Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Beefsteak and Oyster Pie
Beefsteak and Oyster Pie
Miss Riley.
Beat the steak gently with a rolling pin, and season with pepper and salt. Have ready a deep dish lined with not too rich a pastry. Put in the meat with layers of oysters; then the oyster liquor with a little mace, and a teaspoon catsup; cover with top crust and bake. Veal will do as well as beef.
A raw-filled meat pie of the old English kind: the steak cooks slowly inside its crust, and the oysters are there for savour rather than as a luxury. The recipe assumes knowledge the modern cook has to supply, chiefly the oven and the timing.
- The hinge: oysters go in whole and rawThey release liquid and firm up in minutes, so they should be scattered in raw between the layers of beef, not stewed first. An oyster cooked for the full life of the pie will shrink to a firm bead, so layering them within the meat rather than on top helps.
- What "catsup" means hereIn an 1870s American kitchen, catsup could mean mushroom or walnut catsup — a thin dark salty condiment closer to Worcestershire — as well as the tomato kind; a teaspoon in a beef pie reads more like the savoury sort. Worcestershire, mushroom ketchup or a spoonful of soy will give that savour; modern sweetened tomato ketchup will not.
- Oven and timeNothing is given. A deep pie of raw steak needs a moderate oven, about 350F, for roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hours, with the crust covered in foil once it colours. Anything hot and fast browns the pastry long before the beef is tender.
- The cut"Steak" in a pie of this date usually indicates a stewing cut — chuck, skirt or shin — cut in thin slices or strips, rather than a grilling cut. Beating it with the rolling pin is tenderising, not flattening; a firm few passes is enough.
- "Not too rich a pastry"A plain shortcrust rather than puff or a heavily buttered paste, because it has to sit for two hours over wet filling without collapsing. Line the dish, chill it, and cut a vent or set a small funnel in the centre so steam escapes rather than lifting the lid.
- The liquor, and thickeningOyster liquor alone will not fill a deep dish; add stock or water to come about two-thirds up the meat, and dust the meat lightly with seasoned flour as you layer it if you want gravy rather than broth. Strain the liquor — it usually carries grit and shell.
- MaceBlade mace was a common warm spice in oyster and veal cookery. Ground mace works; use no more than a pinch, since it becomes overpowering in quantity. Nutmeg will stand in, used sparingly.
- YieldA deep dish of about two quarts, taking roughly 2 lb of meat and a pint of shucked oysters, serves six. The recipe offers veal as a straight substitute for the beef.
Beefsteak and oyster pie is an English inheritance that stayed on American tables long after it had begun to sound extravagant. Through the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century oysters were cheap and abundant on both sides of the Atlantic — dredged from the Chesapeake, New York harbour and the Thames estuary and carted inland in barrels — so cooks used them the way we now use anchovy or stock cubes, as a cheap source of salt savour to enrich a tough cut of beef. The same logic gives us steak and kidney pie and the oyster-stuffed turkey of old holiday menus. The casual note that "veal will do as well as beef" places the recipe firmly in the period: veal was a common butcher's meat in American towns, and the pie was a formula rather than a fixed dish. The Home Cook Book, first issued in Chicago in 1874 and reprinted in later editions, was compiled from contributed receipts, and the attribution to Miss Riley is typical — these books preserved the shorthand of women cooking for their own households, which is why the oven temperature and the quantities are simply assumed.