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January 10
Menu: Pickles; Cream of Carrot Soup; Celery; Olives; Beef Steak and Kidney Pie; Baked Potatoes; Scalloped Onions; Cauliflower Salad; Cheese; Lemon Snow; Crackers; Coffee Beef Steak and Kidney Pie-2 pounds lean steak, 4 sheep's kidneys, some melted Crisco, salt and pepper to taste, 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, and some pie crust. Mix flour and cheese; add salt and red pepper to taste. Rub in Crisco lightly. Mix yolk egg with water; add enough of these to mix flour, etc., to stiff paste. Knead till smooth on floured board, then roll out and cut Cut steak very thinly and dip it in melted Crisco, then in flour seasoned with salt and pepper. Roll up pieces of steak and lay them in fireproof baking dish. Skin kidneys, cut them in thin slices, leaving out fat in middle kidney; dip them also in seasonings and lay them on top of meat. Sprinkle in Worchestershire sauce and fill up dish with water. Roll pastry rather larger than size required for dish. Wet edge of dish and put narrow band of paste round; wet band, place on it remainder of paste, which cut to size of dish, then pinch edges, and brush over with beaten egg. Make large hole in top and into this put ends some leaf-shaped pieces of paste, with an ornament in center; brush leaves over with egg and bake in hot oven 1½ hours.
A standard British steak and kidney pie transposed into Procter & Gamble's shortening promotion, with the pastry quantities left largely unstated. Assume a two-crust batch of shortcrust for a 2-quart dish and work from there.
- Crisco, and what it replacedCrisco was launched in 1911 as a hydrogenated vegetable shortening sold against lard and butter. Any solid shortening works here; for pastry, lard or butter will give better flavour and equal structure.
- Hot oven, 1½ hoursHot oven, 1½ hours -- "Hot" in period cookery is generally taken as somewhere around 400-450F. That temperature for the full time will scorch the pastry long before the steak is tender. Start at 425F for 20 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 325F for the remainder.
- Sheep's kidneysFour lamb or sheep kidneys are roughly 8-10 oz. Ask a butcher, or substitute one beef kidney of similar weight, trimmed hard of its core. Soak either in salted water or milk for an hour and rinse; unsoaked kidney carries a strong ammoniac edge.
- Leave out the middle fatThe instruction to cut away the fat at the centre of the kidney is the one that matters. That white core is suet and connective tissue and will not soften; left in, it turns the gravy greasy and the slices tough.
- The water will not thicken itselfFilling the dish with plain water gives thin liquor. The flour clinging to the dipped meat is the only thickener, so dredge generously and do not shake the pieces off. Fill to about two-thirds up the meat rather than to the rim, or the crust will steam from below.
- Pastry proportionsThe pastry paragraph names flour, cheese, salt, red pepper, shortening and an egg yolk but no amounts. For a workable cheese pastry: 2 cups flour, 3/4 cup grated hard cheese, 2/3 cup shortening, 1 egg yolk and ice water to bind. Rest it 30 minutes chilled before rolling.
- The hole in the topThe large vent is functional, not decorative. It lets steam escape so the crust stays crisp and does not lift off the filling. The leaf-shaped trimmings and central ornament are a decorative flourish common in pies of the period; egg-wash them separately so they colour.
- YieldTwo pounds of steak plus kidney serves six generously, with a green vegetable and boiled potatoes.
Steak and kidney pie belongs to the Victorian English pudding-and-pie tradition, where cheap offal was used to stretch and flavour a modest quantity of stewing beef; the kidney supplies the deep, faintly metallic savour that distinguishes it from a plain beef pie. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco (1913) is a small piece of commercial strategy: Procter & Gamble bound recipes for familiar, respectable dishes into a promotional cookbook so that a brand-new industrial fat could be introduced through food homemakers already trusted. The dish is set against a date, January 11, because the book's "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a menu to every day of the year, sparing the reader the daily question of what to cook and ensuring the tin was in constant use.