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Beefsteak Pie
(England.) Cut 2 pounds of fine steak into thin strips, season, and dust with flour. Roll each strip, and arrange in a deep dish with two lamb's kidneys, cut up and parboiled, 1 dozen oysters, 1 onion chopped, parsley, thyme, a bayleaf, some bits of butter, and a cup of hot water. Cover with a layer of puff paste, gashing it in several places to allow steam to escape, and brushing it with yolk of egg. Bake 2 hours in a moderate oven, and serve very hot. VEAL AND HAM PIE. (Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire.) Pork pies are made here, and exactly like the following recipe, but they are not so palatable to Americans as the more delicate mixture of veal with the ham. Slice 1/4 pound of ham very thin, and cut 2 pounds of veal into strips, and cover it with boiling water,--setting the ham aside,--add the bones of the veal and some herbs, and cook 1 hour. Remove the meat, and return the bones to the broth, adding salt, pepper, a bayleaf, summer savory, thyme, parsley, a slice of onion, and a carrot. Boil this slowly 2 hours, or until it equals 1/2 pint. Strain and set aside. Make some forcemeat of bread, herbs, and yolk of egg into 8 balls, and fill a dish with layers of ham, veal, and the balls around the sides. Add half of the broth, cover with paste as above, and bake 1 hour, making the lid artistic with cut leaves, yolk of egg being used over all. Do not touch the edges, or they will not rise. Leave a hole in middle, and, when baked, pour in the rest of the broth. Serve hot or cold. A very fine old dish.
Two English raised-crust traditions on one page: a steak-and-kidney pie with oysters, and the Melton Mowbray-style veal and ham pie set in its own jelly. Both are straightforward, but the oven language and the pastry handling need translating.
- Moderate oven350F. Two hours at that heat is right for the beefsteak pie, since the point is to braise the rolled strips of steak until they yield, not to brown them. If the pastry colours too fast in the first half hour, tent it with foil.
- The oystersA dozen oysters baked for two hours will be tough beads. They are there for their liquor, which carries a saline depth into the gravy, and in the period this book comes from oysters were cheap enough to spend freely. Treat them as seasoning rather than as an ingredient you will enjoy eating whole.
- Lamb's kidneysTwo kidneys, cored of their white gristle, halved and briefly parboiled to draw out the ammoniacal edge. Order them from a butcher; supermarket lamb kidneys are uncommon. Veal or beef kidney works, though beef kidney is stronger and wants a longer soak in cold salted water.
- Rolled strips, and whyCutting the steak into thin strips, flouring them and rolling each one up gives you many small parcels that thicken their own gravy as the flour cooks out. Use chuck or skirt, not a tender grilling cut, which will only go dry over two hours.
- A cup of hot water is not muchIt looks scant, but the meat and oysters release a good deal of liquid and the sealed crust keeps it in. Do not add more or the pastry bottom, if you use one, will be sodden and the filling will boil up through the gashes.
- Puff paste and the untouched edgeThe warning in the veal recipe applies to both: do not press or crimp the cut edge of puff pastry, because sealing the laminated layers stops them lifting. The recipe has the yolk 'used over all', but keeping it off the cut rim helps those layers rise.
- Reducing the veal brothThe veal bones and herbs simmered down to half a pint give a broth gelatinous enough to set. Half goes in before baking, the rest through the steam hole afterwards, where it fills the gaps left as the meat shrinks and sets to jelly as the pie cools. Pour it in warm, not hot, and let the pie cool fully before cutting if you mean to serve it cold.
- Forcemeat ballsBread, chopped herbs and egg yolk, bound firm enough to hold shape. Add a little of the reduced broth or melted butter if the mixture is too dry to roll; eight balls from a few ounces of crumbs is about right.
- YieldEach pie is built on two pounds of meat and serves six to eight, more as part of a cold table. Both want a deep dish with near-vertical sides so the pastry lid spans rather than sags.
The pairing of beefsteak with oysters is a genuine period economy rather than a luxury: oysters were among the cheapest protein in nineteenth-century London and were used to bulk out and season beef pies and puddings long before they became expensive. Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire is the home of the raised pork pie, made with hot-water crust and hand-raised without a tin, and it is generally traced to the fox-hunting country around the town, where a sturdy cold pie travelled well in a coat pocket. The author's aside that the pork version is "not so palatable to Americans" is characteristic of this kind of travel cookery book, which collected regional dishes abroad and then quietly adjusted them for readers at home; substituting veal for pork gives a paler, milder filling with the same jellied structure. The jelly is the technical heart of the dish, not a garnish, since a well-reduced veal-bone broth poured in after baking fills the void left by shrinking meat and keeps a cold pie from drying out.