato catsup or one-third cup of cooked and seasoned tomatoes. Pour over the meat one cup of liquid, using equal quantities of made gravy and hot water. Cover with a crust made of baking-powder-biscuit dough. For this amount of meat use for the dough ½ cup flour 1 tablespoonful butter 1 teaspoonful bakingpowder 1/4 teaspoonful salt About cup of milk
A plain use-it-up pie from an era when a Sunday roast was expected to reappear twice more during the week. The original assumes you already have leftover gravy and a hot oven, and it never states either a temperature or a time.
- Oven and timingThe book gives none. A baking-powder crust wants a hot oven, 425F, for about 25 to 30 minutes, until the biscuit top is browned and the filling is bubbling at the edges. The meat is already cooked, so the crust sets the schedule.
- The milk quantity is brokenThe text reads "About cup of milk", with a fraction apparently lost from the line. For half a cup of flour, roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons of milk gives a soft drop dough. Add it a spoonful at a time rather than trusting the printed line.
- Crust quantity is thinHalf a cup of flour makes a very scant lid for a quart dish. Doubling the whole dough (1 cup flour, 2 tablespoons butter, 2 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt) covers the surface properly without changing the character of the dish.
- Baking powderBaking powder of this period was commonly single-acting rather than the double-acting kind sold today, and released its gas differently in the dough. The stated 1 teaspoon per half cup of flour is on the generous side by modern standards; ¾ teaspoon per half cup is closer to current practice and avoids a soapy edge.
- Made gravy"Made gravy" means proper pan gravy from the roast, thickened with flour. If you have none, use a cup of well-seasoned beef stock thickened with a tablespoon of flour cooked in a tablespoon of butter. Plain water and a stock cube will taste flat here, since gravy is doing all the seasoning work.
- Keep the filling hotPour the liquid over hot and get the dish into the oven straight away. A cold, wet filling steams the underside of the biscuit dough before the heat reaches it and you get a raw seam where the crust meets the meat.
- Roast beef, not stewing beefCold roast is already tender; it only needs heating through. Extended baking to "cook" the beef will dry the inch cubes out. Judge doneness by the crust.
- YieldTwo cups of meat in a quart dish serves two generously or three modestly, with a green vegetable alongside.
Left-over cookery was a genre of its own in American and British household books from the 1880s through the First World War, when a large roast was economical to buy but a household had no reliable cold storage beyond an icebox and a cool larder. Meat had to be used within days, and the standard tactic was to disguise it: rechauffes, hashes, croquettes, and pies like this one. The crust is worth a note. A cook of an earlier generation might well have reached for suet paste or a short pastry; the baking-powder biscuit lid belongs to the period after chemical leaveners became cheap and reliable in the domestic kitchen, and it made a covered meat pie something that could be assembled and baked within the hour rather than planned around pastry-making. The tablespoon of tomato catsup does the same job the Victorians gave to mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire, adding acid and savour to meat that has lost its first freshness of flavour.